The Countryside Remembered

Hardback. Foreword by Gordon Beningfield. This book celebrates a world of leafy hedgegrows, quiet country lanes and small, lush meadows, of small-scale mixed farms with chickens scratching in the farmyard, of tranquil villages where the cottages were inhabited by country people rather than commuters, and of harvest scenes in which the fruits of a year's labour were gathered in by whole families helped by heavy horses and not by a single contractor driving a large, noisy marchine. Here too, are the craftsmen who served their local communitites, producing everything from cartwheels to clothes pegs, from bee skeps to farm ladders. The highly evocative pictures of the British countryside dating from around 1930 to the early 1960s, are accompanied by an informative commentary by Sadie Ward that reveals a deep knowledge of the nation's rural past. The foreford is by Gordon Beningfield, who is well-known for his line paintings of the English countryside. This collection of superb period photographs drawn from the archives of the Institute of Agricultural History at the University of Reading paints a beautiful and poignant portrait of a way of life that has vanished for ever. Illustrated throughout. 95 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions ,and all types of Academic Literature.).…