Congratulations to our Tutorial Fellow, Professor Fiona Stafford FBA on the publication of her latest book, Time and Tide: The Long, Long Life of Landscape.
Time and Tide sees Fiona uncover and relate many of the fascinating stories that lie dormant within the landscapes of the British Isles. In doing so, she makes a compelling argument for cultivating the kind of heightened awareness by which we can engender an ability to read landscape and the many layers of history contained within it.
Professor Stafford alongside the cover of her new book, Time and Tide
Fiona proposes that, when we register a certain type of strangeness in the landscape, we are often registering the presence of story. It might be that we sense the presence of absence, such as that caused by the desertion of a plague village or the disappearance of a village under the waters of a reservoir. Or it might be that something incongruous catches our eye – a monkey puzzle tree standing alone in a suburban garden or a rusty rail viaduct heading into nowhere. Either way, Fiona argues, if we can only look a little closer, the stories will unfold. In turn, this deepened awareness of the world can help prompt a deeper, more hopeful relationship to the natural world, despite widespread environmental loss.
In chapter by fascinating chapter, Time and Tide reveals the forces, both natural and human, which transform places. Swooping along coastlines, through forests and across fens, following in the footsteps of Burns and Keats, Celia Fiennes and Charles Dickens, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Noel Coward and Compton Mackenzie, Professor Stafford’s latest book is a time-travelling voyage deep into the stories of our Isles.
Published in February 2024, Time and Tide is already garnering fulsome reviews. Critics are describing the book as ‘poetic and profound’ (Observer), ‘poignant and touching’ (Mail on Sunday) and ‘miraculous’ (Scotsman). Professor Stafford also recorded an episode of the BBC Countryfile’s ‘Plodcast’, in which she takes the history of the Buckinghamshire hill village Brill as an exemplar for this closer process of looking, and which you can listen to below.
Listen to FIONA’S INTERVIEW ON THE COUNTRYFILE “PLODCAST”
The hilltop village of Brill in Buckinghamshire
Whittlesey Mere in north Cambridgeshire, one of the lost landscapes Fiona writes about
Speaking about the book, Fiona said, “I wanted to share my discoveries of the living histories hidden away within what might appear to be ordinary landscapes. The clues are everywhere, it’s just a question of spotting things that look a bit out of place and then following up on them.”
She added, “It’s really a book of stories, but there’s an environmental dimension, too. The long, fluctuating history of familiar wildlife includes stories of loss but also of recovery, so by showing that the ‘countryside’ has always been in a process of change, it suggests that there is no reason why our wildlife can’t thrive again. And yet, this is not a book that tells you what to think – it’s just helping to reveal the extraordinary richness of the everyday.”
Time and Tide is the third of Fiona’s books to explore the natural world through our literary, cultural and personal responses to different aspects of the environment. The previous two books were The Long, Life of Trees (‘A chapter a day of this calming book will keep panic away’ – Margaret Drabble) and The Brief Life of Flowers (‘A glowing account of the myths and meanings we impose on flowers’ – John Carey).