Next To Me, A Robin

By Rosalind Brady

From the Woods and Fields of Dartington, Devon

When Ros Brady first walks into the sun and rain of a Devon summer and turns up a road to Higher Close Hill, the writer and the half-wild, half-farmed landscape that lies along the River Dart, are joined in an experience close to nature that will haunt her forever.

These are her writings pencilled outdoors on scraps of paper. They lead the reader, young or old, on her trail - through ash copses in storm, through rain, hail and sun, among the birds, the wild animals and along the river's banks.

The title of this book pays tribute to the ornithologist  David Lack whose seminal study 'Life of the Robin' was written and researched on the thousand acre rural estate of Dartington Hall.

The author takes you by the hand and steals you away to a quiet place and an encounter with a visionary world.

'Ros Brady moves slowly through the natural world and observes closely, feels deeply and thinks originally: what could be more important? She shares her relationship with this world through her vivid writing with its unusual metaphors... The reader looks, learns and experiences life in a new way...'

Kay Dunbar

Director of 'Ways With Words' Literature Festivals

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosalind Brady
• Release date: Oct 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386274148

Book preview

Prologue 

If  you stand on Yarner Beacon facing east  you will spy, a mile away, a wood at the foot of a hill.  Beyond it is a river though you can’t see it from where you are poised, (it is behind the trees swishing through Longmarsh Meadow). There, hidden in that round wood and by the river and hedgerows that mark the borders of wild nature, her birds, plants and small mammals, and that carry the eye over the landscape and beyond, is where I explored and rambled, spent hours in contemplation, sometimes slept and dreamed.

In 1952 this wood, called Chacegrove, was awarded a gold medal as the finest ash wood in the west of England.  It was famed for its timber across the entire country. (from ‘A Forestry Venture’ by  H.E Hiley director of forestry research, Dartington Hall Trust Estate 1939-1961)

Chapter 1

Spring River

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Oak Trees by Bram’s Oak,  Highmarsh

I often go there to those quiet places

To rid myself of the ugly urgent things

That torture men.

Green grass and quiet trees

A soft, little wind,

A springwell in the grass.

These things give me back to