England in infra-red: the beauty of the country at night

John Lewis-Stempel is nearly as prolific as the natural world about which he writes so well. His voice is distinctive – that of a traditional agriculturist of lyrical articulacy, an observant ecologist who finds mythopoeic magic in everyday animals, who honours his Herefordshire origins but addresses all England.

As with his monographs on meadows and ponds, Nightwalking looks at under-appreciated aspects of the rural scene – this time, the most enigmatic of all. Like Robert Frost, poets often aspire to be ‘acquainted with the night’, and many are cited here. But even lifelong country dwellers scarcely know the hours between dusk and cockcrow, when gloom comes down over suddenly unfamiliar fields, while city residents hardly notice what waits where the street lights straggle out. Lewis-Stempel ventures alertly into this obverse universe where man no longer has the advantage. Nightwalking is the opposite of somnambulism. This is England in infra-red.

It is Herefordshire specifically that the author explores, season by season, with forays into France’s Charentes to encounter tense wild boar and rejoice in nightingales. In the accompanying illustrations, the black-and-white half-timbering of his county’s vernacular buildings help fix his genius loci, and suit the muted moonlight of one of England’s least light-polluted counties.

He usually takes his dog, because solitary noctambulists arouse atavistic fears – and, on one occasion, even anger from a drunken driver on a midnight lane. Writer and retriever pad unobtrusively across starry spaces, by turns in sable shadow, dappled greyscale or light bright enough to read by. ‘For a few minutes the dog and I were original and Neolithic, the first man and his dog trudging across the star-polished tundra for the cave.