#688: 'The Little Grey Men'

Denys Watkins-Pitchford was also known as 'BB'.

He wrote a range of books on natural history, shooting and conservation. Many of these remain in print despite being first published and have really nice illustrations by BB himself, including paintings and engravings.

He was an artist, writer, and outdoorsman, and wrote upwards of 50 books for adults and children. His regular column in “The Shooting Times” gave him his pseudonym, apparently'BB' was the size of the lead shot he used to hunt geese.

I've previously talked about the link between shooting and conservation. 

'The Little Grey Men' was the first of a pair of books featuring a quartet of gnomes and their adventures. They are described in the introduction as "the last gnomes in Britain".

The subtitle is: 'A story for the young in heart'

Their names are Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry. These are all the names of plants.

They live next to the Folly Brook.

Cloudberry goes exploring and disappears so they build a boat called the 'Dragonfly' and go in search of him. The book is the story of the gnomes' epic journey, set against the background of the English countryside, beginning in spring, continuing through summer, and concluding in autumn, when the first frosts are starting to arrive.

The book was first published in 1942. It won the Carnegie Medal.

The books are available in modern editions and you can find earlier editions from online retailers.

Read it on the Internet Archive here.

There was a TV adaptation of the book in 1975,

A trail based on the books can be found at Brixworth Country Park.

Recently, the nature writer Melissa Harrison wrote a couple of books which were inspired by the original books: 'By Oak, Ash and Thorn' and 'By Rowan and Yew'.

A nice piece in Elementum magazine. It was written by Helena Drysdale.

The book had two sequels. The first, published in 1948 is called 'Down the Bright Stream'. I have a copy of that too.

BB prefaced Down the Bright Stream with a text copied by his clergyman father from a Cumbrian gravestone:

The wonder of the world

The beauty and the power

The shapes of things,

Their colours, light and shades

These I saw,

Look ye also while life lasts.

#675: WONDER #2: Heacham

WONDER was launched by Jake Fiennes as part of the work of the Holkham Estate.

Image: Holkham Dunes

It's their strategy for sustainability. I've blogged about the Holkham Estate before.

I've also blogged about his book 'Land Healer', which I think is an excellent book - and should be part of a library of books for those teaching GCSE Natural History. 

The dictionary definition of wonder is ‘a feeling of amazement, admiration or awe, caused by something beautiful, remarkable, or unfamiliar.’ 

We believe Holkham is remarkable, somewhere more than a million people visit each year to admire and enjoy. It is also a place vulnerable to the effects of climate change, associated sea level rises and risk of flooding. So, our drive to be more sustainable is a very real one. 

We need to ensure we work towards improving our practices and cherishing our environment for the benefit of future generations. It is by sustainability becoming an instinctive and natural behaviour that we will succeed. 

I think it would make sense to connect with Jake and his work as case studies of land management, habitat restoration and other related themes which are part of the proposed subject content.

I'm going to put together a case study of Holkham - I've already made a start on a StoryMap.

#666: Lia's Almanac

Thanks to Michelle Graffagnino on the Facebook group for the recommendation of this book.

This has been published for quite a few years, and the 2027 version is now available to purchase. 

This would be a useful resource to have a copy of within the 'department' and refer to when working out some activities and foci during the year(s) that the course is taught for.

Reconnect with the seasons in Britain and Ireland with this month-by-month guide to the world around us - including tide tables, sunrises and moon phases; wildlife and folklore; seasonal recipes and more.

The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2027 gives you the tools and inspiration you need to celebrate, mark and appreciate each month of the year in your own particular way.

Divided into the 12 months, a set of tables each month gives it the feel and weight of a traditional almanac, providing practical information that gives access to the outdoors and the seasons, perfect for expeditions, woodland foraging and beach holidays.

You can also sign up to receive weekly seasonal posts.

Check out the ones so far this year here.

