Wild About Dorset : The nature diary of a West Country parish

From an award-winning journalist and nature writer

Wild About Dorset draws on a decade's worth of monthly columns written for a local parish magazine, painting a vivid 'year in the life' of wildlife and wild places in West Dorset's Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Author Brian Jackman, who has lived in this corner of England for fifty years, celebrates a rumpled, tumbling world of green-gold hills bordered by the Jurassic Coast's crumbling cliffs—a landscape few corners of England can match for wildlife richness and rural intensity. Arranged month-by-month, this is a love letter to the only place that truly reminds Jackman of the lost countryside of his youth.

This is a book about nature in all its seasonal glory. Join Jackman to watch sea trout and mating foxes, observe peregrine falcons flying along the coast, marvel at mad March hares, glow-worms and dormice, and witness the fallow deer rut amid ancient oakwoods. From mistletoe to little owls, each month brings its own natural wonders and wildlife dramas. Complementing the text are thirteen stunning colour illustrations by celebrated nature artist Carry Akroyd, an award-winning member of the Society of Wildlife Artists.

This is equally a book about place—celebrating the vigorously local and unequivocally rural. Via Jackman's pen, explore the holloways and lynchets that characterise West Dorset's landscapes, discover the pleasures of haymaking and beekeeping, visit Powerstock (a thatched village straight out of Cider with Rosie) and Kingcombe (the farm that time forgot, now a National Nature Reserve), and enjoy views from a giant Iron Age hillfort. Evocative, personal and authoritative, Wild About Dorset is a unique portrait of rural England that will inspire you to don walking boots, grab binoculars, and fall in love again with the great British countryside.