Blown away by this. Such an insightful & generous review. You never really know if something has worked, if your true intention has been recognised; if the risk of trying to do something a bit different has paid off. But when someone you admire sees other stuff too, well; totally made up. #booksky

Some times the old ways are the best ways. Grassland in my local SW London park being managed for biodiversity using heavy horses today. I'll be joining the volunteers to rake and bail next week. @nicolawriting.bsky.social

Today’s book post. #BookSky @nicolawriting.bsky.social 🧡 @mailbykite.bsky.social 💜

This is exciting … loads & loads of love for @caughtbytheriver.bsky.social, their content & all they stand for. Delighted to have been interviewed for bonus content for their supporter offer! (Excellent questions.)

A very poignant #BBCCountryfile Mag. My column unillustrated. Lynn Hatzius, a talented, insightful, deeply moving artist has died too young, after a short illness. I only knew her through her art & online interactions, but felt her warmth & kindness. Love to her loved ones. www.lynnhatzius.com

These two together? Don't miss if you can help it!

Sorry, but book is out next week & promo I must. You know - 3 yrs work & all that, & through some big stuff. And the wonderfully kind @joannacdobson.bsky.social has said this about it; & I’m utterly made up: “there’s a universality about it …I’ve never read anything quite like it.’ #booksky

Look! The silk-smoky glimmering of bedwine appearing with the Michaelmas, Mop, Hiring & Goose Fairs, to light us through the winter, from Dorset, to Herts, Hants, Berks, Wilts & beyond.

#DailyNature Something about this gaffa taped, natural-material, manufactured, coconut in northern England, bird feeder, strapped to the thinnest branch, amongst public footpath - made me reason 'that's us humans in nature; trying, not-trying, failing, succeeding, all at once' #NatureWriting

Anyone help @jackwallington.com & me & my family out here? Wellies are now more expensive than car tyres! And we often get through a pair a year on the flint!

Delighted to see my beloved local newspaper giving me a shout out. Lovely words here from Newbury Today/ Newbury Weekly News Launch tix, 3rd October! @hungerfordbookshop.bsky.social www.newburytoday.co.uk/lifestyle/be...

Re church bells and their place in a community, as you recently mentioned on here, have you seen this heartening Guardian piece today on the ongoing rescuing of the sound of ancient church bells in Spain & how due to it being done online youngsters are joining in. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/s...

That one of your most favourite poets ever, should say such a thing … am giddy with delight!

'I am eight years old. I am a horse. But. I am also its rider.' Read an extract from @nicolawriting.bsky.social's ‘Ghosts of the Farm’ (@chelseagreenbooks.bsky.social) - our September Book of the Month www.caughtbytheriver.net/2025/09/nico...

Just booked for one of our local independent bookshop's events. Thoroughly enjoyed @nicolawriting.bsky.social first book 'On Gallows Down', this looks at least as good. Great to read nature writing with a direct local connection too. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nicola-che...

Some of the hardest working agricultural people I know or have worked alongside have been women. The sidepiece! - I've thought for a long time how devalued we made the term 'farmers wife' 'ranchers wife' - in my experience these are double barrelled job titles not assistants 💪💚🐴

Pig muck, is it? With apologies to anyone I’m near in the next couple of weeks (or any patients of my husband’s.) Was aiming for freshly-laundered sunshine, & I’m not doing it again. Pig muck-spreading it is.

Our local delicacy! Grew up on this as a weekly treat & it is more delicious than it perhaps sounds!

Come & play bedroom carpet farm with @theunhurriedreader.bsky.social & me, before she has to put them all away again!

This, in the US @us.theguardian.com today is extraordinarily good, pertinent & hopeful. What women! #TheVelvetSpur & others are on Insta. Horses, ranching, farming, community, it chimes HARD with my cowgirl past & farming attempts & what women are doing now. Would love to connect! #GhostsoftheFarm

Our local delicacy! Grew up on this as a weekly treat & it is more delicious than it perhaps sounds!

Thrilled that #GhostsoftheFarm is @caughtbytheriver.bsky.social’s BOTM … you can read an extract on The Bedroom Carpet Farm, here:

I can’t actually do The Times crossword, but I recognise the description of what its like, the way the act of ringing to take you out of your day to day worries, and the awe when you sit silently in the tower as the bells vibrate all through your body.

As school librarian, I’m lucky I’m alive to the utter brilliance of YA/crossover fiction (do try it! It keeps you in touch, current, fresh-thinking & boy, it’s where it’s at!) This is one of the very best I’ve read for our time #OntheEdge @nmgarrard.bsky.social @oldbarnbooks.bsky.social #booksky 1/3

It was a very cold evening & the East wind was as thin as glass. Look, Wolf, look at the sky over the Downs, said Pine Marten, the clouds look so strange. They're called Lamenters, said Wolf, torn clouds, strife-tellers, come a long way they have to bring their warnings.