Click and search the archive for 3 years' worth of posts, which will contain useful ideas and inspiration for following the course of the seasons and how they are reflected in the landscape.

#649: Natural History Reading List #28 - 'The Story of Nature'

This is an academic and lengthy read, and a heavy dense book by Jeremy Mynott.

I have been reading it slowly for the last year or so, one chapter at a time.

This review has some useful details.

We talk about ‘nature’ all the time, but what exactly is it? Does nature include physical processes such as rocks and rivers, as well as life? Is humankind part of nature or is there now a clear separation between the artificial and the natural? And if the latter, when did that divorce take place? Nature has a deep history, and what we think about it today may be different from how it was viewed in the past (there have been changes in perception even in my own lifetime). Who invented nature anyway?

There's another useful review of the book here.

It explores some of the early relationships that people had with nature and how those relationships have changed. I was interested in the chapter on cave paintings for example, and the relationship that we had with nature in those times.

Introduction:

What is ‘nature’? Has it always meant the same thing? Are we a part of it?…This is a huge subject, of course, and it would be impossible to write a comprehensive and systematic account of it in a book of this length — or indeed any length. But…stories offer a different way of finding routes through such a vast, varied and difficult terrain and my story is only one among many possible ways of tackling this theme.

#643: The Path More Travelled

A cross posting from my Geo Library blog project - what do you mean you haven't visited? There's over 700 books that would be of interest to geographers.

'Absorbing and exhilarating . . . This book will literally expand your horizons' MICHAEL PALIN
'A panoptic, deeply researched and compelling history of our nation' PATRICK BARKHAM

This was the book I finished at the beginning of the summer break.

It's a chunky tome from Nicholas Crane which sits alongside his earlier book on the making of the landscape of Britain.

It explores the origin of the paths and tracks that run through England, from their first makings as the landscape was populated with the first arrivals. 

The paths firmed up with foot traffic and created a network of paths connecting settlements as they developed. Horses expanded the network, and trade turned them into roads. They were joined by trains and canals and then the car changed everything.

It's scholarly and accessible and full of incident and detail, taking you through the thickets of ancient woodland and out to the development of motorways and the current issues we face travelling through the countryside, including past struggles to gain access to open access land.

Details from the publisher:

In The Path More Travelled, acclaimed geographer and travel writer Nicholas Crane explores the hidden history of Britain's coast-to-coast web of footpaths, from the icy Cairngorms to the banks of the Severn (where he discovers footprints left over 7,000 years ago). 

Witty, wide-ranging and passionate, this is an enchanting call to rediscover and protect the lifeblood of our landscapes.

My copy was published by W&N in 2026

Hardback, 432pp

ISBN:  978-1399605816

If you want to hear more about the book, Nicholas Crane is doing a series of events around the country, including a talk in King's Lynn at the Town Hall.

Your best option if you live in the East of England is to come along to our Christmas social event on Tuesday the 8th of December.

It will be hosted by Norwich School.

Nick will have a focus on the ancient footpaths of East Anglia as well, given the location of the talk, and the fact he was born in Cringleford - a few miles from where my daughter lives - and grew up in the area.

My ticket is booked, so I will see you there and may even help you get some sausage rolls and brownies once the talk is over. We usually have mulled wine on arrival as well...

#602: Hitting the library

We now have the proposed subject content for the GCSE Natural History and you have some time to respond to the consultation to give your opinions. Please do... it's cheaper than buying books.

Don't forget to head off to your local library. It's vital to support it so that it doesn't go the way of many others and disappear. My main library is the Millennium Library at the Forum in Norwich.

However, this closed in April 2026 for a £1.3 million refurbishment and complete re-organisation. It reopens in mid-July 2026. I look forward to seeing what has been done there. There was a very large Natural History section in the library stretching for quite a while.

In the meantime, I headed for the library at Wells-next-the-Sea, which is a small one, and operates as as unmanned library for much of the week. I found these two books which look like being very interesting amd appropriate for the collation of materials and ideas and images that will have to take place fairly quickly once content is approved and we move onto draft specifications....

