Bradt This is Not My Land (Travel Literature)
30 years on a small Cotswold farm
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Bradt This is not my land
A new Bradt title about living on and with the land.
About This is Not My Land
In 1995, Caroline Mills and her partner Paul, in their early 20s, bought 65 acres of land on the edge of the north Cotswolds. At the time of, what they had believed would be an impossible, purchase, they regarded it innocently as just land, something, hopefully, from which to make a living. They gave the land a name, and it became something.
What follows is 30 years of living on and with the land, discovering an extraordinary 1000-year history, transitioning to organic certification before it became fashionable (again), raising a family that becomes so much a part of the farm’s identity, learning its sense of place.
Ultimately, realising that what they once regarded as merely ‘land’ is an increasingly rare and exceptional mosaic landscape – falling in love with the land so deeply that it becomes unthinkable that anyone would wish to harm it, least of all those that have the power and duty to protect.
Above all, walking and working the same five fields and woodland over and over again, from the water meadow beside the river that floods the butterbur in winter, to the top field where brilliant yellow bird’s foot trefoil highlight the stripes of medieval ridge and furrow in summer.
The historic hay meadows, whose swards are thick with rarities that make it a designated Priority Habitat and Wildlife Site.
The hedgerows, decorated by the eruption of ditzy hawthorn blossom in spring and holding on to rare English elm; to the ancient woodland, the only one in the area marked on Ordnance Survey’s first map in 1805, embracing the expansion of bluebells on the ground while watching helplessly as a pernicious disease takes its grip across the canopy.
All the while witnessing wildlife:-
- The barn owl who tracks up and down the meadow at dusk (and what becomes of her)
- The plumes of chimneysweeper moths that feed on the pignuts in spring
- The migrant redwing flock that we wait for every autumn
- The mummy blackbird that steals strawberries from the fruit garden to feed her young
- The ecstatic excitement of a skylark’s arrival after 20 years during Covid lockdown
- The grass snake that scares the hell out of any attempt to walk through the long grass in sandals
This is slow travel in its most microcosmic form. Walking the same five fields and woodland repeatedly, watching and witnessing how it, and the surrounding landscape, changes over a period of three decades.
How will it end? With the realisation of custodianship rather than ownership, merely passing-through. And a deep desire to ensure the land survives at all, let alone in a healthier condition.
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Contents
Introduction
The Cotswold fringe – a sense of place
Hooray for Henry
Wedding Presents
Living off the land
The house the land built
Modern times
Battles
Solastalgia
Epilogue
About the author
Caroline Mills (carolinemills.net) is an experienced, award-winning travel writer and the author/contributor of ten books, specialising in travel throughout the UK and Europe. More so, she is a country girl, and a farmer’s wife. While she loves her role writing extensively about the countryside inspiring others to travel, she likes nothing better than to return to the farm where she lives with her husband and three children, on the edge of the Cotswolds.
Having moved no more than five miles from where she grew up – also in the Cotswolds – she has been able to call the region home for more than 50 years, an aspect utilised to write another of Caroline’s books, The Cotswolds (Slow Travel), an Inspire Global Media Awards finalist Travel Book of the Year 2025. But it is to her farm, which she and her husband purchased 30 years ago, that she turns her attention with this book. With a passionate love of the countryside in which she lives, Caroline paints a very personal picture of this special place.
Caroline is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and the Society of Authors.