Contemporary Authors

Rob Cowen
Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist, features writer, naturalist, broadcaster and author of Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild.

Common Ground review – Rob Cowen searches for the animal within

This memoir about the columnist’s move to Yorkshire works best when he loses himself to the forces of nature
Swifts on a telephone wire. As Cowen watches them he feels a sharp connection to the rhythms of nature.
Swifts on a telephone wire. As Cowen watches them he feels a sharp connection to the rhythms of nature. Photograph: Alamy

Kirsty Gunn

Sunday 5 July 2015 02.30 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 14.44 EDT

The wild and rather unusual book tethered inside this one is about what it is to be animal, how that might feel. By imagining his way into the lives of the creatures he discovers in the course of this memoir about his move to a Yorkshire town and the edgeland around it, journalist Rob Cowen uncovers a story more interesting than his ostensible subject. “I can’t say what imperceptible force drew me there, only that I needed to reach it,” he announces at the beginning of Common Ground. “That frontier called me. Maybe a speck of soil carried in a starling’s foot had been drawn down deep into my repository system… Whatever it was, I felt a sense of returning, like a bee to a hive.”

Common Ground is stuffed with writing like this – portentous and pronouncing, full of forced metaphors and fanciful mixed similes that have us flying from bird to bee in one paragraph. “Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic,” Michael Palin has written ominously on the cover – but are Rob Cowen’s thoughts and poetry what we want in a book about the natural world?
The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape
Read more

In a recent Times Literary Supplement, ornithologist Richard Smyth takes nature writing to task for exactly this sort of approach. “It’s a reflex in many readers and reviewers to read great nature writing and cry ‘poetry!’” he says. Yet what Smyth misses is that, unlike when it served to list and name and record, nature writing now is part of a larger movement tending away from the anthropocentric towards a larger self that is inclusive and global.

Books about wild places release us from the trap of technology into a world that absorbs us. In this new nature writing, to be particular, not poetic, is the aim. In his finely graded sentences, nature writer Robert Macfarlane gives us the textures and smells and experiences of what is out there, beyond us, and his careful calibrating of each phrase actually effaces him from his texts. He might be walking through the landscape but there’s no sign of his footprints.

Rob Cowen, by contrast, can’t leave the place alone. “Crucially we need to be in it,” he writes of his own wild places, “in order to connect on this physical, emotional level… Find it, watch it, follow it.” An award-winning newspaper columnist, he is well practised in commenting on his experiences for thousands of readers each week. Thinking about his wife and unborn child and the migration of swifts he effects this tidy conjoining: “It will never just be me and Rosie again…The Earth turns and the swifts move. You can’t stop the ceaseless turn of the universe. Then, as I’m thinking this, the baby squirms beneath my fingers…” Well… yes. I suppose.

Yet when Cowen leaves his memoir behind and thinks of himself as an owl or a butterfly or a fox caught in a snare the book lights up: “There is no pain, only numbness, and for a moment he forgets his bonds and tries to stand… Licking, pulling and biting the wire again agitates the cut further… it boils up with fresh blood until it’s too tender even for his tongue to touch.” Later a deer comes upon him – stepping over him as he lies sleeping in a ditch – and we feel it again, an author coming into his real story, leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us. His lovely linocuts that front each chapter have the same quality – responsive and naive – showing someone, like a child, fully caught up with his subject , seeking to draw it close to him in his own pieces of art.

Kirsty Gunn’s short story collection, Infidelities, is published by Faber. Common Ground is published by Hutchinson. Click here to order it for £12.99
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Q and A with Rob Cowen, author of ‘Common Ground’

Rob-Cowen

In the run up to the festival, we will be introducing each of our authors through a Q+A which we sent to each of them. Nine identical questions, but as you will see, nine very different answers.

Our first author is our most local. Harrogate-based writer and journalist Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground. In this book, over the course of a year, his close observation and imagination transforms an ordinary patch of common land on the outskirts of Harrogate into something utterly unique. A wonderful, critically-acclaimed book.

Here are Rob’s answers…

1. What inspired you to write your latest book?
Finding a patch of wild, weird and wonderful edge-land on the fringes of what was a new home in Harrogate. Moving north back to my home county – Yorkshire – after 10 years in London, I found myself alone, disconnected, in a strange town and in the depths of winter. All the maps I navigated my life by suddenly useless and correlating to a city 220 miles to the south. I felt caught between states, somewhere suspended between present and past. For Christmas that year I received an old OS map of Harrogate and found that, contrary to what I’d been told, the nearest open space was not ornate gardens or parkland in the centre of town, but a mile over the ring road and through the density of housing estates to an overgrown tangle of wood, meadow, field and river (the Nidd!) on the outskirts; a sweep of ‘common’ ground, in every sense. So on New Year’s Eve I set out to find it. It seemed immediately powerful, different, haunted, alive, forgotten; this was a seam of wildness in the shadow of a thousand houses and an intermeshing between the urban and rural, human and nature. As such it seemed, like me, caught between states and I felt a sense of alignment with it. This began my total absorption into this strange, magical, transitory place and an obsessive investigation of the extraordinary layers and lives – human and animal – that I found there. I wanted to create a multi-perspective portrait of this seemingly forgotten space through the eyes of its inhabitants as I realised that this patch was a microcosm of our relationship with the world at large – a place of tension where nature, pragmatic and prosaic, comes up against the human world – and I wanted to investigate that tension, that negotiation. At the same time Common Ground is woven through my own personal re-mapping, and about our ‘common ground’ as a broader concept. Over the course of the year I spent obsessively revisiting that space, my wife moved up from London and I found out that I was to become – and then became – a father. Such tectonic shifts in our existence force us to lose our illusions and work out who we are, where we fit, how we got here and where we’re going. So the book is about ‘common ground’ as a wider notion too, how the outside world can inform our inside worlds, righting us, helping us redraw the maps by which we navigate. How drawing closer to nature shows us what we are, what we are not and how those two things are ultimately inseparable.

2. What is the relationship between your writing and the natural world?
I always struggle with the concept of the natural world being something different; I mean technically nuclear power stations are ‘natural’ in the sense that we created them. Everything is ‘nature’, but I do also understand that there is a need to differentiate now between the inward-focused, self-obsessed worlds we exist in (which are becoming ever-more ‘nature free’) and that big, green, ‘other’ world out there. I suppose all my writing has been about bridging that self-imposed gap between human and nature in some form or other. I have written extensively on what I thought were the wild places – the sweeping coast, the rugged mountain, the rarefied national park – but Common Ground is about discovering that wildness, nature, whatever you want to call it is everywhere. It is the dandelion defying the concrete driveway; the sow thistle in the gutter; the swifts feeding above the sewage works; the ants under the pizza box left on the pavement; the cells in the womb forming into a baby. It is all around us, it is in us; it is us. My relationship is probably best summed up as one of attentiveness. Wherever I am, it is about looking. Looking through, beneath and beyond.