I loved writing this piece on the art, craft, graft & mathematics of #bellringing for #BBCCountryfile Thank you to the ringers of #Kintbury & #Inkpen & all of you who engaged with my wide-eyed inquiry. What an alchemy of quarter peals & plain hunting. ‘Look to. Treble’s going. She’s gone …’ 1/2

This is what we should be protesting against. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

#Day16 #DailyNature Wet trainer sharply turning in gymnasium - Coot Squeeze toy, never fully reinflating - Canada Goose Flat whistle you got from inside a cracker - Moorhen Wind throttling at the curve of a bridge - Wood Pigeon If crickets could sound underwater - Sparrow #NatureWriting #Sound

Eldest daughter is home to dismantle & pack up the room she & her younger sister have shared all their lives, prior to our move. So much love, nostalgia, silliness & poignancy coming from upstairs. Howls of finding forgotten treasure, shrieks of laughter. The dog clearly joining in too.

The thing that gets me about this is that so many of us have known this for so long, and so many people have faced pushback for saying it, and even if by some miracle something changes now, there will not be an ounce of retrospective reflection from anyone at all who insisted it wasn’t

I posted this on X and got a rant from an American 🙄 that I should kill the ivy on this tree before it kills the tree. Ivy doesn’t kill healthy trees. It does however provide food & shelter for many creatures so please stop killing things & ranting & google it first maybe. It’s also nice to paint

Can't wait for this - I've had a taster - it's exciting! 😍

Not long til #GhostsoftheFarm is launched, in convo with Sarah Langford! Tix here, I'd love to see people. Can't wait to bring these pioneering, forgotten farming women into the light. 1940s, 80s cowgirls, the sound of the northern lights, barn owls, horses & more! It's CINEMATIC IN SCOPE! #booksky

On the buckle, homeward bound. September rides are the best. Swirls of swallows and house martins heading inexorably south, picking up flies around the horse fields. And the surprise delight of a lemony mixed flock of grey & yellow wagtails on the move. Domestic & global migrations begun together.

Grandad’s Romany granny used to collect him from Portsmouth each September, to go for their ‘hop-picking holiday.’

On the buckle, homeward bound. September rides are the best. Swirls of swallows and house martins heading inexorably south, picking up flies around the horse fields. And the surprise delight of a lemony mixed flock of grey & yellow wagtails on the move. Domestic & global migrations begun together.

#naturewriting Giddily happy this morning after such a parched, droughty summer to find the soil just a few inches down full of little worms. Earth's little wonders thriving after all this. Such joy.

Surely the best & most wonderful thing you’ll read all weekend. Moved to (good) tears. Who we really are: ‘he tells us about this land, & how tough things are for farmers now. His pride & love for the place radiates.’ Bravo @ebenmyrddin.bsky.social for @environment.theguardian.com

Warm your cockles on this by @ebenmyrddin.bsky.social . A glimpse of something so reasonable and so possible, because this is how people really are when they give each other a chance: mutual respect and common interest for and with each other & the land. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Surely the best & most wonderful thing you’ll read all weekend. Moved to (good) tears. Who we really are: ‘he tells us about this land, & how tough things are for farmers now. His pride & love for the place radiates.’ Bravo @ebenmyrddin.bsky.social for @environment.theguardian.com

And so it goes… alerted to this by @cmf406.bsky.social From Andover’s chalk aquifers to Montana’s Rocky Mountain Rivers: the luxury 18,000 acre Crazy Mountain Guest Ranch, is trucking in billions of gallons of water from a community of 950, to water a new 18-hole golf course 1/2

Further to earlier posts, ‘locals’ say these 30 tankers of DRINKING water, delivered daily & through the night, were filling a new lake for duck shooting. There wasn’t one (er, chalk downland) on his estate which is also much bigger than quoted; more than double that. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The most uplifting & galvanising day at #WildSummitUk #Bristol @wildsummituk.bsky.social Such passionate speeches, panels & chats, all to inspire ideas, collaborations, support, hope & action. Bravo to everyone involved @wclnews.bsky.social & beyond, & so good to meet up with so many wild friends!

This Trump-ally billionaire's my neighbour. He's collecting estates: Conholt, Hippenscombe (of Ravilious fame) & Buttermere, & rents the one I live on, filling it with pheasants. A piece in the Telegraph seems to say locals 'mostly like' what he's doing. Not met one yet. @guyshrubsole.bsky.social

Dordi, I am being reckless with risk in my words and thoughts and opinions today ...

This Trump-ally billionaire's my neighbour. He's collecting estates: Conholt, Hippenscombe (of Ravilious fame) & Buttermere, & rents the one I live on, filling it with pheasants. A piece in the Telegraph seems to say locals 'mostly like' what he's doing. Not met one yet. @guyshrubsole.bsky.social

Brilliant to meet & chat with the incredible @wildjustice.bsky.social team @wildsummituk.bsky.social @ruthtingay.bsky.social & bump into so many others there. A magnet for action for wildlife (& good news that the Pheasant Show theatrical will at some point be online!) Thank you for all you do 💚

The most uplifting & galvanising day at #WildSummitUk #Bristol @wildsummituk.bsky.social Such passionate speeches, panels & chats, all to inspire ideas, collaborations, support, hope & action. Bravo to everyone involved @wclnews.bsky.social & beyond, & so good to meet up with so many wild friends!

Been married to this lovely, lovely, wonderful man for 26yrs today. Couldn’t be more joyful & grateful. There have been adventures. There will be more.

Oh DEAR Wiltshire! Someone’s put a red driving harness on our wild white Westbury chalk horse, for bad intent. I have it on good authority, this hoss does not work for that & will refuse to go. Do boo from the Ravilious train. I’m certain, as war artist, HE’d have been appalled with its inference.