Common Ground: Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 022642426X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
That’s what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked—a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism no longer had any use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering its meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive—and he fell in fascinated love.
Common Ground is a true account of that place and Cowen’s transformative journey through its layers and lives, but it’s much more too. As the land’s stories intertwine with events in his own life—and he learns he is to become a father for the first time—the divisions between human and nature begin to blur and shift. The place turns out to be a mirror, revealing what we are, what we’re not and how those two things are ultimately inseparable.
This is a book about discovering a new world, a forgotten world on the fringes of our daily lives, and the richness that comes from uncovering the stories and lives—animal and human—contained within. It is an unforgettable piece of nature writing, part of a brilliant tradition that stretches from Gilbert White to Robert Macfarlane and Helen Macdonald.
“I am dreaming of the edge-land again,” Cowen writes. Read Common Ground, and you, too, will be dreaming of the spaces in between, and what—including us—thrives there.
2005 – the Official British History recognises the efforts made by the men, many of who had never been in action before. In Brigadier-General Sir James E. Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1916, Sir Douglas Haig’s Command to the 1st July: Battle of the Somme: Volume I, 1932, it states: ‘There was no wavering or attempting to come back, the men fell in their ranks, mostly before the first hundred yards of No Mans Land had been crossed. The magnificent gallantry, discipline and
nature and travel for the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Telegraph. Described by the Guardian as ‘one of the UK’s most exciting nature writers’ he previously received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors for his first book Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild (2012). In 2013 he wrote and presented a BBC documentary ‘The Ospreys of Loch Garten’. He lives in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. For my father and my son To know fully even one field or one land is a
seven centuries. ‘This is my blank face,’ says Elaine, the sister on reception, as a loud buzzer parps somewhere down a corridor. ‘I’ve never heard of a spring here. You mean a water spring, right?’ Another parp. ‘Becky?’ she shouts over her shoulder. ‘Springs?’ Becky pokes her head around from the back office chewing a pen, sticks out her bottom lip and shakes her head. ‘Not that I know of. I’m pretty sure this whole area used to be a deer park, though, back before this place was even built.
whipped into catching up. My breath escapes in rhythmical snorts; I can feel my heart tiring and my lungs growing heavy, but still a force keeps my legs crossing and uncrossing. My vision narrows into a tunnel, a hazy white circle through which I can better read the landscape and find escape through the thickening trees. My will to live is strong. Still they come. More dogs. The relays. They have crossed the river further up over the wooden bridge. These fresh hounds kindle a deeper fright in
the sofa. This small space just inside the treeline where I can watch the last of the light slip down the field and linger in the nettles. This thin place in the fabric, this margin within a margin. Where day meets dark. And after a few minutes I feel the same sense of correspondence as I did before – the same sense of presence and the awakening of memories. I feel a resonance with the thoughts and lives and layers committed to this ground, as though faintly remembering an old dream. A calm,