3. Do you have a favourite passage of ‘nature writing’ (in the broadest sense) from your own work?
Wow. That’s tough. Many passages in the book mean an incredible amount to me for many different reasons. But as this is Nidd Fest and the river Nidd features heavily in the book, I should probably choose something from the chapter called ‘One Day’. This records the 24-hours of the mayfly’s adult stage, which I watched on the river, integrating it with the story of a local girl who is drawn down to the edge-land with her mates and the moment her life changes forever. This is the moment the mayfly reach maturity and are ready to take to the air:
“By now the Ephemera danica are awake and fully formed. Final formed. Long, glossy, crème caramel abdomens, segmented and intricate, have the kind of wispy brown tobacco smears once found on old magnolia pub walls. Elevated above their previous aqueous universe, poised on the alder leaves, cushions of Jew’s ear mushroom and pole-like grass stems, the mayflies took little over an hour to achieve their ultimate incarnation, to moult into the sexually mature ‘spinner’, the imago. They appear more clearly defined and sharper, as though an aeronautical engineer has stepped in to improve their designs, readying them for their last, triumphant function. The six-jointed forelegs stretch further than before, the three-pronged tails whip out from their rears for better aerial balance and the wings have lost their fine hairs, becoming translucent and etched with black veins. On wider bank-side leaves sometimes two or more of these spinners sit side-by-side. Then small differences in appearance become apparent: the males are smaller in size and darker with larger, pronounced eyes.Time is of the essence and yet there is no sense of time. Not as we know it. No fear of the coming, inevitable unknown; these are prehistoric creatures of the present, 300 million years in the making. An order older than dinosaurs. Time to them is in the frequencies of the surrounding birdsong, the fluttering of wings, the sun moving through the foliage, the colours that move across their compound eyes, the vibrations that spill down from a passing heron’s croak. Light spills down too, a hot afternoon light that fractures the wood, falling in shards between trees and water. The infinite motion of the river runs in one direction; the endless flux of sky meeting wood in another, and into this strange dimension, as though an irresistible force possesses them, the spinners rise on stained-glass wings, like angels.”

4. Do you have a favourite author whose work celebrates nature, or piece of writing about the natural world?
Many. When you consider that ‘nature writing’ dates back to the first writing in English – the Saxon poem The Seafarer from The Exeter Book for example, from 960 AD – that’s a hell of a list to narrow down. Standout for me though are those authors that kick at the boundaries in their representations or reactions to place and ‘nature’, such as Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton; The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies; The Peregrine by J A Baker. I also find Kathleen Jamie’s work – her prose and poetry – irresistibly fascinating, keen and beautiful. Perhaps my ‘favourite’ though is Ted Hughes. And he was a Yorkshireman, like me.

5. Do you have a favourite wild place or natural landscape? (What? Do you mean it’s not the Yorkshire Dales?!!)
Ilkley moor. An ever-present place of consolation to me; a place that lives in my mind, bound up with memories and emotions. Being up there in high summer with the thick flustered air and the ‘cour-lee’ of curlews; among the wiry heather and ling. It forms the backdrop to my earliest memories, and will probably be there in my last thoughts too. For almost every year of my life I’ve spent some time in the North Eastern Lakes, especially around Ullswater.

6. What is your earliest or fondest memory of being out in nature?
Earliest is probably going badger watching on Ilkley Moor with my mum and my brother, aged about six or seven. It was the middle of the night. Fondest is probably finding a hidden waterfall near Semer Water where my wife and I sat for a few hours in the sun a few summers, back before our children were born. A delightful, magical place, filled with light and birdsong. A magical moment before our lives became very different!

7. Do you ever write outside?
Yes. I frequently write field notes. In fact for Common Ground I ended up with about 150,000 words of field notes, bits of historical research, maps of fox tracks, table that documented the feeding times of swifts. Lots and lots of weird things, all stuff gleaned from being in that place over time.

8. What are you working on at the moment?
Mmmm. I’ve lived with Common Ground now for three years and its publication feels a little like breaking up with someone! I’m not sure I’m ready for another emotional and psychological relationship straight away. That said, I must confess to making in-roads with new things. And I can feel an idea forming. Suffice to say it will be – like Common Ground – stories of people and place, about states of consciousness bleeding into one another, and about the tensions between time and the present. And, of course, our natural world.

9. What are your three ‘desert island’ reads and why?
So Tough. I don’t know… maybe Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte; The Hill of Summer – JA Baker. And The Collected Poems – Ted Hughes.

Rob Cowen’s event is on Sunday 26 July, 16.00-17.00, Memorial Hall, Pateley Bridge

Next featured author… Piers Torday
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By Kit Peel
01/06/2015
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Author: Kit Peel

Common Ground (Paperback)
Rob Cowen (author)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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Paperback Published: 24/03/2016

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2016. Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize for Non-Fiction. "Sensitive, thoughtful and poetic ...leading us into a whole new way of looking at the world". (Michael Palin). "Touched by genius". (John Lewis-Stempel). "Absolutely mesmerizing, utterly beautiful and engrossing". (Joanne Harris). After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, and about to become a father for the first time, Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for open space, he ventures out to a nearby edge-land: a pylon-slung tangle of wood, hedge, field, meadow and river that lies unclaimed and overlooked on the outskirts of town. Digging deeper into this lost landscape, he begins to uncover its many layers and lives - beast, bird, insect, plant and people - in kaleidoscopic detail. As the seasons change and the birth of his child draws closer, his transformative journey into the blurry space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound. In bringing this edge-land to life, Cowen offers both a both a unique portrait of people and place through time and an unforgettable exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

Publisher: Cornerstone
ISBN: 9780099592037

COMMON GROUND by Rob Cowen
COMMON GROUND
Encounters with Nature at the Edges of Life

A journalist and travel writer pays homage to the “topographic delirium” of marginal lands.

When Cowen (co-author: Skimming Stones: And Other Ways of Being in the Wild, 2012) moved from London to Yorkshire, in northern England, he felt disoriented and displaced. Searching for connection, he discovered the natural richness of the liminal landscape at his town’s edges, where he felt a sense of “common ground.” The area teemed with wildlife, which the author evokes in language that ranges from poetic to distractingly clotted with imagery. Beech trees “grab at the sky with furry, green limbs, like mould-covered bones.” After a storm that stampedes through the countryside “with heavy, iron shoes,” “woods and wheat fields shook and cowered like slaves under an overseer’s whip.” For the most part, though, Cowen renders his observations with great passion and freshness. His new world is filled with wildlife: hares, mayflies, swifts, butterflies, ants, and owls, all of which inspire discourses on their habitat, life course (swifts, for example, make a round trip of more than 12,000 miles to breed in the U.K.), and cultural significance. He imagines himself as a deer, awakening to the scent of blood. “The hunt is coming and it is coming for me,” the deer perceives. “I feel my heart quicken, thump and prepare for flight.” When the deer leaps over him, he feels the “shock and excitement” of a genetic link to his own wildness, “a half-remembered thing, known, forgotten and recalled.” By far the most moving section deals with the birth of Cowen’s son, when finally he is “face to face with a life that has fought its way to this beginning, all the way from nothing, from eternity.” Words, he realizes, “all are insufficient to relay the hugeness of the shift…as if it’s you that’s been born.” The author’s delicate rendering of that moment outshines his sometimes-fevered descriptions of the changes in his “internal landscape” inspired by the edge-lands.

