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Four Fields
In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields � walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields � the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life � looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.
Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields.
Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain’s very best writers about nature.
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize
Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields.
Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain’s very best writers about nature.
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize
288 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2013
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276 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
November 8, 2016
Dee's writing about the natural world is breathtakingly good - unexpected but evocative metaphors abound and scenes burst into life in your imagination. It's a shame then, that the structure of this book left me a bit underwhelmed - the side-tracks into history often felt overlong and my attention drifted regularly. I absolutely loved parts of this and am keen to read more of Dee's work, but I can't unreservedly recommend this book.
April 16, 2016
This is the story of four fields on three different continents; his local field on the Cambridge fens a Zambian field, an America prairie and an abandoned field in Chernobyl in Ukraine.
Each of these locations has a story to tell, not only of the history that permeates them, but of the people that relied on them, the flora and fauna that inhabit them, and how they have been moulded to suit the will of man.
With his local field he describes the way that it changes throughout the seasons. The writing is beautiful and evocative; it almost makes you image in that you are standing alongside as he tells you the things that he is seeing. The fields that he visits abroad are so very different to the fens at home, from the fragile prairie, the wildness of the African farm and the abandonment of the file close to the scene of the nuclear disaster.
Nothing groundbreaking you might think, but with his acute observational skill and his eloquent descriptions of what he sees when he walks around these landscapes, make this a fine natural history book.
Each of these locations has a story to tell, not only of the history that permeates them, but of the people that relied on them, the flora and fauna that inhabit them, and how they have been moulded to suit the will of man.
With his local field he describes the way that it changes throughout the seasons. The writing is beautiful and evocative; it almost makes you image in that you are standing alongside as he tells you the things that he is seeing. The fields that he visits abroad are so very different to the fens at home, from the fragile prairie, the wildness of the African farm and the abandonment of the file close to the scene of the nuclear disaster.
Nothing groundbreaking you might think, but with his acute observational skill and his eloquent descriptions of what he sees when he walks around these landscapes, make this a fine natural history book.
October 21, 2015
This is a fascinating read, although at times it's easy to get a bit lost in it. Although it's a book about fields, in some senses it isn't "about" anything - rather a series of reflections mainly on nature in and around fields.
At the heart of the book the author keeps returning to his "hime" field in the Fens - and for me the depth of what he writes about the Fens, as they are now, as they change, and about their history, is the most enthralling parts of the book - particularly perhaps the parts about the relationship between man and nature, and his reflections that it's very hard to identify what the "natural" state of the fens is, because man's role is so entrenched in shaping them.
But the elements of African field, the field at heart of the Battle of Little Big Hirn, and the land around Chernibyl, are all filled with reflections and comments on nature, life and our impact upon them.
Worth a read, and probably reading again, but not an easy or comfortable book.
At the heart of the book the author keeps returning to his "hime" field in the Fens - and for me the depth of what he writes about the Fens, as they are now, as they change, and about their history, is the most enthralling parts of the book - particularly perhaps the parts about the relationship between man and nature, and his reflections that it's very hard to identify what the "natural" state of the fens is, because man's role is so entrenched in shaping them.
But the elements of African field, the field at heart of the Battle of Little Big Hirn, and the land around Chernibyl, are all filled with reflections and comments on nature, life and our impact upon them.
Worth a read, and probably reading again, but not an easy or comfortable book.
Read
January 8, 2016I read Tim Dee's first book about migrating birds and absolutely loved it. This one is a slower read, and explores four "fields" or areas that he has become familiar with over the years. The most interesting ones were the those outside of his native England: the battlefield of Custer's last stand/Little Bighorn and the contaminated countryside around Chernobyl, the site of the nuclear disaster. He has a gift for tiny detail, like the rust colour of the trees. This is a thoughtful book and rewards persistence.
January 28, 2018
Tim Dee's Four Fields explores our world through his neighborhood fens and fields in Zambia, North Dakota and outside Chernobyl. He believes and writes of simpling - the seeing of what is in front of us. Simpling coming from his reading of John Ray's Flora(1660). He seeks to help us understand, "Natural, indeed, is another of those bastard words." Nature can not return to its past. Humans have changed the world.
