People and places the lie of the land

A writer’s eye view: Meet three acclaimed writers – two novelists and a poet – who have found inspiration in the English landscape.

Andrew Michael Hurley, the north of England  

It’s no surprise to me at all that the landscapes of the north of England have come to occupy centre stage in my work as a novelist. Growing up, a summer holiday usually consisted of a fortnight’s camping in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales, where, from an early age, I was captivated by the fells and the valleys, but also the otherworldly names of Blencathra and Helvellyn and Pen-y-ghent.  

Many years on, I still feel most content and complete among moors and mountains. They are always there to escape to whenever I crave solitude, perspective, or whenever I need to walk at length – something that is an integral part of my process as a writer.  

Exploring on foot the landscapes that become the settings of my stories is the only way I can render them accurately and atmospherically on the page. That means not only capturing those physical features that make a location unique but trying to get at something deeper, the spiritual identity of a place, which comprises its hidden histories, its persistent folklore and its ghosts in whatever form they take.  

The locations of all four of my novels are haunted in some way. ‘The Loney’, the fictional stretch of Morecambe Bay in my first book, is a graveyard of shipwrecks and the bones of those who have drowned over the years. And there is a palpable sense of menace about the real place too. The tides sweep in with great speed, the water channels shift, and when the mist descends it’s very easy to get lost. 

In ‘The Loney’, that’s an outsider’s error, but in my second novel, ‘Devil’s Day’, even those familiar with a particular landscape find themselves prone to disorientation. Living in a remote place called the Endlands (based on the Langden valley in Lancashire’s Forest of Bowland), the farmers enjoy a deep intimacy with the land they own, but the moorland that looms above them is largely untrodden and unmapped – the home of the ‘Owd Feller’, so the stories go.  

Both novels speak to the idea that there are more powerful forces at work in the world. Ones that we do not necessarily understand and therefore seek to personify in folk tales. Such narratives often give a setting its identity. Indeed, it was imagining the stories that might swirl around a name like ‘Starve Acre’ that led to my third novel, ‘set in North Yorkshire’, in which a couple’s grief seems to awaken something in the field next to their house.  

As well as being the sites of human dramas, such places can prompt an exploration of bigger questions about our complex relationship with ‘nature’. My latest novel, ‘Barrowbeck’, set at the meeting point of Lancashire, West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, charts the history of a village from its first Celtic settlers to its eventual demise in the near future and returns again and again to the thought that we are only ever visitors to or custodians of the places we inhabit.  

Andrew Michael Hurley won the Costa First Novel Award for his debut, ‘The Loney’. His latest title, ‘Barrowbeck’ (John Murray, £16.99), will be released on 24 October. 

Kate Worsley, north-east Essex 

‘There’s only fields and hedges and cloud and wind. No houses. No trees. No hills. No snow, or slush, or soot stains. All flat and wet, green and muddy. Soft. It sets my teeth on edge.’ 

When Foxash’s Lettie Radley arrives in north-east Essex – now ‘Constable Country’ – her first impressions are not good. It’s January, the height of the 1930s depression, and she’s come to join her unemployed husband Tommy on a colony of smallholdings run by the Association.  

By midsummer, she is bewitched: ‘I have felt it. The swell, split, stretch, the blind search for the light. These past few weeks the growth has been unstoppable. The sky seems always to be wide awake, calling.’ 

The rural life has long exerted this dual repulsion and attraction, not least on myself. Having moved from a London flat to an Essex village, I have been Lettie midwinter, trapped between high hedges, and midsummer, luxuriating in the long grass.  

To succeed, the Radleys embrace every modern and artificial method the Association can provide. Their West Country neighbours, the Dells, are more old school, they plant by the moon, practise what we now call organic permaculture.  

This horticultural setting is vital to the novel’s central theme: how far can nature – and people – be pushed, before cultivation becomes exploitation? 

As a scientist colleague burst angrily out recently, hearing someone rhapsodise about these self-same country lanes, hedges, trees and fields: ‘You think what you are seeing is nature but it’s not, it’s horticulture, it’s agriculture. We’re killing nature.’ 