An unlikely landscape inspires a memoir of wonder and joy.
Pub Date: Oct. 24th, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-226-42426-2
Page count: 352pp
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016

Common Ground: Encounters with Nature on the Edges of Life
Rob Cowen. Univ. of Chicago, $29 (352p) ISBN 978-0-226-42426-2

In beautifully written and evocative prose, English nature writer Cowen explores the relationship between humans and nature, making it abundantly clear that nature is where you find it. His subject is ostensibly a single square mile of waste land on the edge of Bilton, a small town in northern England. Cowen writes, “The no man’s land between town and country; this was the edge of things.” He masterfully describes this place of beauty and garbage, a place filled with wildlife and the smells and sounds of the encroaching town. But he does much more than superbly describe the transformation of the seasons over the course of a single year. In discussing the changes the land and its inhabitants have experienced over hundreds of generations, Cowen brings the lives of individuals into sharp and poignant focus. Whether he is creating the story of a red fox eking out a living, a deer hunt two centuries ago, or a vagrant living on the land, he captivatingly blends science, politics, and poetry, passionately explaining “the need for a new global ecological consciousness to the bored commuters parking their Rovers and Volvos at the railway station.” Cowen shows how to find joy and awe in the quotidian while cogitating on the world we will leave the next generation. (Oct.)
Reviewed on: 07/25/2016
Release date: 10/26/2016
Paperback - 336 pages - 978-0-09-959203-7
Hardcover - 304 pages - 978-0-09-195455-0

thinkingcountry
Ben Eagle thinking about conservation, farming & community

Book Review: ‘Common Ground’ by Rob Cowen
November 15, 2016 1 Comment

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Common Ground is an exploration of place that is in some ways endemic to the ‘new nature writing’ of our age, and yet it is also riddled with originality, pronounced detail and a freshness to its vibe that only journalist Rob Cowen could produce. It tells the story of his new life in Yorkshire, having moved house from the metropolis of London. At the beginning of the book he is about to become a father, and this part of his life is intimately discussed within the text, with whole sections within chapters set aside to reflect on this particular experience, occasionally drawing on the reality of his wife Rosie’s ‘natural’ struggles, of childbirth for example.

Much of Common Ground is set in the ‘edgelands’ around Cowen’s new northern home. The characters he meets along the way include a fox, a brown hare and a flock of swifts. He is also careful to draw on a number of human characters. He aims to connect the reader as directly and intimately as possible with this small patch of ground, sometimes through his experience, sometimes through his descriptions of the animals he watches and sometimes through the historical lens of others who have connected with the place. Certainly I found myself becoming drawn in to this place as I read, although it was a strange experience as it came seemingly third hand: firstly, into Cowen himself, then translated onto paper and then sieved into my mind as I read.

The edge-land is overpowering at times. Consolatory, cold, late afternoons before rain are painted a beautiful duck-egg blue and pink and sweetened with drifting woodsmoke. Rooks blow across the narrow aperture of my vision like the wind-blown ash.

I found myself in awe of Cowen’s use of the English language. Even though his words have many leanings towards the poetry of new nature writing, it seems to lack the poeticisms apparent elsewhere, to the extent where the language overcomes the reader and pushes us away from the place itself.

He is careful not to write exclusively of the edge-land itself. We are occasionally taken elsewhere. He also draws on the bigger picture. This is a commentary on our self-removal from the natural world itself. I particularly enjoyed a section mid-way through the book where we meet a character, sipping coffee in Caffe Nero. We are told his story and how he rejected money and so-called success, casting out doubt and dissatisfaction and leading a life whereby the subtleties of the natural world dominated his lived experiences. Cowen raises an important point here: that the priorities of western society continue to drive us towards consumption and to blinker our eyes from the wonders that surround us.

We live in a time whereby many of us have forgotten what it is like to know a single area of land intimately. I am personally liable on this front. I spent my formative years doing so, living through my childhood imagination and defending my ‘territory’ in the core areas I would play, walk and explore. Since then, I have moved around a lot. This has in some ways broadened my experience and knowledge to include places that are ‘greater’ than the local can provide. However, I think that it has also tarnished my ability to see and experience true subtlety in the way that you can at a single place over a long amount of time. To know a place, we must experience it intimately. We must not be afraid that it will change but we must learn to understand its uniqueness and to appreciate this.

Cowen succeeds in bringing the human and non-human closer together, although there still seems to be a divide in the experience. Is his an imposed venture or something that he was naturally drawn to? I am unsure whether presenting human beings as part of the natural world is something that the written word can ever truly convey, when read through a modern perspective, in the way that being there in the moment and directly experiencing it can.

Common Ground is a successful protrait of a place as well as an encouraged reflection on where we are, where we are heading and how our modern personal psychological state has been bound in such as way that we have perhaps forgotten the need to return to the local; return to the edge-lands. It is a profile of people as much as animals and plants. Rather than a traditional elegy, Common Ground subtly encourages reflection whilst also presenting reality as Cowen experienced it.

This is a mesmerizing and enchanting book; the kind of text that you never want to end. It will capture your imagination and perhaps encourage a reconsideration of the forgotten parts of landscape.

If you have read it, I would love to hear your views below.

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One thought on “Book Review: ‘Common Ground’ by Rob Cowen”

Martin Boulton
November 15, 2016 at 11:49 am

An astonishing book, highly recommended. I had the great fortune to be born and grow up on the patch of land described in the book. An idyllic 1950s childhood. Having left for university, however, I never looked back. Studied German and French, married a Spanish girl – my world got bigger. This book reminds me so powerfully of what I’ve lost. Please keep hold of this invaluable corner of England -and all others like it – for future generations. They will be healthier and happier for it.
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‘Common Ground’, by Rob Cowen

May 15, 2015

by: Review by Serena Tarling

Rob Cowen, acclaimed nature and travel writer, turns his focus to an uncelebrated landscape in his new book. Using highly poetic language, he explores an “edgeland”, the no man’s land between city and country, near the Yorkshire town of Harrogate.

Like an archaeologist, Cowen unearths histories, natural life and decayed infrastructure in a small area bordering the River Nidd. In one moment the narrative carries the reader into the world of owls, foxes and wheat fields, “glimpses of what lies beneath and beyond”; in the next it switches to the everyday immediacies of iPhones, WiFi and Caffè Nero. Above all, Common Ground is about the transformative power of this unnoticed piece of land, if one can only take the time to stand and stare for long enough.

Common Ground, by Rob Cowen, Hutchinson, RRP£16.99, 352 pages

Common Ground by Rob Cowen

8 May 2015 // Books
by Rob Cowen
Hutchinson, hardback, 352 pages

Reviewed by Ben Myers

Space will be the great commodity of the next century. Space in which to breathe, to reflect. Space in which to live externally – that is, looking up and down and all around and feeling part of an environment that you can carry home on your mud clotted shoes, dirt-flecked trousers and wire-ripped jacket. In your hair and under your fingernails. An environment you can touch and eat, burrow into, slip down, swim through and watch over, rather than existing in the internalised sphere of the digital world, that strange and alien young planet perpetually half-shadowed and blaring with white noise.

It’s too early to register the true, long-lasting sociological effects that the digital world is having upon human behavioural patterns but this much is certain: we have drifted away from our moorings. We are in unchartered waters and it is not looking good; we can trade millions of pounds but can’t light a fire. Worldwide, the environment – and many of its species – are in decline; happiness, health and welfare are increasingly reliant on financial or economic success and depression is reaching epidemic levels. You know all this.

So does Rob Cowen, who found for himself a space where others saw nothing but a hinterland, a place of inconsequence defined by pylons, litter, dog shit. Somewhere usually viewed at speed from passing trains or cars. Here in this liminal space on the edge of Harrogate, to where he and his wife had relocated from London, Cowen discovered a new realm in which to explore worlds both internal and external – and it is very much a realm, one given new life through heightened, lucid prose that drips with poetry, where the River Nidd “splits over a the weir like Brylcreem-parted black hair”. Ours is a world, he explains, “growing yet shrinking, connected yet isolated, all-knowing but without knowledge…all is speed and surface…..digging down deeper into an overlooked patch of ground, one that (in a global sense, at least) few people will ever know about and even fewer visit, felt like the antithesis to all of this.”

