A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Guardian's much-loved Country Diary column, Martin Wainwright has compiled a collection of the best of a century's writing, covering the landscape of the whole of the United Kingdom, from Wales to Northern Ireland, Scotland to Norfolk. The column has consistently attracted some of Britain's best writers on natural history and the countryside: Jim Perrin the mountaineering writer, whose biography of Don Whillans won the Boardman-Tasker Award, writes the dispatches from Snowdonia; Mark Cocker, author of Birders, writes the Country Diary from Norfolk. There are also diaries written by a leading Suffragette, one of Rupert Brooke's mistresses, and even one of The Guardian's printers. Martin Wainwright has found diaries to reflect the changing of the countryside over 100 years—from the prevalence of owls in World War I trenches full of vermin to the plant surveys of World War II bombsites.