The real-life Association had noble aims, both for the land and the people. From 1934 onwards, the government-backed Land Settlement Association (LSA), the biggest and the most expensive of the interwar ‘back to the land’ movements, bought up farmland all over England, developed 1,100 holdings on 21 estates and trained more than 1,700 long-term unemployed industrial workers in horticulture and livestock rearing.  

I saw my first LSA settlement, the Foxash colony itself, from the top deck of the 102 bus along the A137 to Colchester, its sprinkling of modest brick homes dwarfed by the vast glasshouses at their rear. Around the same time, I read Rachel Carson’s environmental horror story Silent Spring. Wanting to translate my abstract thoughts around fertility, idealism and human nature into novelistic action and character and to see where they might lead, I worked a season alongside an organic grower on one of the original Foxash holdings. And I talked at length to residents who had grown up there. They mostly loved the life but recalled discrimination from locals right into the 1960s.  

I’ve been left with a profound respect for anyone who tries to make a living off the land. And an even greater respect – and concern – for the land itself. The LSA soon faltered and then was stymied by war. Farmers and growers in Constable Country – the original working landscape and now an urbanites playground – find themselves yet again in dire straits, as does wildlife, the National Trust notwithstanding. And the flat, fertile, well-drained acres of Foxash are being colonised once more, this time by garden centres, executive homes and vineyards. 

Kate Worsley’s novel ‘Foxash’ (Tinder Press, £10.99) was a Bookseller Pick of the Year and won the East Anglian Fiction Award for 2023.

Louisa Adjoa Parker, south-west England 

I was born in Doncaster, moved to Huntingdon, and then to Devon the summer I turned 13. Since then, I’ve lived in Dorset, and now Somerset. I first came to the south west in 1978, when my grandparents retired to Torbay.  

I wasn’t consciously aware of a connection with landscape when I was young. I spent a lot of time in the countryside or on the beach but took it for granted. We didn’t have a car, so walking (or ambling!) was a way to get somewhere or to find a space away from prying adult eyes.  

Later, I took my children to the beach and for country walks. I enjoyed it, but it was only when I was older that I appreciated the beauty, history and magnificence of the south west’s land – and seascapes, and my connection to the region, which deepened since discovering many English ancestors from Devon and Dorset.  

I began writing to tell my story of being of English and Ghanaian heritage; it was challenging often being ‘the only one’. I went on to tell other stories of ‘difference’. Writing about underrepresented groups from the south west helped me feel I belong, that we all belong. I’m fascinated by stories of people and place, the imprint we’ve left on the land, and how place has shaped us. 

I’ve mainly written with the geography of the region as a beautiful backdrop, but I’m interested in learning more about the geology, history and wildlife. I used to think I wasn’t the ‘right’ sort of person to be a nature writer, but now I think anyone can be! 

I often write about Lyme Regis, where I lived for 18 years. For me, it’s a mixture of darkness and light. It’s filled with beauty – the light over the bay, the night moon over a glittering black sea, the white-gold sand, but there can be ugliness too, and outsiders aren’t always welcome. My favourite spot is Monmouth Beach, with grey pebbles and black cliffs in the distance, quieter than the main beach.  

I write in the dining room, with our garden behind me. Recently I delivered writing workshops as part of a Nature for Wellbeing project. We sat in a wildflower meadow, among purple knapweed, read others’ poems, and wrote. I’d love to do more of that.  

My favourite places are south Devon and west Dorset. I love the colours of the land – terracotta red, rich greens and gold; the way the landscape rolls out and makes you feel small yet connected to it all. I don’t get out as much as I used to due to health challenges. I go to the beach now and then, or for a walk. I enjoy pottering in our untamed garden, or lying on the lawn, bare feet on the prickly grass, staring up at the sky, watching swallows flying overhead, listening to woodpigeons cooing.  

I enjoy spending time outside with my family, who also love the south-west landscape. Sometimes I go with my grandchildren to places where I took my children. It gives me a sense of coming full circle, of mine and my family’s place in the world.  

Louisa Adjoa Parker has published four poetry collections – the latest is ‘She Can Still Sing’ (Flipped Eye, £4). She is currently writing a coastal memoir.