If they prove to be vital to have a physical copy of, there will perhaps be a budget provided for the development of the new specification and a library of books can be built up - some for teachers to refer to, and some for students to be inspired by.

Image: Alan Parkinson

#581: Natural History Reading List:#27 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

I have this book as an Audible copy, and it is excellent. 

It is also available to purchase in paperback and hardback, or loan from your local library.

If you haven't already got a copy then it may be worth going for the illustrated version which has some wonderful images of fungi.

A film of the book has also been made, with narration by Björk.

#579: Natural History Reading List #26: Fenland Nature

A cross-posting from my GeoLibrary blog, which currently features over 700 books.

This was picked up in Topping Books just before the summer 2025. It's a really detailed and comprehensive guide to the nature to be found in the Fens. It's a book to dip into rather than read cover to cover, with chapters exploring different aspects of the Fenland landscape.

There are lots of excellent photographs, mostly taken by the authors themselves, who have certainly put in the legwork and mileage to cover the region they are writing about.

Publisher's description:

This book showcases the natural history and landscape of the Fens, an area now responsible for a third of Britain’s food production and worth over £3 billion to the economy every year. It describes the geology and geography across the Fenland Basin over the last 14,000 years, a period dominated by the flux of wetlands and movement of water. The human relationship with this landscape is traced through history: from Mesolithic hunters to the prosperity of a medieval economy based on the currency of eels, through the taming and draining of the vast wetlands, to modern farming on an industrial scale.

While recognising that only a fraction of the Fens is left, Fenland Nature celebrates the breadth of wildlife still to be found in the region, from vast flocks of visiting wildfowl in the winter months, to rare and specialised plants and insects – all illustrated with detailed and evocative photographs.

The book concludes by contemplating an uncertain future where there are possibilities for a sustainable agricultural industry alongside increasing biodiversity, requiring new ways of thinking and working with the land. The fenland landscape is a microcosm of the huge global challenges caused by habitat loss, ecological degradation and climate change. If solutions can be found to these complex issues in the Fens, then there is hope that these can also apply to similar places across the world.

It's written by two local authors who really know their local patch well. A great coffee table / browsing book.

A good review by Mark Avery.

It sits nicely with my other Fenland books - dipped into to inform my teaching about the local area.

My copy was published by Pelagic Publishing.

Paperback, 376pp

ISBN: 9781784274108

#577: Natural History Reading List #25: 'How to read a Tree'

Another really useful book by navigation expert Tristan Gooley.

I have a signed copy of his previous book: 'The Natural Explorer'

This book explores what a tree can tell us about the landscape. It says a great deal about the value of trees and how they interact with the soil, atmosphere, weather and biodiversity. They influence the drainage and fertility of the soil, and can also tell us a lot about where we are, and how the landscape is changing.

The loss of a tree can touch millions, as we saw with the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree.

It would make a useful book to add to the library for those who are considering work in local woodlands for fieldwork. We are still waiting to see to what extent woodlands are featured in the final specification.

My thinking would be that the final specification would involve students investigating a range of ecosystems and the value of a tree is something which students should certainly be asked to consider, perhaps when thinking about the wider 'value' of nature in our lives and landscapes.

Published by Hodder Press

Paperback, 320pp

ISBN: 978-1529339628

#576: The path more travelled

 I'm currently reading Nicholas Crane's new book on the history of Britain's footpaths: how they came about originally following the drowning of Doggerland, and were then refined by successive waves of change: horses, the Roman invasion etc. It's a dense and scholarly work, with plenty of points of interest and relevance to geographers exploring the connections between people and the landscape.

He's taking his book on the road in a series of talks, with three confirmed so far. Here's the description for his talk at Stanford's book shop at the end of the month. He's also speaking in Exeter and Stamford.

