Hunters of Longtree: A Cotswold Tale

Written in the great and much loved tradition of Gilbert White, W H Hudson and Henry Williamson, Hunters of Longtree can best be described as a real-life drama of survival in the natural world. It is centred on the lives of predators such as stoats and weasels, foxes, badgers and otters, bats and birds of prey, and is set in the south Cotswolds at the start of the 1950s, against a landscape as yet untouched by the ecological consequences of myxomatosis in the rabbit population.
The main player is the stoat, the so-called ‘royal hunter’ of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, through whose activities the reader is taken on a natural history tour of ‘Longtree’, making it possible to experience in intimate detail this elusive predator’s interaction with its environment; though ‘hunter’ may also stand for the local ferreter, hounds of the Berkeley Hunt or young boys exploring their home ground.
David Walker skilfully tempers the narrative’s strong predatory element with frequent reference to local geology and landscape history, archaeology, rare butterfly populations, flora and folklore. He also draws on his lifelong association with the area, since wartime evacuation, to provide an insight into a contemporary Cotswold community, unblighted by the march of consumerism, citing named local characters from the past, including A E Housman. His own wood-engraved vignettes of contemporary local landmarks enhance this well researched piece of period reconstruction, which is as much a social as a natural history.