'Village', my new non-fiction prose book, features witches, wheelbarrows & cheerful survival-especially of women.The villagers dictated the blurb in the image! Kindle/phone/computer edition only 99p! Generous paperback £9.99.Only via Amazon. SEARCH FOR ALISON BRACKENBURY VILLAGE AMAZON

My non-fiction prose book,'Village' has a digital edition,readable on Kindle, phone or computer. This can be downloaded FREE on Sunday 3 May. You can read many stories of the extraordinary Mrs Rudkin, whom I knew, & of Lincs singers! SEARCH FOR ALISON BRACKENBURY VILLAGE AMAZON

I'm on LCRFM from 9-10 pm today Fri 1 May. I'll tell stories from my prose book 'Village': the singer who sat on the verge to sing, with dog & barrow; & tough Annie Hiles whose dark song Tom Lane plays! You can hear 'Lincolnshire Folk', after broadcast, on LCRFM's Mixcloud list!

But there is wonderful new music too on Tom Lane's 'Lincolnshire Folk', LCRFM radio, 9-10 pm, Fridays. Today he launches the 'Write a Lincolnshire Song' contest for 2026, open to songwriters everywhere. And there will be a contribution from me and my Lincs prose book, 'Village'!

I wonder if old Alfred Bateman (a lay preacher!) decided to stop before Verse 7! You can hear why today, Fri 1 May, when Tom Lane plays a full version on his superb 'Lincolnshire Folk' show LCRFM 9-10 pm. Tom's treasured records bring 'old songs' powerfully sung by Lincs singers!

Lincolnshire is rich in what Edward Thomas called 'The old songs'.Percy Grainger in Brigg found Joseph Taylor (whom he thought the finest folk singer in England) & a joyful love song, 'Brigg Fair'. A hopeful collector in my village found Alfred Bateman & a disreputable fragment!

Belatedly, here is a fine spring evening... Now I wish you a very good spring morning! #April #moon

An extraordinary story... lively & inspiring. Dean was a boy from Doncaster, who sold his most treasured possessions to fund a trip to a US site, where he found fascinating fossil remains... just as he did later in Doncaster...where he uncovered a rich hoard of prehistoric plants, 5 min from home!

Did you not know the worm sang?''To see her was to marvel, to despair.'Meet Lambton's 'Wyrm', dragon in a well, & crows,nuns, 'greenish stars' of glowworms. 'If you ever see a ghost/it'll be the way a kingfisher is seen.' Read starry Kym Deyn @kymdeyn.bsky.social @ninearchespress.bsky.social!

I wrote a poem on a whiteboard'.. Rishi Dastidar's @betarish.bsky.social's fresh poems @ninearchespress.bsky.social are wise to our world: 'everything will be alright, at least until they reach the ticket barrier.' Yet they offer 'a sun you carry in your pocket' & end in tenderness of blossom.

P.S. to my last post. The moon has just told the garden that it was right about the rain...

My garden was very excited about midnight's wild moon, which seemed to promise rain. But the hedgehog, stolidly crunching dried chicken cat food just along the path, was, rightly, not trusting in the appearance of many snails! I hope you have the weather you need!

How big, bold and loud the House Sparrow is, although, sadly, still declining in England! This male, confidently calling from a low forest of greenery nesr the gate near a Cheltenham allotment, shows the joyfully untidy abundance of plantlife they prefer!

A bird brought this! I have encouraged this hawthorn tree - it's now taller than me. I was excited to see that it has flowered for the first time. Its wild corner of the garden smells like spice. A great tree for a small plot, with flowers & berries! Do you have hawthorn?

Hedgehog news! Two outside our front door. Much snuffling... I hope the milkman doesn't arrive too early. Good evening!

