In la France profonde the signs are more exotic, as John Lewis-Stempel discovers one February morning when his horse crashes through an electrified fence and bolts into a walnut orchard. I feel enriched, bit by bit, by descriptions of food, custom, terroir, language and manners as interpreted by a sensitive and observant insider/outsider. This house comes with a potager, various farm buildings, and other accoutrements of a house built in rural France during the Belle Époque.

John Lewis-Stempel - Wikipedia

He likens it to turning the clock back to the 1970s, or earlier, before England wrecked its countryside with industrial production. The Wood: The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood, released in 2018, was also a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and Sunday Times top five bestseller. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.Such small woods play a vital role in the life of our countryside: they are the last refuge of many flora and fauna. In the Preface to this book, he highlights the song of nightingales as a reason to relocate to rural France.

La Vie: A year in rural France by John Lewis-Stempel

Lewis-Stempel is a farmer of mediaeval heritage, with his family owning the same land for 700 years. There is also gentle mockery of the French with their bureaucracy and obsession with hunting, and self-deprecation of his own struggle to get his point across in a second language. I've absolutely loved a lot of Lewis-Stempel's earlier books and as a farmer he seemed to be so rooted in rural Herefordshire. They are arrogant, as in Aesop’s The Hare and the Tortoise, and absurd, as in Lewis Carroll’s Mad March Hare. Observing the traditional shepherd's calendar, The Sheep's Tale is a loving biography of ewes, lambs, and rams through the seasons.Bartering is commonplace and by Christmas Stempel has proveded over 50 per cent of the Christmas dinner from his own potager and used bartered goods for the rest. Lewis-Stempel is so associated with British farming and nature writing that it’s a bit surprising to find him in this role, though. I'd really been looking forward to reading this and it saddens me to have to give it such a low rating.