In Common Ground Cowen does what many other nature and travel writers have done before him – find a space and occupy it – but rarely has it been executed in such a boldly imaginative way. This is writing of the highest order and which, like the land he explores that is neither urban nor rural, often seems to exist between definitions, straddling as it does memoir, journalism and fiction simultaneously.

Cowen often writes as if from the subconscious, evoking those feelings many of us might experience when trailing a fox through the undergrowth or walking across a crust of morning snow or turning ourselves into statues in the crepuscular woodlands – those feelings for which words and language so often feel just beyond reach.

Words do not fail Cowen though, who uses innovative techniques to view this overgrown 129 hectare space from all angles. Rather than mundanely report his sightings of the aforementioned fox, he instead becomes it, dragging the reader down every railway siding, experiencing every scent on the breeze and stolen moment of sleep: “In his drowsiness, time past and present combine and soft, clawless paws clamber over his face. Blind liquid eyes push up to his. His fur stirs with the hot, sweet breath of pink mewing mouths. Then he is alone again. He dreams of root, burrow, earth and blood.” Through such prose we feel the fox’s hunger, experience the torturous heartbreak of a departing partner and we are right there when it becomes trapped in wire fencing (it’s significant that it is a man-made boundary that marks the downfall of this fleeting hero). It’s one of the most remarkable pieces of nature passages I’ve read in some time.

Another example: Cowen tackles that age-old English enigma of the hare by personifying him, giving him a name and an allegorical story. He even puts him in a Cafe Nero of all places. Here the creature is outsider, a hare-lipped feral man who has seen glorious days but now exists without a home on society’s very fringes. He is a creature that a changing England is leaving behind in its rush for progress and/or urbanisation.

In others scenes, the place – and writing – feels haunted, at one point Cowen briefly seeing “a human face in the shrubby ground foliage, a waist-height tangle of messy hair and earthy face staring out over the fields towards me. Somebody crouching.” This surely is the Green Man that has stalked the indigenous imagination for centuries. Rural England is clearly in the author’s bones – deep, rich and alive in prose that bubbles up from the fetid loam and, as in the work of, say, John Clare, William Wordsworth or DH Lawrence, takes pleasure in every microscopic, fecund detail.

Elsewhere we experience further time travel when Cowen crouches by an oak tree in a winter field, the tree a lightning rod to days gone by: “We’ve all been here before, sweaty, bent and hacking with hand scythe and sickle, cutting callous-forming avenues through whispering stems, reaping, rolling and stacking sheaf. For a moment I’m part of another union, a brief rare return to the earth for us landless masses”. It brings to mind David Gladwell’s elegiac and absorbing 1975 film Requiem For A Village, in which the layers of time are peeled back, where memory reveals more memory, suburban progress is heavily questioned and the hands of the dead literally push up through the soil in a moving climactic scene.

The breathless description of a deer hunt as seen from the perspective of the hunted creature meanwhile should rightfully have any red tunic-clad hunter questioning the senselessness of such a folly, and the juxtaposition between the telling of the stunted lifecycle of a mayfly and a teenage girl’s skunk-pungent, blissful outdoor tryst with her boyfriend is as unexpected as it is evocative.

Woven throughout Cowen’s forensic, fastidious, obsessive and microscopic accounts of the changing seasons and various species to be found in his edge-land is his own story – an escape from the city, financial and professional struggles and, perhaps most significantly, fatherhood. It’s a subject rarely tackled in today’s glut of nature writing and one which Cowen, an award-winning writer and journalist, deftly handles, learning as he goes along.

What makes this book special is the author’s total immersion in his subject. Reading this you expect him to be part-human and part….what? Bramble? Owl pellet? The nature writing renaissance is busy with such rural portraits, so many of them painted by literary tourists forever passing through, and currently with a dominance by Oxbridge graduates. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this – all education is to be encouraged and applauded – it surely presents a collective rural view through the narrowed lens of academia’s rarefied upper echelons, or by those who romanticise hardships. Where, for example, are the books by the land workers or those smallholders displaced by big business? What of the multi-generational dairy farmers being undercut on their milk yield by the supermarkets?

Cowen exists one step removed from the current nature writing world. He does not undertake exploratory weekend sorties and be back by his desk for Monday morning; we are with him as he sees his first baby scan, we are breathing the same sub-zero winter air. The space he becomes infatuated with only confirms what many of us already suspect: mankind’s long-term spiritual well-being may yet depend upon our relationship with such close environments – and when that environment is all glass and concrete, volume and detritus, so too our souls will be hardened and transparent, noisy and cluttered.

He does this by walking the Yorkshire woods. He watches, listens and explores. He’s an outlier, a Northern voice, a set of eyes on the soil, and Common Ground is his outstanding addition to – and expansion of – the canon.

Common Ground is in the Caught by the River shop now, priced £15.

Common Ground by Rob Cowen

commongroundImmersive, evocative and powerful, Common Ground is a unique evocation of how, over the course of one year, Rob Cowen discovered a common – though extraordinary – square mile of wood, meadow, hedge and river on the edge of his northern town.

After moving from London to a new home in Yorkshire, and about to become a father for the first time, Rob Cowen finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Disoriented, hemmed in by winter and yearning for open space, he ventures out to a nearby edge-land: a pylon-slung tangle of wood, hedge, field, meadow and river that lies unclaimed and overlooked on the outskirts of town.

Digging deeper into this lost landscape, he begins to uncover its many layers and lives – beast, bird, insect, plant and people – in kaleidoscopic detail. As the seasons change and the birth of his child draws closer, his transformative journey into the blurry space where human and nature meet becomes increasingly profound. In bringing this edge-land to life, Cowen offers both a unique portrait of people and place through time and an unforgettable exploration of the common ground we share with the natural world, the past and each other.

Read an extract
About the author

robcowenRob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer who has authored regular columns on nature and travel for the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the Telegraph. Described by the Guardian as ‘one of the UK’s most exciting nature writers’ he previously received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors for his first book Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild (2012). He lives in Harrogate, North Yorkshire.

Common Ground: Rob Cowen on Edgeland Literature, Psychogeography & Nature Writing

August 17, 2015
Articles, Books, Recommendations, Stories

Rob+BWWORDS: Gary Budden interviews Rob Cowen

I recently spoke to Rob Cowen, author of the excellent Common Ground, about his new book, edgeland literature and psychogeography, the debates around what does and does not constitute ‘nature writing’ and the importance of writing in re-engaging people with place.

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RC: I kind of strayed into psychogeography without really meaning to. I’ve always been looking for a way of understanding the greater, broader, deeper aspects of landscape and our connection with it. I’ve always read books about landscape because that’s what I grew up reading.

Psychogeography to me is like a field that I got to through a long walk through a wood. It was somewhere that I immediately felt was interesting. But it’s nothing new. The myth is that it’s something new.

In Richard Jefferies The Story of My Heart (his mad, rambling, crazy, brilliant autobiography), he spends the first 40 pages of that book talking about walking up a hill in Wiltshire, being by a burial mound and having the sensation of thinking about the body and the burial that’s 3000 years old, thinking about the butterfly moving between the cornflowers and the bees between the bindweed, and then the stars, and then a kind of ultimate time. He describes that over 40 rambling pages – but brilliantly he ends that whole section by saying ‘of course, all of this comes to me in one second of being there’. That to me is no different to psychogeography.

GB: I like that. John Rogers [author of This Other London] talks about not only the French flaneurs, but the English topographical writers of about a century again, people like Gordon S Maxwell – doing a similar kind of thing.

RC: Maxwell, we had his book on the shelf when I was a kid. The thing is, that approach always made more sense to me than the sterile field guide, or the pictorial guide for walkers or climbers, or whatever it was. The sense that the landscape was somehow living and breathing. As I say in the book, there’s a kind of aboriginal concept of the land as being a repository of memory.

