Roger Deakin

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new."

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clocks that drifted on the s over the moat."

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives. To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. sends the future as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in . There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees."

"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens during a rain-storm in the spring-fed moat that lies close to the house. In Wildwood (2007), his epic account of trees, woods and forest cultures around the world, Walnut Tree Farm is the fixed point to which Roger returns and from which he learns,even as he journeys out to the groves of Kazakhstan and the of Australia. And in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (2008), extracts from Roger's copious journals record both the labour and wonder involved in living in twelve acres of meadow, and woodland; the night-time bark of foxes, the viper-bite of s as he cleared scrub or laid hedges, and the fallen stars of glow-worms in the long grass."

"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse outside the ancient village of , in , and began a restoration, repairing stone walls and replacing roof tiles. Among the attributes of Walnut Tree Farm, as the house was called, was a deep, spring-fed . It didn’t surround the house, as with a fortified castle, but was excavated into the land, in roughly parallel lines, at the front and the back of the property. The moat had served its original, Elizabethan owner as a water supply, a cooler, and a status symbol. Over the centuries, it fell into disrepair, becoming silted up from falling leaves and rotting tree roots. Deakin had the moat dredged to a depth of ten feet; staked a wooden ladder by the bank, near the spreading roots of a tree; and began regularly swimming in the cold, greenish water. He gained what he called a frog’s-eye view of the changing seasons, and an intimate familiarity with the creatures sharing the moat, from to s."