The South Country

Edward Thomas walked through southern England and wrote about what he saw. But this is no ordinary travel guide. Thomas doesn't just describe villages and hillsides, he uncovers the strange pull that landscape exercises on the human heart. His year of wandering through Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Cornwall becomes an inquiry into what it means to belong to a place, to be moved by countryside you've never seen before, to feel the dead living in the land. His prose has the quality of late afternoon light: golden, unhurried, precise. He notices what other travelers miss: the particular slant of a hedgerow, the way fog lies in valleys, the voices of people long dead that seem to speak from ancient churches and barrows. This is a book for readers who have ever felt that England, its small roads, its forgotten villages, its rolling downs, belongs to them even though they've never lived there. Thomas wrote this in 1909, before the Great War took his life, and his words now carry the weight of something precious and lost.