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  • Country Diaries Collection - 3 Books
  • Martin Wainwright
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About the Book

These beautiful, touching and wide-ranging chronicles tell the story of British life through the history of the Guardian's best columns producing a much-loved collection for lovers of the countryside nationwide.

Titles include: The Guardian Book of Wartime Country Diaries, Lifetime of Mountains: The Best of A. Harry Griffin's Country Diary and A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary.



The Guardian Book of Wartime Country Diaries

Twice in the 20th century, the world was engulfed by warfare whose battles and effects on society have been much-chronicled. This is the less familiar story of how struggles between the great European powers reached into the quietest corners of the British countryside. From jam-making to Italian prisoners of war, among the many subjects covered, diarists discuss the effect of Battle of Britain planes on hawks and waterfowl. As Arnold Boyd writes in September 1939, 'I cannot help thinking that if only Hitler had been an ornithologist, he would have put off the war until the autumn bird migration was over'.


Lifetime of Mountains: The Best of A. Harry Griffin's Country Diary

This is a moving and remarkable digest of one man's long and varied life and a chronicle of a landscape and a community - the English Lake District - over the decades.

Harry Griffin's 'Country Diary' column for the Guardian was one of the longest-running regular features in the British media, running uninterrupted for some 52 years until his death in 2004.

Martin Wainwright, who knew Griffin well, has selected 150 of his best columns to make both a moving and remarkable digest of one man's long and varied life and a matchless chronicle of a landscape and a community - the English Lake District - over the decades.

Harry Griffin was an outdoor man: a climber, a walker, a wanderer, and this book will appeal to anyone who loves the wild parts of the British landscape. It is also a fascinating social history of rural life, vanished and present, from solitary hill shepherds to slate miners, mountain hares to mountain rescue teams.


A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary

In 2006, the Guardian's much-loved Country Diary column is a hundred years old, and to commemorate the anniversary Martin Wainwright, the Guardian's Northern Editor and also the editor of A Gleaming Landscape (Guardian Books) has compiled a collection of the best of a century's writing.

This collection covers the landscape of the whole of the United Kingdom, from Wales to Northern Ireland, Scotland to Norfolk.

The Country Diary column has consistently attracted some of Britain's best writers on natural history and the countryside: Jim Perrin the mountaineering writer, whose biography of Don Whillans won the Boardman-Tasker Award, writes the dispatches from Snowdonia; Mark Cocker, author of the bestselling Birds Britannica, writes the Country Diary from Norfolk. There are also diaries written by a leading Suffragette, one of Rupert Brooke's mistresses, and even one of the Guardian's printers who stepped in at the last minute when the copy he was waiting for had not been filed!

Adding his own insightful and fascinating commentary throughout, Martin Wainwright has found diaries to reflect the changing of the countryside over a hundred years: from the prevalence of owls in First World War trenches full of vermin, to the plant surveys of Second World War bombsites.