Fiennes - Footnotes: a Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers

A Guardian Best Nature Book of the Year

Extraordinary Written with a mixture of lyricism and quiet fury Fienness book winningly combines autobiography, literary history and nature writing. It feels set to become a classic of the genre.

Alex Preston, Observer

Steeped in poetry, science, folklore, history and magic, Fiennes is an eloquent, elegiac chronicler of copses, coppicing and the wildwood.

Sunday Express

A passionate ramble through Britains complicated relationship with its woodland.

Daily Mail

Fascinating This passionate book should inspire readers to plant more trees, support woodland campaigns and participate in active conservation.

BBC Countryfile Magazine

Lyrical, angry I loved it.

Tom Holland

Rich, personal, evocative, rousing.

Robert Penn, author of The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees

A wonderful wander into the woods that explores our deep-rooted connections cultural, historical and personal with the trees.

Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground

Peter Fiennes really can see the wood for the trees he blends mythology, natural history and a sense of righteous anger to produce a paean of praise to our ancient woodlands and modern forests, and the life support system they provide.

Stephen Moss, author of Wild Kingdom

A tender hymn to the trees, a manifesto for a woodland society, a contemporary gazette of ideas and attitudes radiating into the future like annual rings from the original pith In this lyrical, informative, unashamedly arboreal propaganda, one mans walk in the woods can inspire a generation.

Paul Evans, author of Field Notes from the Edge

Fiennes is the best of guides, gently, eloquently and with a fierce humour telling a sad story relating chapters of fascinating detail to brighten his tale and quoting the poets as he goes.

John Wright, author of A Natural History of the Hedgerow

In memory of my parents: my father, Michael Fiennes, 19121989, whose modest presence appears in these pages at least twice; and my mother, Jacqueline Fiennes (ne Guilford), 19222001, who brought life and laughter to everything.
And for Anna, of course, as ever.

Hes gone: but you can see
his tracks still, in the snow of the world.

Norman MacCaig, Praise of a Man

Footnotes

post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if were all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Margaret Atwood, Cats Eye

But once in my life I did have a feeling that the world was a phantom. That was when I was in England.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, A Passage to England

The premise of this book is simple, or that is what it seemed when I started. I was going to travel around Britain in the footsteps of a succession of (mostly) famous writers, without leaving any gaps, and without straying from their recorded paths, passing from one to the next like a baton in a relay, or a snowball swelling as it rolls, picking up people and debris along the way. I was keen to take in as much of the country as I could, but I also decided, for no good reason, that the journey should unspool in one continuous loop.

My first idea was to organize the route chronologically. The earliest journey made here is by Gerald of Wales (1188) and the most recent is by Beryl Bainbridge, who smoked her way around England almost eight hundred years later. But then I thought it would be more interesting to move from childhood (Enid Blyton in the Isle of Purbeck) to death (Charles Dickens, whose corpse was shunted by train from his home in Gads Hill, Kent, to Westminster Abbey). The ghost of that second idea remains, faint traces of the Seven Ages of Man (theres even a mid-life crisis), although we all know that the best journeys never go entirely to plan.

I was pleased I started with Enid Blyton. Her influence runs deep in all of us, I came to believe or at least her idea of what Britain should be has proved surprisingly tenacious. I nosed around her life and Footnotes became an attempt to understand her, and the other writers, by looking at the places they had travelled through and written about. Enid is the only one who doesnt actually go anywhere. That seems appropriate, but I was also happy to discover that she is a much more interesting person than we have been led to believe.

Footnotes also started as a rather grandiose attempt to bring modern Britain into focus by peering through the lens of past writers. I steeped myself in what they had seen and witnessed, tried to adapt to the different ways they thought, absorbed what mattered to them and the tenor of their times and then stepped into the present. Sometimes it can take a shock, like getting off a train in a foreign land, to open our eyes and ears. Of course it was hopeless. The diversity, Orwell wrote, the chaos! But one of the connecting threads of this book is an examination of what conservationists call shifting baseline syndrome, the disorientating idea that as every generation passes, our understanding of what is normal moves, without us even realizing it. We can no longer remember, or we have no direct experience of what it was like, to live in a different world. In short, how do we know whether life is getting better, or worse? And not just for humanity. Especially not that. Because surely by now we have all got the message that our lives are not separate from everything that connects and supports us. We urgently need to lift our eyes and take the long view.

Anyway, I should quickly add that I also managed to have a lot of fun, following this opinionated band of writers around Britain. We live in a beautiful land. I indulged a lifetimes obsession with old guidebooks. There is so much to enjoy, from the wilds of Skye and Snowdon to the big night out in Birmingham. And the people. They are so friendly and open. Until, just occasionally, they are not. Of course it is ludicrous to generalize, but even so I did find myself succumbing to a sneaking desire to say something about identity. Who are we? What do we want? They seemed like good questions to ask, in the company of some of our greatest writers, given these restless times.

Peter Fiennes, London, 2019

One

I Am Your Storyteller

Oh voice of Spring of Youth
Hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
Ill warm me with your echoes
Through the night.

Enid Blyton, Sunday Times , 1951

Enid Blyton,
Swanage and the Isle of Purbeck, 19401960s

It is April in the Dorset seaside resort of Swanage and the town is struggling to emerge from a long and grisly winter. Not ice-bound, exactly, but the last few months have been dank and chill and unremittingly dreary. Only last week, the Beast from the East had lashed the peninsulas narrow lanes and calcareous hills with a clogging, heavy snow; now it has returned (a mini-beast the papers are calling it), but this time with a supercharged wind, gusting up the Channel, flailing a couple of panicking teenagers on the esplanade and shepherding the towns elderly smokers into the uneasy sanctuary of the bus shelter. Everything, everywhere, is being clawed and rummaged by a foul sleet and the streets are slick with last seasons grime. It is, I am certain, the kind of day that Enid Blyton would have described as lovely.