His command of language, his knowledge of the world inform an truly amazing book.
His command of language, his knowledge of the world inform an truly amazing book.
September 24, 2020
Tim Dee is undoubtably an amazing writer. His detail of the natural world is poetic. This book is not so much about four fields but four very different areas. It’s easy to lose one’s way in this - and I did frequently as Tim seems to go off piste quite a lot. I enjoyed the detail of the Fens both now and in the past. Likewise the Chernobyl section is fascinating.
It’s not an easy read and you really do have to concentrate to keep on top of Tim’s style of writing.
It’s not an easy read and you really do have to concentrate to keep on top of Tim’s style of writing.
March 15, 2020
This book clearly has a good heart to it, but Dee's poetic waxings proved in many ways rather typical and less and less enticing to me as they continued.
October 11, 2019
Tim Dee takes us to four fields spread around the world.
The first one close to home is called the Burwell Fen in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It really is his home field , the one he visits whenever he can. There’s a spring, summer and autumn chapter on this field.
In between the chapters of the home field are those of the three other fields.
The first one of these is a field in Zambia on an old colonial farm that once grew tobacco, but at present, is overgrown with grasses and scrub.
The second one is a battlefield in Montana (USA) where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors killed George Custer and his party in june 1876.
And the last one is an abandoned field in the village of Vesniane in the exclusion zone near the exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Until april 1986 it was a meadow grazed by cows.
Some undeniable truths and insights
About Fens
(�)the nature reserve at Wicken Fen (�) is a shaggy place (�) with large reedbeds, bold mosquitoes, booming bitterns, but als a problem. It is turning into a wood. Being the only undrained place for miles around is not easy. (�) when the adjacent fens were drained Wicken suffered as well. It wasn’t big enough to make its own rules. The fens share a common wetness and when all those around you are sucked dry you do not escape.(�) How then could we best live with the fens in the future? Might we redefine our tenancy over that which we have subjugated? Tot his end something new has crept out of the drying earth � an almost posthumous chapter in nature-conservation thinking. Our tangle with the place is to be declared � how we made the fens, altered them, ruined them even ; and then, demonstrating that we have finally understood this, some knowing and kindly repairs will be proposed. The new ethos extols prefixes and is another film running backwards: rewetting, rewilding, unfarming, the undoing of doing, the managed retreat of management, the letting go via legislation of what we once ruled. (�)
This floats all sorts of questions about projected or imagined environments. How does land management, even managed retreat, live with a dynamic landscape? Who sets the year for climax of creation?
If trees have to be felled to maintain the fen, then in what way is the fen now anything other than a farmed place? In any case for some, dry might be better than wet. (�)
Whatever we do, whether we drain or we wet, we remain thoroughly and forever implicated.(�) There can be no true leaving.We cannot stop and clear off. Instead some sort of facility is being made and, though the public noise is all about access and commmunity benefits, what is being offered can sound even with value-adding bitterns, like a reduced version of the place. In substantial part this is because wisdom about the land and feeling for it � contact or occupancy of any kind � is being siphoned off as the sole province of experts and managers. (�) Rewilding will not then return the remade fens tot he farmers or indeed to anyone; we have all forfeited our rights to be in them in any way that isn’t mediated.
About grasslands
Without the last 150 years breathing all over it, the prairie might have endured. But the worm can not forgive the plough. ‘Busting the sod� or ‘breaking out� the land does as it. Turn over the grasses and the topsoil of the prairie and it is no longer prairie. Rescue is hard. Grasslands are soilmanufactories. But they need grass to do it. There was often more than 10 feet of topsoil beneath the prairie surface. Most of any grass is underground; roots spread for miles allowing it to live in drought conditions and to survive fire.(�) To sever the roots is to destroy the surface of the earth. (�) Almost the entire prairie is gone now, the grass and its soil and everything following. Less than 5% of the original tallgrass prairie remains. Less than half of the original mixed and shortgrass prairies remain.