I mean that firstly in a kind of pseudo-science way – how is that different people can walk through the same space that they’ve never been to before and experience the same range of emotions? But I also mean in that the sense that there’s no way that we, being so receptive as a creature, can fail to start noticing things all around us. For example, I was watching hares. Every time I’d sit in the field and watch hares, I’d find bits of broken clay pipes from workers, find old horseshoes and bits of broken pot. You can’t help but feel the lives and layers.

GB: The layers then start to build up, don’t they.9780091954550 (2)

RC: They do. This links into the debate about land generally. There’s nothing other than common ground, there’s no landscape that isn’t interfered with, whether that’s industrially or intensively farmed, or indirectly, though our actions in terms of our effect on the wider environment. I think it’s dishonest to talk about landscape in a rarefied and separate sense.

GB: This idea of wilderness – wilderness doesn’t really exist any more?

RC: A classic example is Everest, held up as the ‘great extreme wild’. You look at pictures of Everest there’s always a queue of 300 people trying to climb it and it’s full of cans and gas cylinders . . . it’s a wreck.

Our connection to landscape is complicated, it’s profound and it’s emotional, it’s physical and instinctive and it’s augmented. It’s all these different things together. What I love is books that try and ask a question about that.

With Common Ground, at first I thought I could just write following the course of a year, a year in this place tracking the change of seasons and so on. I could easily have written a book like that.

GB: There are quite a few of those books.

RC: Yeah and they don’t really do it for me to be honest.

GB: I find them, often, a little bit twee and English…

RC: It’s like what Kathleen Jamie said, nature isn’t all primroses and otters.

What put me off that form is that it didn’t feel like it was an honest representation of place. As soon as I found the edgeland I wrote about, I got a very real sense that it was tugging at my sleeve, and going – ‘don’t forget’. This place is going to vanish in 15 years – who’s going to know anything, remember anything about the place?

GB: This leads me onto the stylistic choices in the book – that mix of memoir, social history and fiction (something that appealed to me greatly about the book). Taking the one perspective isn’t enough?

RC: There are many ways of telling a story. I could have written a social history of that place and it would have fulfilled a function of some sort. But it wasn’t what I felt. I couldn’t get across what I felt that way, what it was like to spend a night in the dark there, in the shadow of 70,000 houses, in a strange and wonderful, dark, deep place. That approach just wasn’t going to cut it. So then what do you do?

I knew for the first chapter, that the fox perspective was important. It was a symbolic creature in the sense that this creature is one that crosses between worlds. But this was a fox I was following that didn’t venture into the urban; it stayed in the edgeland. It wouldn’t go in. It was like a last vestige of something on the edge itself. The last wild fox on that bit of ground. Ultimately this would kill it, it was starving and made bad decisions, but couldn’t cross over.

GB: It’s interesting you use the word ‘wild’ there to describe it. Surely all foxes are wild? Are urban foxes ‘less’ wild?

RC: They’ve changed territory and I think they’re more familiar with people. Urban foxes don’t run from people; I’ve stood in London with an urban fox stood just two feet from me. But watch a fox in a wood and will disappear like smoke, because it won’t want to be anywhere near you. That’s instinctive.

It seemed relevant to me to try and capture the experience of that fox, to try and explain its perspective and to explain this crossing place, this meeting of the urban and rural. This weird tangled place, this margin place. It needed another voice other than my own to try and explain this place. I taxonomised it in a human way; I talked about the railway and the viaduct and how this place was created, but that wasn’t the whole story. There was an animalistic rawness that existed on the edge as well.

wd_penguin_1976GB: Did you find it hard to write the fox section? I find there’s often a risk of sentimentalising or anthropomorphising when writing an animal’s account of things. Could people associate that kind of writing more with children’s literature, or books like Richard Adams’ Watership Down (which incidentally I like very much)?

RC: Not really. Before I’d even started writing the book I had about 150,000 words of field notes. A lot of that was just recording and following. So I already had the scenes, if you like, that were going to occur, because I’d watched them happen. Something happens when you begin to spend a lot of time outside – you begin to empathise in a different way with the natural world. I found it very easy. I’d love to say I struggled with it but I wrote it all in, pretty much, one continuous session. I did feel at times that I was merely channelling something.

I was conscious of that Henry Williamson Tarka the Otter thing. But what he does brilliantly is make you the reader feel like you’re crawling along the bank of a river. I wanted to create the same feeling [with the fox section]. Richard Adams created the same feeling in Watership Down – it didn’t seem contrived, you immediately lose yourself in the narrative.

It’s the same with the chapter on the deer in Common Ground. I feel that that section is totally true. I felt that there was a way to present the book in an interesting, different way. I don’t really care about form, that’s my problem. I don’t really sit down and think ‘Is this nature writing? Am I crossing some sort of event horizon where this no longer becomes nature writing?’ That never occurred to me. I just wanted to write a book about people and about place, and be honest. To somehow capture the essence of a place in a way that, to me, many defined genres do not do.

GB: So what do you think about recent negative articles about the ‘New Nature Writing’?

RC: It seems a bit silly to me. To try and define nature writing under very certain terms is a stupid thing to do. Nature writing is as old as writing itself. Take ‘The Seafarer’ from the Exeter Book [Old English poem], 960 AD, with the narrator talking of his heart-strings being tugged and the cold grains of snow coming in – read that poem, it’s personal, combining his feeling of being on the sea and away from home, how the elements affect his emotions.

South country by Edward ThomasEdward Thomas was personal. Read The South Country, if you want to talk about psychogeography. That book is classic exercise in psychogeography. He moves with a fluid dynamism and freedom between personal narrative and, basically, a novel. There’s an entire chapter in that book based on what he overhears on a train. It’s clearly dramatised. It crosses between his feelings about enclosure and what’s happened to the countryside, his personal feelings about nature . . . people have been doing this since time immemorial. Richard Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart is one of the most personal accounts of nature ever written. It seems to me that for the new generation of nature writing, to try and batten down the hatches and say ‘this is the genre, it should be removed, be about nature and nature only, with an absence of the human’ seems impossible to do.

GB: The act of writing itself makes it human.

RC: Yeah. So of course it’s already going to have the influence of the human. But also we are inseparable from nature. I always think if you want to kill a genre, putting fences around it and saying ‘this is it’ is a way to make it irrelevant, boring and stale.

GB: There’s a whiff of elitism about it?

RC: Yeah there is.

GB: I wonder who even coined the term ‘New Nature Writing’.

RC: Probably the press. ‘Nature writing is the new rock’n’roll they said a few years ago. The analogy I use is that it’s a lot like the folk scene in 1960s Greenwich Village New York, at the Gaslight, when you had all the folk purists with their roll-neck jumpers and thick glasses and little pointy beards, smoking pipes going ‘yeah, this is folk music’. Then they complained that people came in, used old folk modal tunings and old folk songs and sang their own lyrics over it. Which side of the fence do you want to be on?

It’s the same with psychogeography. People saying about certain works ‘that’s not psychogeography, sorry, we have to keep some purity to it.’ I guess people get used to what something is and want to own it, to protect it in some way, and I understand that. I understand why great naturalists want to make sure that the kind of rigorous approach to nature is maintained and not lost, to not become a sideshow. But I think that any art form has to progress and adapt if it wants to stay alive. Everybody benefits from that.

GB: What do you think as ‘edgeland writing’ itself as a genre? I’m thinking of the famous Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts book, for example.