Walking is a cornerstone of British identity and the most popular form of exercise in the UK. But how much do we know about the paths that we walk? What is their history? Why do they follow the routes that they do? Are they permanent? Can we designate more of them?​

The Path More Travelled is a coast-to-coast history of footpaths from the stone age paths walked by migrants 12,000 years to the industrial revolution and the birth of map and walking apps – from beloved writer and broadcaster Nicholas Crane.​

In The Path More Travelled, acclaimed geographer and writer Nicholas Crane explores this coast-to-coast web that is both ancient and futuristic. Starting with the stone age paths walked by European migrants 12,000 years ago, he traces their development - from early pilgrim paths and coffin tracks, through to the industrial revolution and the birth of the bicycle and car, sat-nav and walking apps. We discover how land-grabbing Norman barons set a precedent for the enclosure of our countryside, and how out of the ashes of World War Two came our beloved national parks. 

Along the way, Crane takes the reader on some of his most memorable walks, including the Hadrian's Wall Path, the outer reaches of the Cairngorms, and the banks of the Severn where he discovers footprints from over 7,000 years ago.​
​
From one of our most beloved travel writers, The Path More Travelled is a passionate ode to footpaths and a call to rediscover this most fundamental part of our landscape.

Book a ticket here.

#567: Natural History Reading List #24: "Landmarks"

The latest in a series of posts on suggested books that could be in a GCSE Natural History subject library. The library is building but a long way from the contents of my GeoLibrary blog which has over 600 books on its virtual shelves.

'Landmarks' was written by Robert MacFarlane. 

It was published in 2016, so is coming up for ten years old, which makes me feel old.

There are several reasons for including this book on the reading list.

This description from a New York Times review provides some sort of sense of the contents of the book.

It includes some lists of words which describe some quite specific aspects of landscapes - particularly of words which are disappearing from dictionaries and common usage.

Expanding the vocabulary of young people with respect to Natural History will hopefully be an important part of the new course once the specification is revealed.

#529: NHBS: the place for Christmas gifts for the Natural Historian in your life

NHBS started out as the Natural History Book Service.

These days they sell a wide range of equipment and resources for those interested in wildlife and natural history. whether that's books, binoculars or bird boxes... and that's just the B's....

The perfect place to buy Christmas gifts for nature lovers... give Amazon a miss this Christmas...

#462: The Observologist

Possibly not one to use as a GCSE text but certainly one which has a lot of interesting ideas for exploring wildlife and nature and paying attention to our surroundings.

By Giselle Clarkson.

An observologist is someone who makes scientific expeditions, albeit very small ones, every day. They notice interesting details in the world around them. They are expert at finding tiny creatures, plants and fungi. They know that water snails glide upside down on the undersurface of the water; not all flies have wings; earthworms have bristles; butterflies taste with their feet.

The Observologist puts over 100 small creatures and features of the natural world under the microscope, piquing our curiosity with only the most interesting facts. Subjects range from slugs, ants and seeds, fungi and flies through to bees and bird poop.

But this is no everyday catalogue of creatures. It is an antidote to boredom, an invitation out of the digital world and screentime, an encouragement to observe our environment, with care and curiosity, wherever we are.

Facts combine with comics, detailed illustrations, science and funny stories in this unique, warm and fascinating account of the small things all around us. Graphic and comic illustrations with funny talking insects make this a playful and informative book for 7- to 11-year-olds and one to be treasured in the classroom.

Giselle Clarkson has a comics and conservation background. Through her unique sensibility you’ll find that once you start thinking small, there’s no limit to what you can notice—right under your nose.

I have a copy in my classroom, ready for use with younger students.

#445: National History Reading List #23: 'Oak and Ash and Thorn'

Another book that would be good to add to the developing reading list of books for those who are developing curriculum resources for the new GCSE Natural History.

It is a book about the ancient woodlands, as well as the more recent forests of Britain. 