My role model as the week slides slowly to an end... #snail #slow

Johnny Coppin, that fine singer-songwriter based in Gloucestershire, has been performing for 50 years! Via Mixcloud, you can hear his very enjoyable talk with @genevievetudor.bsky.social on her podcast, with Johnny's songs including the mysterious Tudor legend of the 'Bisley Boy'!#folkmusic

If you're interested in country life, & the survival of rare,beautiful animals-with invaluable genes!-do listen! Eric's son now safeguards his herd of Gloucester cattle, the quiet glossy brown cows with a lightning streak on their back. If you live in Glos. perhaps you knew Eric? SEARCH BBC SOUNDS!

This year, while finishing new poems, I thought I'd post a (seasonal) old favourite every couple of months. So 'Down Unwin's Track' is out for a spring canter. Here's the track, in summer, & the pony, who lived to 31, & C. F. Tunnicliffe's mesmerising hare! Poem from 'Gallop', @carcanet.bsky.social

Hello, harassed humans... from the superior viewpoint of a sunbathing heron...

From the sunlit spring flourishing of Prinknash, Gloucestershire, a very good evening! P.S. Is the brilliant daylight - winged - visitor a Cinnabar Moth?

4 days to listen! @helenmort.bsky.social on lighthouses. Facts! No UK lightkeepers since 1992. LED lights now, not systems with 3/4 ton of lethal mercury. Poetry! Helen's words: 'The heart cannot be automated..' 'a path that moves & pulses..' 'the last great sweeping beam'. SEARCH BBC SOUNDS

'Totally Tangerine':a geum which is widely grown and which I now have, after a long geum-less period! I wonder how long a flowering period it has & how it will react to our recurring summer droughts. But currently flowering with (tangerine) enthusiasm! Do you grow it, please?

Birdsong! As I walked home, along the street I followed a chain of blackbirds, each melodiously defending his patch. And the third was 'ours'. The reward for days spent laboriously spreading bags of mulch - which blackbirds love - around trees and shrubs is an evening of song...

Cheltenham sidestreet, dreaming at dusk... Good night!

Watched with sympathetic amusement by my neighbours, I've swaddled the lofty white heather by the pavement in its own zipped sleeping bag each frosty night! But to my delight, bumblebees are now burrowing into its hundreds of blooms to fill their 'hungry gap' between bulbs and roses!

Can you ever have too much green? Perhaps only if you are a mock-bronze, mock-Jacobean owl! Good night and very best spring wishes!

Fascinating discussion of women's voices e.g. in poetry. Karen McCarthy Woolf speaks of Afghan women's oral poetry, their 'landays'. And there are reflections on how women alter their voices for radio. I slow down, deepen, sharpen the consonants Lincolnshire drops - but keep my village vowels!

I had a sense of time travel when I first scrambled over a stile & saw the worn footpath,straight as a die, to Shurdington.I might have been a Victorian labourer's wife,in polished boots,tramping from my hamlet, Up Hatherley,now a Cheltenham suburb-whose church burnt in 1640-to that distant spire!

Two ridiculously fancy celandines, which live shielded from garden wildlife by a wire cloche...plus a delicate paler variety which has self-seeded into unprotected earth & is apparently now best friends with a tough wild celandine! Warm & varied wishes from the spring garden!

A delight- and a perfect introduction to the range of folk music today! Genevieve Tudor's selection includes the irresistible voice of June Tabor & the intense storytelling of @jimmoray.bsky.social ! Warmly recommended to all music-lovers! Available from BBC Radio Shropshire on BBC Sounds!

Brilliant World Service documentary on Africa's 'pastoralists', whose animals graze drylands'- 60% of the continent-& may contribute 40% of a country's GDP. They face drought, politics & war-but may save weeks of hunting pastures by 10 min on a mobile! Illuminating & encouraging!

Exquisite new visitor to the garden... a female Holly Blue butterfly! They appear every year... I hoped to video this one for you but it flitted away to ring its agent!

An Easter lamb demonstrating what lambs do best... chewing! A very Happy Easter Monday!