RC: Marion Shoard talked about it before them (they credit her in the book).

51gUHE92b+L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_GB: And things like The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey, going back to the 1970s. It seems to me that edgelands are much more likely a space urban people will experience than any pristine wilderness, that doesn’t really exist in Britain anyway.

RC: For the first time in human history more people live in the urban environment than the rural one. 58% globally. Something like 85% in Britain. So of course, for most people, the closest green and different space outside of that urban consciousness – that Bataille called ‘the work consciousness’ – is this close liminal space, this narrow penumbra around our lives. Which we see, we see it out of our windows, we see it over the back fence, we see the buddleia defying the railway, bursting everywhere along these corridors.

GB: And buddleia is from China originally.

RC: Buddleia is a classic story. It was originally brought over by very rich and serious gardeners who tried to make it take in the country, and protected it at first because they didn’t want other people to have it, as it’s so beautiful. As I say in the book, it looks like a can of paint exploding. Then it jumped the fence and it became, over time, a menace. It became uncontrollable and it was on the blacklist for railway companies. It was having to be ripped up and torn down, costing millions of pounds to British Rail.

Then they had to review that policy when it became clear that it was almost single-handedly supporting large colonies of pollinators [bees and butterflies], and then suddenly it was more benevolent again, this rich green vein running through cities that could sustain various species that had been ravaged by our attitude to wildflower meadows and pesticides.

GB: That leads me neatly onto the topic of native/non-native species, and the kind of criticism George Monbiot came under when he published Feral, being accused of a kind of eco-nationalism. The buddleia is an interesting example of a non-native species that has had clear benefits and disadvantages.

RC: It’s a matter of time and perspective in many ways. 12,000 years ago technically nothing was native. The ice sheets were retreating back and the first colonising spores and trees were appearing. Rabbits and pheasants are non-native. It’s a difficult one to call. Of course I understand the impulse to want to keep landscapes as they are, that’s a natural urge, but at what time to stop the clock? What epoch do you reverse to?

I love the idea of rewilding and of there being more wild space. In edgelands, because no one gives a shit about them, you find nature getting on with things, with native and non-native mixing. I think the less interference we have the better – but what point are we regressing the land to? England 500 years ago? 200? For example 200 years ago we had vast tracts of farmed fields so that we had more hares. 500 years ago we didn’t have that many hares. Does that mean we should protect hares or not?

My take on it is that before you start you have to make people care about landscape. The first step has to be getting people to start thinking about themselves again as an inseparable part of the landscape.

GB: Is an important part of that finding places close to home?

RC: I think it’s crucial that people engage with their local spaces. Ultimately there has to be that local connection. Having somewhere close by means you can visit repeatedly, observe the changing of the seasons, to allow the merging of person and place that can only occur over time. If you go a woodland on the edge of town and you see foxes, you see rabbits, you start to know what they move, sound, smell like – it gives you a far greater sense of responsibility, empathy and understanding than a kind of cold classroom ethical stance that says ‘don’t eat cod as they’re running out in the Atlantic’. How that can mean anything to you if you’ve never caught a cod? You have to have a physical connection to a place, and the things that live in that place, to care about a place.

The disconnection we feel, the sort of hollowness, can be countered by taking a walk into a place where you can watch buddleia defiantly bursting full of life, full of nature, nature that doesn’t give a shit about the human world. It is itself, a perfect and pure pragmatic thing. That’s crucial to our health, and to our own understanding of ourselves.

GB: What is the role then of writing engaging people with landscape? One of the criticisms levelled at New Nature Writing is that the average metropolitan British person might use these kind of books as a form of escapism, never actually doing the things that you’re talking about.

RC: Number one: what’s wrong with that?

If you insist writing has to have a role in that, it makes it difficult for writing to have a sense of freedom. Enquiry, fascination, intrigue and trying to make sense of who we are and how we fit into the world – that’s what Common Ground is about. It’s not intended to make all who read it become an issuist.

I talk about the fact that the space in the book, that I love and know better than any other, is at some point going to be built over. That’s something you have to come to terms with. Places change, we all change. Change is something that we have to physically and mentally get our heads round and process.

Hopefully, if you read Common Ground you can’t fail to be intrigued about what lies around you. There’s no piece of British soil that isn’t freighted with stories. The layers and lives that run deep through this landscape, and of course the stories of the creatures that exist in these spaces, and the flowers and everything else. It’s triggering that is the point. It’s about awareness and it’s about looking, in a local sense and in wider biosphere-sense too. That’s always been my area of interest. We’re beginning to live in a world that is all-knowing but without any true knowledge. Our knowledge is broadest than it’s ever been, but also incredibly shallow.

There’s a quote I use at the beginning of the book, from the poet Patrick Kavanagh:

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience…a gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.

GB: And by the time you’ve ‘finished’ knowing a place, it will have changed, and you the observer will have changed too.

RC: That’s very true. I remember reading back through the field notes I had written and thinking ‘I’m not the same person anymore’. Now I’m a father I feel differently about things.

What drawing more closely to nature has always done is show us what we are and what we’re not. That’s crucial for us and it’s a perspective we’ve lost as a species, over the last 200 years particularly. This disconnection has led to a kind of blindness about how we treat each other and how we treat the earth. It’s destructive and terrifying. How can it be that there are [in the USA] Republican party candidates on a stage, all of whom don’t believe in climate change? It’s astounding. We’ve completely alienated ourselves from any sense of responsibility – all that stuff is mediated by so many layers. You go into Sainsbury’s a buy a bag of spinach, you don’t know if that’s the last bag of spinach in the world. You switch on a light, and you don’t know what that means, in a local sense or a wider sense.

What the human being is very good at is denying, and lying to ourselves. It’s a frightening thing. The way to counteract this is, again, to reconnect people to land and let them value it, let them see how it all works. Then people will have a toolbox with which to rail against this blind stupidity, this blind political madness.

GB: There’s a wilful ignorance about a lot of environmental issues I think.

RC: It’s a wilful ignorance that reinforces the line between human and nature, and that’s the line that’s always done the biggest damage. No matter how clever we think we are, we’re still beholden to the rhythm of night and day, of the seasons, of growth and death.

To pull all of this into a theory – I went looking for that common ground to sort of write myself, to draw new maps. All the maps with which I had navigated my life for ten years were correlating to London, 220 miles away. And I wound up alone, in winter, in a strange town I’d never lived in in a strange house with all my belongings boxed up in a hallway. The edgeland at first felt like somewhere I could align with because it was also caught between states – caught in this suspension between the present and the past. By drawing closer to it, listening to its histories and exploring the area, letting it manifest, I learned about those key things. I drew my new maps.

GB: Do you think these edgeland spaces appeal to people (writers especially) in the sense that thy can be a new place of transformation? Traditionally in folklore and fiction, the forest was the place where things happen and characters change – in a space that is somehow removed and out of time, neither past nor present. Is the edgeland replacing this in some way?

RC: Absolutely. They are a literal meshing of human and nature, so they act as a perfect microcosm for the world at large. In the past, woodland was a wild space. Very few people owned a wood. It could be dangerous, it was somewhere outside the normal experiences of many people.

GB: Also a space for people beyond society or the law – Robin Hood, General Ludd etc.

RC: Yes and edgelands are the same. They are the one space that isn’t privatised. The urban is completely privatised. The rural environment that we are told about, the farmland, is equally privatised. They are privatised spaces, but the edgelands are not because no one cares about them. It’s a space you can tramp around in with a sense of freedom, and be pretty sure that they’ll be no one else there. Or maybe just other writers with notebooks and pens . . .

