I remember – I doubt in fact I shall ever forget – my first visit to the Simon Aspinall Wildlife Education Centre at Cley; it rendered me speechless. As an American, I am perpetually in awe of the astonishing wildlife reserves I have the privilege to visit in the UK, but this one truly was like nothing I had seen before, even among all the other jewels of the British wildlife reserves.
Thus I was pleased to see that Mark’s Sunday Book Review this week, penned by Ian Carter, took The Worshipful Companies; Images and Poems from the Norfolk Coast by Stuart Medland as its subject. The second in Medland’s works about the area (the first, Rings in the Shingle; Images and Poems about Wildlife at the North Norfolk Coast, was published in 2014), Carter assesses its verses, its photographs, and its companionability as an accompaniment to a cozy evening by the fire.
Links to Mark Avery’s Sunday book reviews appear in The Well-read Naturalist by special arrangement. You can find all of Mark’s past reviews as well as a wide-ranging collection of his other writings on his Standing Up for Nature website. Mark’s opinions regarding the books he reviews are his own.
February 11, 2019 @ 03:08
Johannes – It’s great to see these reviews getting a mention on your side of the Atlantic, so many thanks for that. It’s interesting what you say about reserves in the UK. I always feel very envious of the vast wilderness areas that you still have in the US and we now completely lack over here. The nature reserves are great but the best ones are often teeming with humans as well as wildlife and are on a tiny scale – increasingly they are fragments of decent wildlife habitat surrounded by intensive agriculture. Its becoming more and more difficult to truly get away from it all and back to nature here in the UK.