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Inspired by John Cheever's classic short story, "The Swimmer," Roger Deakin set out from his moat in Suffolk to swim through the British Isles. The result of his journey is a maverick work of observation and imagination.
For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept notebooks in which he wrote his daily thoughts, impressions, feelings and observations. Discursive, personal and often impassioned, they reveal the way he saw the world, whether it be observing the teeming ecosystem that was Walnut Tree Farm, thinking about the wider environment, walking in his fields, on Mellis Common or on his travels at home, or contemplating his past and his present life. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm collects the very best of these writings, capturing Roger�s extraordinary, restless curiosity about the natural and human worlds, his love of literature and music, his knack for making unusual and apposite connections, and of course his distinct and subversive charm and humour. Together they cohere to present a passionate, engaged and � in spite of the worst pressures of contemporary life � optimistic view of our changing world.
Portraits and landscapes from the cinematographer famed for his work with Sam Mendes and the Coen brothers This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger Deakins (born 1949), best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve. It includes previously unpublished black-and-white photographs spanning five decades, from 1971 to the present. After graduating from college Deakins spent a year photographing life in rural North Devon, in Southwest England, on a commission for the Beaford Arts Centre; these images are gathered here for the first time and attest to a keenly ironic English sensibility, while also documenting a vanished postwar Britain. A second suite of images expresses Deakins' love of the seaside. Traveling for his cinematic work has allowed Deakins to photograph landscapes all over the world; in this third group of images, that same irony remains evident.
In 1970 Roger Deakin acquired Walnut Tree Farm, a semi-ruined Elizabethan farmhouse deep in the countryside of northern Suffolk, on the edge of Mellis Green, the largest area of common grazing land in England. The house's thatch and roof beams were rotting; pigs and hens had been its last occupants and the floors were ankle deep in shit. Leaving swinging London behind, Deakin bought the farm in a spirit of 'back to the land' fervour; and, in the coming decades, lovingly restored it. Deakin lived here until his death in 2006, dredging the moat (in which he swam daily), planting woods and buying more of the surrounding fields, where he grew hay and wild flowers. Walnut Tree Farm became a place...
Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frog’s-eye view of the country’s best bathing holes – the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island. Charming, funny, inspiring, an assertion of the native swimmer's right to roam, a celebration of the magic of water – this book will indeed make you want to strip off and leap in. Selected from the book Waterlog by Roger Deakin VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Eating by Nigella Lawson Liberty by Virginia Woolf Summer by Laurie Lee Desire by Haruki Murakami
From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, Roger Deakin embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man�s profound and enduring connection with wood and with trees. Meeting woodlanders of all kinds, he lives in shacks and cabins, builds hazel benders, and hunts bush-plums with aboriginal women. At once autobiography, history, a traveller�s tale and a work of natural history, Wildwood is a lyrical and fiercely intimate evocation of the spirit of trees: in nature, in our souls, in our culture, and in our lives.
'Lovely, lively, passionate... a celebration of nature's ability to inspire healing and joy' Robert MacFarlane In the breaststrokes of Roger Deakin's Waterlog, this is the story of one man's search for himself across the breadth of Britain's wild waters. Joe Minihane became obsessed with wild swimming and the way it soothed his anxiety, developing a new-found passion by following the example of naturalist Deakin in his own swimming memoir. While fighting the currents - sometimes treading water Minihane swims to explore, to forget, to find the path back to himself through nature, and in the water under an open sky he finally begins to find his peace. Floating is a remarkable memoir about a love of swimming and a deep appreciation for the British countryside: it captures Minihane's struggle to understand himself, and the healing properties of wild stretches of water. From Hampstead to Yorkshire, Dorset to Jura, the Isles of Scilly to Wales, Minihane uses Waterlog to trace his own path by diving right in.
A visually sumptuous and breathtakingly detailed book about British trees and woodland.
In July 2005, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres and great strangeness. Six years later, after Deakin's early death, Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. This book is about those journeys and that landscape.
Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? Or have we tarmacked, farmed and built ourselves out of wildness? In his vital, bewitching, inspiring classic, Robert Macfarlane sets out in search of the wildness that remains.