I think it’s a space where people can genuinely feel a sense of wildness and freedom. It’s unowned, it’s dispossessed. It has the freedom of nature following its own rules.

To order Rob Cowen’s Common Ground, click here or you can find it on Amazon.

garyABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Gary Budden is co-founder of independent publisher Influx Press and assistant fiction editor at Ambit magazine. He lives in London. Click here to read his blog: New Lexicons.
Tags: edgelands, Gary Budden, landscape, nature, Psychogeography, Rob Cowen

November 7, 2016

Book Notes - Rob Cowen "Common Ground"
Common Ground

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Lauren Groff, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Jesmyn Ward, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.

Rob Cowen's Common Ground is an innovatively told memoir that blends the personal with the natural.

Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:

"In beautifully written and evocative prose, English nature writer Cowen explores the relationship between humans and nature, making it abundantly clear that nature is where you find it. His subject is ostensibly a single square mile of waste land on the edge of Bilton, a small town in northern England. . . . He masterfully describes this place of beauty and garbage, a place filled with wildlife and the smells and sounds of the encroaching town. But he does much more than superbly describe the transformation of the seasons over the course of a single year. In discussing the changes the land and its inhabitants have experienced over hundreds of generations, Cowen brings the lives of individuals into sharp and poignant focus. . . . He captivatingly blends science, politics, and poetry. . . . Cowen shows how to find joy and awe in the quotidian while cogitating on the world we will leave the next generation."

In his own words, here is Rob Cowen's Book Notes music playlist for his memoir Common Ground:

I’m not sure Common Ground could’ve even been conceived without music, let alone written. Music was there in me and in my words from the start. My first memory is of standing on a kitchen chair at three-years-old, singing along to the whole of Sgt Pepper on a blinding English summer day, dizzied – even then – by its mad narratives and textures, its alchemy and aural brilliance, the way it bounced and flew between worlds like a butterfly between flowers. I felt the same when going through any of my dad’s records, and putting the needle down: Darkness On The Edge Of Town; Between the Buttons; Blonde on Blonde; Unhalfbricking; Hark, The Village Wait. These records were like portals that led from our living room floor in Northern England to myriad places and possibilities. They existed in a space outside of time, like scenes you could crawl into and lose yourself. When you came back, everything felt a little different for a while.

Around the time I was discovering those records I began trying the magic myself. I put pen to paper, writing lyrics for bands I was playing in. Bad stuff in hindsight, I’m sure, but it was a good schooling, forcing me to try to learn what makes a line spark, shine and sear itself into the mind. I found stuff that knocked me sideways when I read it: Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Jim Harrison, Phillip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, T.S Eliot. And from there it was further paths into literature and prose. I remember too the first time I picked up my dad’s 1967 first edition copy of J.A Baker’s The Peregrine. It was like listening to Pepper for the first time, a record – coincidentally – released the same year. I knew things would never be the same again.

I listened to music constantly when writing Common Ground. This was partly because there was a new baby in our house, making loud songs through my headphones essential to any kind of concentration, but also partly because of what the music did to me. It set a tone or a scene, turning something in my mind into three-dimensions. I’d be sitting there reading my notes and scribbles and wondering how the hell to begin the enormity of chiseling it down, of pulling focus and foreshortening, of condensing and clarifying into something that got across the truth of the place, the reality of being there. Then something as simple as a song’s intro starting would trigger it: an emotion, a word, a memory. Boom. Here was a path. And I was away, through the portal again – only this time when I came back, removing the headphones in the wee hours, I usually had a written page too.

Here are a just few of the songs that wove themselves into the fabric of the book.

1. John Martyn: “Parcels”
Something about the plucked guitar, harmonics and that haunting piano in this song always sets a scene for me. It’s a hair-raising soundscape. Like walking into strange wood. It suggests possibilities and horizons. In fact, this song was played the most when writing the book, sometimes on repeat for hours. I’m not sure I know why. It’s oddly comforting and weirdly eerie too. Like all John Martyn’s best songs, it’s as much mood as lyrics, but there’s a simplicity to his voice and words too: “Take your sadness, make it mine…”

2. Arcade Fire: “Suburban War”
What an opening line: “Let’s go for a drive, and see the town tonight. There’s nothing to do, but I don’t mind when I’m with you.” Part of Common Ground is the recording and kaleidoscopic delving into a patch of edge-land, a bastard patch of marginal waste ground on the outskirts of the suburbs, and no-one writes about such edges in modern music like Arcade Fire. It’s a song about memory and change and how that plays out in one place. The opening twelve-string guitar could be the noise of the pylons in the wind or the whistling melody of streets at night.

3. Michael Chapman: “Rabbit Hills”
A fellow Yorkshireman like me, Chapman is relatively uncelebrated but he was a seminal figure on the British folk-rock scene in the late 1960s. And he’s brilliant. In fact, this album – ‘Fully Qualified Survivor’ – was one of the first to feature Mick Ronson on guitar, the man would become Bowie’s guitarist foil on some of the world’s best-known songs. I love the wistfulness of this song, the chord progression and its attachment to place. Rabbit Hills is named after and set in a place near Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast. Again, a weird marginal land.

4. George Harrison: “All Things Must Pass”
I’m not sure I can even begin to fairly describe the genius of George. I listened to his ‘All Things Must Pass’ album religiously during the writing of the book, and would have included any one of a string of incredible songs off it here: ‘Run of the Mill’, ‘Isn’t It A Pity’, ‘Ballad of Frankie Crisp’, ‘Hear Me Lord’, ‘Beware of Darkness’. I chose the title track as it is one of the finest evocations of nature and the natural world on record. I adore the way he holds up the natural transitions and changes as a mirror on which to see and understand the cycles of our lives more clearly.

5. Bruce Springsteen: “Something In The Night”
I suspect that anyone who says they don’t like Bruce Springsteen struggles to enjoy any great literature. You listen to those early records and they’re like novels. It’s a thin line between Darkness On The Edge of Town and Cormac McCarthy; Bruce writes stories with often-simultaneous crushing human insight, hope, tenderness and eye for heartbreak. In this song, he inhabits the character completely. I love its tones and coldness, its bleak repeat, its attempt to get at that thing lurking at the edges.

6. The Beatles: “Within You, Without You”
I’ve always been a Lennon nut since childhood, but it’s George who makes it here again. I include this purely for the finest philosophical awareness ever consigned to a pop record: “When you’ve seen beyond yourself, you may find peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you see we’re all one, and life flows on within you and without you.”

7. Steeleye Span: “Dark-Eyed Sailor”
The eeriness of the English landscape can’t be overemphasized. Pretty it may be, but look closer and every square of soil is deep with layers and lives vanished and gone. It’s ghostly and dark. The earth here is a repository of memory. Folk music, recovered, recorded and kept alive by pioneers throughout the late nineteenth-century captures many of hundreds of years of such experience - the rural and the working lives; the colloquial, the tragic and the tales passed down for countless generations. This classic death-and-return ballad is so beautifully composed and sung here by Gay Woods that when I hear it, the layers seem to fold up and fly away: you’re immediately in a place you’ve never been but you seem to have known forever. It’s like the sound of England’s earth distilled to me; wherever I listen to it, I’m home. And that end line kills me every time: “For a cloudy morning brings in a sunny day.”

