J I M P E R R I N O N T H E N E W N AT U R E W R I T I N G

Holy Things

Out of all these circumstances – the pride of skill in handicrafts, the detailed understanding of the soil and its materials, the general effect of the wellknown landscape, and the faint sense of something venerable in its associations […] there proceeded an influence which acted upon the village people as an unperceived guide to their conduct, so that they observed the seasons proper for their varied pursuits almost as if they were going through some ritual. Thus, […] when, on an auspicious evening of spring, a man and wife went out far across the common to get rushes for the wife’s hop-tying, of course it was a consideration of thrift that sent them off; but an idea of doing the right piece of country routine at the right time gave value to the little expedition. The moment, the evening, became enriched by suggestion of the seasons into which it fitted, and by memories of years gone by.

George Sturt, Change in the Village

Hardly a recognisable description of life in a present-day Home Counties parish, and I doubt if many now read George Sturt (1863-1927), which is a pity, because this Surrey-born wheelwright and author of books like Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) posed a crucial question with which contemporary society still wrestles, and to which – despite increasing cultural signs of a yearning for the renewal of a close relationship with nature – we have yet to find an adequate answer: what measure of compensation can be found in contemporary life for the loss of connection with process and the natural cycle which was woven through the whole human life fabric in a pre-industrial world, the disappearance of which has left us with a kind of psychic insubstantiality by comparison with those who, in the marvelling and resonant phrase of the American author Barry Lopez, ‘radiate the new welsh review 9