It is written by Peter Fiennes, and focusses on some of the species that have been around for the longest. It would sit nicely with some of the other tree related books I have mentioned before on the blog.

There are plenty of possible locations for field visits here too - and I hope that young people explore woodlands as part of their teaching.

The image shows a useful chapter on the importance of trees in cities. Regular readers will know of the the vital part that trees play in ensuring lower temperatures, and the link with the London National Park City campaign.

#398: Free e-book on the Climate crisis

Konnie Huq launches free climate crisis ebook for UK primary schools https://t.co/eNXrjBEwEc

— Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) November 4, 2024

A free ebook about the climate crisis for every UK primary school has been created.

The ebook, Children for Change, is edited by Huq and features contributions from more than 80 writers, illustrators, environmentalists and young people including Tom Gates author Liz Pichon, The Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler and TV presenter Chris Packham. Not all of them are climate experts to be fair.

The book contains stories, poems, illustrations and features about a variety of topics related to the environment including fast fashion, rewilding and measuring our carbon footprint.

The introduction advises children to “start anywhere” in the book. “It’s a chocolate box, essentially”, said Huq.

Edited by broadcaster and author, Konnie Huq, Children For Change is packed with 300 pages of imaginative stories, poems, non-fiction, illustrations, infographics and creative resources - all to inspire children to take climate action. Contributors include Rob Biddulph, Adam Kay, Liz Pichon, A.M. Dassu, Joseph Coelho, Hannah Gold, Axel Scheffler, Emily Gravett, Chris Packham, Mary Portas and Jamie Oliver.

Packed with actions and eco-tips, this ground-breaking ebook helps you to educate children about what they can do to help protect the planet, without generating eco-anxiety. It's a perfect resource for KS2 English, PSHE, science or geography lessons, or primary assemblies, covering a range of topics including sustainability, endangered species and fast fashion. It's also free for you to distribute home - all you need to do is send the link to parents and carers, and they'll be able to download Children For Change too!
 

Given that not every child (or school) can afford to buy books, this is a welcome development.

#393: Congratulations to Samantha Harvey

In post #372, I added a mention for Samantha Harvey's book 'Orbital' and added it to the GCSE Natural History booklist.

On Tuesday this week, the book was announced as the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize!

Well done to Samantha. I was hoping that the book would win. I hope that it leads to lots more people experiencing this excellent book.

I am planning a new unit based on the book which I shall be teaching to Year 6 students in January 2025. More to come on this as the project develops.

#383: Anticipatory History

A cross-posting from my GeoLibrary blog.

This is a book published by uniformbooks. It explores ideas of localness and sense of place. 

Anticipatory history is the present day really, where we explore our landscapes and bring them to life with stories.

Here's a review from the uniformbooks website.

In brief, various authors have been given free rein to elaborate upon a number of critical terms now at work in debates about landscape, ecology, climate change and futurology, ranging from the technical to the poetical, and from the instrumental to the epiphanic. Thus we get wonderful expositions on what is meant by Adaptation, Dream-maps, Entropy, Liminality, Memory, Rewilding, and Presentism, amongst many others—in fact fifty glossaries in all. The initial brief for this research endeavour was “to explore the roles that history and story-telling play in helping us to apprehend and respond to changing landscapes, and to changes to the wildlife and plant populations they support.” The editors rightly caution themselves and their readers against the dangers of instrumentalising the history-writing process, bending a reading of the past to suit the needs of the present and the future.

Not surprisingly forms of land ownership and its management and stewardship loom large. The short essay on ‘Commons’ rehearses Garrett Hardin’s famous essay on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, which suggested that self-interest will always ultimately defeat the social aims of things held in common. However, it doesn’t reprise historian E. P. Thompson’s counter-argument that in particular societies at particular times, a ‘moral economy’ is brought in to play to regulate private behaviour. It was also surprising—though perhaps there wasn’t enough room—that the entry on ‘Rewilding’ focused entirely on vegetative succession with no mention of the fearful ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor’, nor of the proposal to re-introduce sea-eagles to the East Anglian shoreline.