8. Tom Waits: “Ruby’s Arms”
Ah, Tom. I use his albums like I use great literature – it inspires and sets the mood to start hitting letters. It’s like a shot of pure truth. It charms you while robbing you of everything you’ve got. You can’t help but listen, then you finish the album and realise your emotions are as raw as sushi. He’s one of the great American outsiders and outliers; he’s an edge-land, part-man, part-nature. Part-junkyard barfly poet, part-wind through a cornfield. From “Kentucky Avenue” to “The House Where Nobody Lives” he does it every time. “Ruby’s Arms” gets it because of the confessional aspect. Something ending, but life still going on and the space between these two things that we’re forced to live in.

9. Martin Simpson: “Never Any Good”
This is the song that makes up the epigraph of Common Ground and details a man’s complex, confessional and loving relationship with his father. It fit perfectly in the story after the revelation of my son being born, and captures all the hopes and fears that experience suddenly brings about being a good man, and a good father. And how the definitions of those things can sometimes be the opposite of what we imagine. I actually had the idea of writing the final chapter thirty years in the future with my son visiting the edge-land I inhabited after it has been built over and is gone, but after this came on my iPod while I was writing, I realised Martin had all I wanted to say down. He’s a stunning writer, so I just lifted it. I’m now actually working with Martin and the awesome singer and fiddle player Nancy Kerr to bring Common Ground to life as a show involving their songs and readings.

10. Bob Dylan: “Visions Of Johanna”
This playlist cannot exist without the man who’s navigated me through more writing hours than anyone. I pick this song not because I listen to it most (although it’s a contender with “I Was Young When I Left Home”), but because what he does on Blonde on Blonde is so extraordinary and brave and fresh that it compels you to write bravely, to be unafraid of what anyone thinks. And the lyrics on this record are untouchable. He writes scenes that fire and burn, even if nothing happens. There’s always what’s not being said; it’s never on the nose. One sentence carries with it a thousand-page story, if you know how to hear it. It’s something I’ve always tried to do too, to create that depth. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face, where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”

11. Mike Oldfield: “Tubular Bells – Part II”
I actually quote a section of this in the book, because near the beginning it has these amazing arpeggios and harmonics that sound like the tweets, chirps, buzzes and melodies of a high summer day in the wildflower meadow of the edge-land. Everyone knows the famous into to the first part of Oldfield’s masterpiece, but Part II has some truly outstanding moments, and for my money 1:27 to 5:27 is as close to the sound of English fields in balmy July as you’ll find. Beautiful, haunting, wistful. It almost makes me cry every time. I listened to that section on repeat for days when writing the book.

12. Sandy Denny: “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”
If you could distill an evening into a song, this is it. I first heard this as a kid, but it’s this recording (which I think was done for John Peel show in the early 70s) that really breaks me. Dreamy, resigned, defiant, misty-eyed, Denny sings unbelievably brilliantly about time, passing time and the changes of the world. That opening line could be the first sentence of a book: “Across the evening sky/all the birds are leaving/but how can they know it’s time for them to go?” Again, it’s the sound of looking out over a wood at sunset as the birds flare up and flock, coalesce and disperse, and wondering about the spinning world and life. It’s perspective and awareness you rarely find.

Common Ground by Rob Cowen

My experience of nature as a child was in the suburban south, where snipe would flush from the ditches by the railway, we tracked grass snakes on the banks of the Basingstoke Canal and cuckoos called from the exotic wilderness of the army training grounds.

I've had a lifetime working with nature and I owe it all to the spark kindled in me by those suburban landscapes. I have a deep respect for the un-wild wild-lands of my youth and the edge-lands that connect our modern lives with nature. These places are a blend of the unseen, neglected and frayed back-story of modern human lives and the restorative miracle of nature which reclaims these places despite all pitted against it.

Rob Cowen's Common Ground is an elegy for edge-lands, for the small harp-shaped common whose story he tells movingly, poetically and with respect and knowledge. It is a place he learns to know and to love. Edge-lands are the unknown and under-valued countryside on the margins of our urban existence.

In the northern English urban-fringe landscapes they are a special blend of rapidly-built industrial towns layered on top of a more ancient rural landscape. As a nature book, this would stand alongside many of the best, but it’s much more than a book on nature in the urban-fringe: it’s a remarkable and moving fusion of natural history, fiction and biography.

Rob Cowen tracks effortlessly between styles: he writes good informative nature writing that is clear, accurate and not afraid to tackle contentious issues. He gives depth to his natural history themes by accurate essays on important topics that illuminate rather than hector.

There are pockets of fiction, uncomplicatingly stretching the facts he observes into credible back-stories, giving richness to mere observation and written much as Henry Williamson told us the story of Tarka the Otter. All of this is held together by a rich overlay of Cowen's own highly original observations and feelings for his patch and the story of a period in his life of a new job and home and facing the anxieties and exhilarations of fatherhood.

Cowen follows in the tradition of the best of our nature writers by focusing on the story of his local place and the observations of its wildlife and people’s use of the land. In 1765 Gilbert White began a tradition of nature writing focused on place. In White’s Natural History of Selborne, we learn of the beech woods, meadows and lanes of the Hampshire countryside.

White explained important detail about birds, plants and history and in so doing he opened his readers’ minds to the bigger messages nature tells us about our place in our environment, inspiring future generations of naturalists and scientists.

Like White, Cowen's writing is personal and observational; like White, his writing has a clarity and economy of words that makes his work easy to follow and infectious in its pace. And like White, the reader is left thinking harder about our relationship with nature and wild places.

Cowen is so taken with this common that at times you wonder how much he chronicled the common and how much this story has taken him over to tell his story. Cowen is not afraid to tell the reader directly of the big themes in his life: his redundancy, moving home, starting a family. Just as powerfully, he opens our minds to the big themes in nature. He feels for wildlife harmed by thoughtless human actions, he regrets the lack of outdoor freedoms people have today and he believes that the extraordinary ordinary places like his common deserve greater respect.

He tackles big and contentious issues of the moment, such as the badger cull, hunting and our disconnect with nature. But Cowen’s campaigning is done in a quiet voice, as though given personally as under-stated wisdom offered modestly as helpful advice to a friend. It makes the case for nature more effectively for this.

This book feels good from the start, it is well-made by Hutchinson and at over 300 pages there's enough space to tell all of Cowen's story. This book has a sure form with each chapter coherent in its focus on a distinct wildlife element of the common, the foxes, hares, may-flies or owls. The extended essays on swifts, may-flies, owls and the themes of each chapter are lucid, informative and placed well in the book and so never bore.

As the book tells nature’s story, so too the stages in Cowen’s own transitional life from London-based career writer to Yorkshire family man weave elegantly and unforced into his experience of nature on his common.

Common Ground is a richly-told story. Cowen has a rapid-fire writing style with a clarity, pace and precision in his use of words that is rare amongst nature writers. Page after page, there is poetic prose which uses words sparsely – always light, tight and meaningful. Never mawkish or purple,

Cowen has a gift for punctuating his detailed narrative with stand-out short, rich almost Haiku-like lines of prose that spring off the page, illuminating each theme of his story in each chapter. This makes the book a powerful vehicle for the story he tells of a place, its context and his own life. In time, I can see his writing being the source of quotations that today we would seek from John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Richard Jefferies.

To future writers, Cowen's writing sits confidently with the strikingly successful and justifiably popular new nature writers who are bringing this genre bang up to date, such as Helen MacDonald and Robert Macfarlane. Cowen has as much of the compelling blend of personal natural history observation written in an engaging and competent literary style as any other writer today.

If his really was the last era to have the freedoms and access to nature that generations before had, then this book shows that not only will our understanding of nature be poorer, but so too will our understanding of ourselves.

Common Ground by Rob Cowen is published in Hardback and e-book by Hutchinson 7 May

Posted on: May 10th, 2015