About nuclear disaster zones
(�)the trees that grew here once were killed by radiation. Many of them still lay on the ground, preserved in death since 1986, their grey trunks wrapped in a fogged and brittle marquetry. Fall-out was so potent in these woods that for a time it destroyed microbial activity as well as most other living things. Rot was killed, decay arrested and the dead kept immutably dead. There were no friendly worms.(�)
Down the wooded streets of Prypiat’s arrested past you are bowled into the aftermath of man, into a future that has already arrived. I have been nowhere else that hat felt as dead as here, been nowhere that made me feel as posthumous. And the strangest thing is that in this house of the dead, the dead have gone missing. To make fuller sense of it you would have tob e an archaeologist of cities not yet build, or an interpreter of languages as yet unborn. Except, Prypiat is now and actually exists. Or was and did. And as bewildering as this is, this poisoned rewilding, it is also bleakly appropriate tot his concrete corner of the old empire.
The first one close to home is called the Burwell Fen in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It really is his home field , the one he visits whenever he can. There’s a spring, summer and autumn chapter on this field.
In between the chapters of the home field are those of the three other fields.
The first one of these is a field in Zambia on an old colonial farm that once grew tobacco, but at present, is overgrown with grasses and scrub.
The second one is a battlefield in Montana (USA) where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors killed George Custer and his party in june 1876.
And the last one is an abandoned field in the village of Vesniane in the exclusion zone near the exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Until april 1986 it was a meadow grazed by cows.
Some undeniable truths and insights
About Fens
(�)the nature reserve at Wicken Fen (�) is a shaggy place (�) with large reedbeds, bold mosquitoes, booming bitterns, but als a problem. It is turning into a wood. Being the only undrained place for miles around is not easy. (�) when the adjacent fens were drained Wicken suffered as well. It wasn’t big enough to make its own rules. The fens share a common wetness and when all those around you are sucked dry you do not escape.(�) How then could we best live with the fens in the future? Might we redefine our tenancy over that which we have subjugated? Tot his end something new has crept out of the drying earth � an almost posthumous chapter in nature-conservation thinking. Our tangle with the place is to be declared � how we made the fens, altered them, ruined them even ; and then, demonstrating that we have finally understood this, some knowing and kindly repairs will be proposed. The new ethos extols prefixes and is another film running backwards: rewetting, rewilding, unfarming, the undoing of doing, the managed retreat of management, the letting go via legislation of what we once ruled. (�)
This floats all sorts of questions about projected or imagined environments. How does land management, even managed retreat, live with a dynamic landscape? Who sets the year for climax of creation?
If trees have to be felled to maintain the fen, then in what way is the fen now anything other than a farmed place? In any case for some, dry might be better than wet. (�)
Whatever we do, whether we drain or we wet, we remain thoroughly and forever implicated.(�) There can be no true leaving.We cannot stop and clear off. Instead some sort of facility is being made and, though the public noise is all about access and commmunity benefits, what is being offered can sound even with value-adding bitterns, like a reduced version of the place. In substantial part this is because wisdom about the land and feeling for it � contact or occupancy of any kind � is being siphoned off as the sole province of experts and managers. (�) Rewilding will not then return the remade fens tot he farmers or indeed to anyone; we have all forfeited our rights to be in them in any way that isn’t mediated.
About grasslands
Without the last 150 years breathing all over it, the prairie might have endured. But the worm can not forgive the plough. ‘Busting the sod� or ‘breaking out� the land does as it. Turn over the grasses and the topsoil of the prairie and it is no longer prairie. Rescue is hard. Grasslands are soilmanufactories. But they need grass to do it. There was often more than 10 feet of topsoil beneath the prairie surface. Most of any grass is underground; roots spread for miles allowing it to live in drought conditions and to survive fire.(�) To sever the roots is to destroy the surface of the earth. (�) Almost the entire prairie is gone now, the grass and its soil and everything following. Less than 5% of the original tallgrass prairie remains. Less than half of the original mixed and shortgrass prairies remain.