Attention also gravitates towards the newer, more problematic landscapes which now require a fuller understanding of how they might be managed in the future: the ‘edgelands’ or ‘drossscapes’ produced by failed urbanisation or de-industrialisation. Are these settings just as valuable and worth conserving as farmed or so-called natural habitat? What was once called the search for authenticity in human existential terms, now applies to concrete and clay. Here the newer discourses of psycho-geography and psycho-biogeography are proving to be invaluable in summoning meaning and history from even the bleakest terrain (on such matters see the excellent entry, ‘Liminal zone’).

There are no settled positions on any of these matters any more, as the entry on ‘Enclosure’ concludes. Once upon a time open common land was hedged in and parcelled up into private lots, which had very bad social consequences. When, a century or so later, the hedgerows were uprooted in the name of industrialised farming, much of the flora and fauna using them as habitat disappeared. Now we are re-instating hedges again. “Perhaps,” the author of this entry concludes, “we might think of enclosure as an example of the human modification of land that slips from its moorings, and accept that each generation makes the enclosure it needs.”

The book contains words, terms and concepts that are completely new to me, including the book’s suggestive title, ‘Anticipatory History’. I had not heard of Rephotography before, nor ‘Shifting baseline syndrome’ let alone ‘Palliative curation’. ‘Presentism’ I knew, but not how to pronounce it—and still don’t. Yet these elucidations are vital resources in the debates ahead about how we handle the transition from the past into the future, and provide a much-needed contribution to the crucial matter of ‘Inter-generational equity’.
A terrific and thought-provoking book.

Ken Worpole

#374: 'The Story of Nature' - new in

A new arrival this month was this chunky new book by Jeremy Mynott which promises to explore the story of mankind's changing relationship with nature.

This would seem to offer a scholarly perspective on many of the original ideas that underpinned the draft specification, and which I hope end up being in the final version.

I have made a start and am mightily impressed so far.

It has made me reconsider the reasons why cave paintings were made, and the way that domesticating animals changed our relationship with certain animals.

If you want a taste of the book, you can visit Amazon, where you can look inside the book.

I am looking forward to continuing the story over the coming months.

This comes highly recommended. A full review will come once I've finished it...

#358: "Nature's Ghosts"

A recent piece in The Guardian from Sophie Yeo uses the phrase 'nature's ghosts' to refer to some of the lost species which have been the result of modern farming methods. It's an extract from her new book of the same name, and is tellingly part of a series of articles called 'The age of extinction'.

Here's a review of the book.

I will hunt this out in the library and perhaps add it to the reading list in due course.

#356: Natural History Reading List #19: Fen, Bog and Swamp

One of my favourite books - I have a very nice compact edition with sailing ropes on the spine and cover - is 'The Shipping News' by Annie Proulx.

A more recent book is 'Fen, Bog and Swamp', subtitled as 'A short history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis'.

It covers a great deal of ground, and starts with some useful definitions of the distinction between the three terms, which some people might feel can be conflated. 

There are differences between these three landscape (and habitat) types, and the use that people make of them. The index also provides a wealth of links to useful websites.

This Guardian review clearly explains why this should be on the shelf of any GCSE Natural History reading list / departmental library.

"Proulx conjures up the lost landscape, teeming as it was with eels and sturgeon, beavers and water voles, ospreys and cranes and populated by an unmourned fen people who “poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummelled the land edge in storms”. But for all her sadness at the destruction of our wetlands and what she calls “the awfulness of the present”, perhaps what’s most interesting about the book is her refusal to engage in the usual left versus rightpolitical debate."

We are all complicit in this destruction of the natural world.

My copy was borrowed from the Norfolk Library Service, but I shall be purchasing a copy 

Hardback, 196pp - paperback version now available.

ISBN: 978-0-00-853439-4