‘Easter Morning’ by Caspar David Friedrich. I love this painting. The muted early morning. The women together, yet isolated in their grief. The new leaves just visible on the bare trees. The moon (and not the sun) as the symbol of hope. (Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)

Ridge & furrow: mysterious mounds in English pastures,old ploughing marks.But which animal pulled that plough in fields I knew, to an old man's lost song: 'Babylon's falling..'? The Kindle/phone/computer edition of 'Village', is FREE today Sun April 5. SEARCH FOR ALISON BRACKENBURY VILLAGE AMAZON

You're a lamb, grazing the wide old pastures just outside Cheltenham. Here are three ways of staying warm in a keen wind... N.B. The first does NOT involve becoming a two-headed sheep! Happy Easter!

This was Friday morning's eastern sky ... 'slow' weather forecasting... but Storm Dave has duly blown in I wish you all a safe night!

Sound the trumpet! Very excited to be launching Key Changes: Radio 3’s Essential History of Classical Music, a year-long series charting critical turning points in musical innovation. Each Sat 1pm @BBCRadio3 starting 4 April, but you can find Ep 1 now @BBCSounds🧵1/4 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

New clothes for Easter:a village tradition. I wonder if small Bertha, glimpsed by the cottage in Bedlam Lane, had a new white dress?Was it home-sewn? You can read of Victorian needlework in the Kindle/phone/computer edition of 'Village' FREE Sun April 5! SEARCH FOR ALISON BRACKENBURY VILLAGE AMAZON

This is what I call, with my usual accuracy, a 'fancy celandine'. Meet Ranunculus Ficaria 'Angele'... The single form of this bronze-leaved celandine (found, I believe, in a wood), & wonderfully free-seeding, is called 'Brazen Hussy'. Is Angele a botanical joke? We send our very best angelic wishes!

A spring of friendly flowers... Cuckoo flowers are a particular friend! All from Cooper's Hill, Gloucestershire. Happy Easter!

July 1917. The Eisteddfod. The winner for the best metrical poem is announced. A trumpet sounds. 'But the chair was empty & the poet dead.' Hedd Wyn, 'the poet' had been killed, weeks earlier, near Ypres. The beautifully carved chair was draped in a black cloth.(Available BBC Sounds 29-30 Mar)

Cowslips! When did they vanish, quietly from England's fields?Could they return? Meet them in the FREE Kindle/phone/computer edition of 'Village' today, Sat 28 Mar.It's non-fiction.So are the mushrooms! 'Glorious' Nicola Chester, Guardian Nature Diarist. SEARCH FOR ALISON BRACKENBURY VILLAGE AMAZON

Tides of dusty gold in gutters near Hatherley Road, Cheltenham - catkins! I failed to photograph the very distinctive winter silhouette of these Council-planted trees. Their branches are as straight and upright as combed hair, standing on end. Any theories about their identity, please?

'Spring!' cry the villagers.'Tell people! Our non-fiction prose book 'Village-with which you helped-has its last FREE March day for the Kindle/phone/computer edition on Sat Mar 28.' I find my lamb photo,NOT in 'Village'.'Amateur!' sigh my stern forebears. 'Add a shepherd who knows what she's doing!'

Yet, despite everything, spring has its flowers... and fungi! (I apologise to Cooper's Hill and Cranham Woods, both in Gloucestershire, whose March riches I have scrabbled into a single hoard...)

How we forget! Writing my book 'Village' showed me that in Victorian England,TB would choke a strong farm labourer or the shoemaker's teenage grandson -& in the 1920s, kill my grandmother's hopeful young sister. South Africa, says this haunting radio feature, remains a 'sea of TB'. With US aid gone!

62 'little kingdoms' from the 5th to 10 centuries,evoked by Alex Harvey.History at its most local & strange. Pengwern, lost to 'raging fire', its only place a poem.Lindsey, my land, where, unknowing, I grew up near the grave of the 'Caenby warrior', Odin's ravens silver on his helmet. Enthralling!

Our nesting blackbirds had another busy day... I really need to ask them if they'd like me to put the moss back every evening in their favourite pot with the little holly tree... Very best constructive wishes!