Claxton by Mark Cocker

Claxton by Mark Cocker

British Nature writing

Source – Personal copy

I have a thing where, whenever I go to Macclesfield, where my Mum’s Ashes are spread. I always like to try to buy a book of nature writing because my mum loved nature. Her dad, my grandfather, for many years paid for my membership of the YOC, the youth arm of the RSPB, so I picked this book for a couple of reasons: it is set in Norfolk and Amanda and I have recently spent to great holidays around the Norfolk-Suffolk border and this book is mainly around Mark Cocker and the observations he has made of the nature of his small village of Claxton which is just outside Norwich.  I also like that it wasn’t just about one part of nature, say birds; his writings are around all the wildlife he encounters, from the smallest flies to badgers around their setts.

MONSAL DALE, DERBYSHIRE

Whenever I think of ash trees I think of their deep generosity.

This is not just special pleading for the logs that have supplied our burner and kept the living room cosy all winter. It’s the way that their small saw-toothed pinnate leaves – cotton soft when fresh in May – permit sunlight to pierce down to the ground and allow the flowers to grow at their feet. I also love their rich gift of place names – Ashbourne, Ashford, Monyash, Ashwood – to the folk of Derbyshire.

The entry about Derbyshire’s connection to the Ash tree

The book follows a year but is made up of parts from various years from the time Mark has lived in Claxton, the first part of the book. January is a lot around Claxton: watching plovers, observing the wintering waterbirds at a local bird reserve. In February, he has an entry near me that talks about Ash trees on Monsal Dale and in that area. The Monsal Trail near there is a great walk along a disused railway.  This is about ten miles from me. In March, he discusses Jackdaw, the smaller member of the crow family, with their cap-like markings on their head.  They are known to be sociable birds and often connect with humans. Again, he is in Derbyshire, on the other side of the Peaks, to me, in Buxton, but any mention of a blackbird makes me smile, as if you don’t know, Amanda and I live on Blackbird Drive. The book is fiull of his observations like watching Badgers in Lognor another small peak district village this time in Staffs one My younger brother and I have driven through over the years as we head back from where my mum lived in Cheshire via Leek and the staffs area of the peaks both Leek and this area through to Longnor a small village in the middle of nowhere are lesser known gems of the peak district.

LONGNOR, STAFFORDSHIRE

When it appeared it looked like an inverted white triangle, which had rather incongruously materialised at the mouth of the hole. However, through the binoculars we could tell instantly that it was an animal’s head and that it was bisected by those two black stripes to form the most distinctive pattern on any British mammal. It was a badger emerging from its sett.

It pushed its snout towards the evening sky and sampled the air and its accompanying atmosphere: a blend of rabbit scuts in the half-light, blackbirds chinking wildly from their. roost in the lime trees above, a shovelful of blinking stars overhead and a cold night wind sweeping across the hillside.

Badgers may have a remarkable sense of smell and acute hearing but their vision is poor. None of the five animals that eventually emerged spotted us on the hillside opposite.

There were seven of us, of three Cocker generations, lying in silence among a few hawthorns and completely mesmerised by the unfolding vision.

The badgers he sees in this small Staffs village

I needed a break last week, as I just had one of those times when I needed a change from my usual diet of translated fiction. I think this month, with it being Women in Translation Month, there is just a glut of posts around books people want to read, or lists people are making now.  Don’t get me wrong, they are great, but when you have read most of the books and after so many years of reading books in translation I just wanted a break from this noise so this is the other reason I buy these nature books that is they are my putting an anchor down in the storm of reading translated fiction and settling down and reading the year drift by in marks wonderfully descriptive entires of the world of nature he has seen over a number of years I also loved at the end lof a book is a list of all the plants.  trees, insects, birds, reptiles, etc that have been seen in the parish of Claxton, showing what a rich part of the country he lives in.  This is a must-read for any fans of British nature and those who love to see a year of nature go by. This for me is a break from my usual fare and reminds me to open my eyes and look out for what is around me, which I do a lot anyway!