About nuclear disaster zones
(�)the trees that grew here once were killed by radiation. Many of them still lay on the ground, preserved in death since 1986, their grey trunks wrapped in a fogged and brittle marquetry. Fall-out was so potent in these woods that for a time it destroyed microbial activity as well as most other living things. Rot was killed, decay arrested and the dead kept immutably dead. There were no friendly worms.(�)
Down the wooded streets of Prypiat’s arrested past you are bowled into the aftermath of man, into a future that has already arrived. I have been nowhere else that hat felt as dead as here, been nowhere that made me feel as posthumous. And the strangest thing is that in this house of the dead, the dead have gone missing. To make fuller sense of it you would have tob e an archaeologist of cities not yet build, or an interpreter of languages as yet unborn. Except, Prypiat is now and actually exists. Or was and did. And as bewildering as this is, this poisoned rewilding, it is also bleakly appropriate tot his concrete corner of the old empire.
February 21, 2019
Loved this. The combination of broad geographical sweep and a narrow focus on one place in particular, the almost throwaway snapshot images (a jay as 'flying Mr Punch'; a capercaillie as 'boreal troll turkey'), the lyrical prose. 'Lyrical prose' is probably one of those overused cliches, but at times it almost felt like reading a prose Gerard Manley Hopkins, the same kind of densely-packed imagery.
November 17, 2018
A lyrical, poetic tale of rural life. The writing is wonderful, if perhaps a little drawn out: a book to be tackled in short doese for the beauty of the imagery.
February 18, 2019
Beautiful and lyrical. The book held particular meaning for me as I am very familiar with two of the four fields.
April 19, 2021
Wonderfully poetic and entrancing, Four Fields recasts the Fens as a magical place. I am inspired to go exploring.
December 27, 2014
My book of the year for 2014: Four Fields is an exploration four different landscapes, from the fens of England to the wind-swept aridity of the African veldt. It’s what my daughter would disparingly call ‘landscape memoir� or I might call topographical writing. It’s beautifully written, more like poetry than prose often, and in touch with the human and the natural and with a recurring them of birds (Dee is a birder after all) My favourite landscape of the four explored was the fens, mainly because I finally got to see that landscape earlier this year, but it is all beautifully handled.
June 30, 2015
There were many interesting and enjoyable elements (honeyguides, Chernobyl, the Fens, decaying African farms, shooting sick wildebeeste), a love of nature, a greater love of words in this book but it was ultimately a struggle to haul myself across the finish line and by the time I did, I had forgotten what the point might be. Maybe that's because of the effect the Fens have on me and so much of the book was either about the Fens or referenced them.
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April 28, 2014Lovely luscious poetic prose, reworking some elements from the running sky but sadly less resonant.
August 9, 2014
Best use of a Gramsci quote to talk about bird watching in Chernobyl!
April 24, 2017
This book is so very good. As he writes, no page is unnecessary. No thought too thin. Context is always accounted for. Precision and light, beauty and horror made present using only words. It is amazing what pictures and experiences of him, of birds, of humans and land and sea and animals and of history of all, I am made able to see through his words on paper. He makes a case about the impact of the human animal everywhere on earth, without spitting it at you from a mountaintop of self righteousness. I admire his language as strong,h as I do his eye.
That being said, he did overindulge in metaphors now and then, particularly in the Winter Fens chapter. At some point reading that chapter I had this image, valid or not (and possible or not), of alligators pursuing and consuming g crocodiles. A riot, in fact, a confusion of metaphors.
But the history I have learned and the sensations I have reveled in pull me, pull me and I read on with delight.
Listen to this: "Best of all was to do this when lying down, when the grass stems leaned over your faces the damp soil crept through your shirt. I would turn my head, the grass brushed loud in my ear and I could hear that the sprinkle of song fell more to one side of me than the other..."pg 161
And the fate of corncrakes due to mechanization. Oh, the harm we do.
That being said, he did overindulge in metaphors now and then, particularly in the Winter Fens chapter. At some point reading that chapter I had this image, valid or not (and possible or not), of alligators pursuing and consuming g crocodiles. A riot, in fact, a confusion of metaphors.
But the history I have learned and the sensations I have reveled in pull me, pull me and I read on with delight.
Listen to this: "Best of all was to do this when lying down, when the grass stems leaned over your faces the damp soil crept through your shirt. I would turn my head, the grass brushed loud in my ear and I could hear that the sprinkle of song fell more to one side of me than the other..."pg 161
And the fate of corncrakes due to mechanization. Oh, the harm we do.
March 8, 2018
Eloquent but dull unless you are a birder or love nature writing.
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