Something in the water

‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built on and out of limestone: the cosy Cotswold village of Coleshill, the shambolic hamlet of Le Chambon in the Dordogne, the limestone Karst region of western Slovenia, and the honeycombed hills of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘Surely, I thought, this has to be more than mere coincidence.’

From a strictly demographic point of view, it isn’t even much of a coincidence: about one quarter of the world’s population lives in limestone country or depends on it for its water. But the mind of a poet can feed on the slightest chance connection. While her neighbours in Coleshill go about their spongy, fossil-filled environment with nary a thought of ‘chthonic forces’, Sampson inhabits a half-soluble landscape of subterranean streams and geopathic stress created by the compacted shells and skeletons of primeval sea-creatures.

A professor of poetry and champion of creative writing as a therapeutic tool, Sampson fortunately finds other people as interesting as herself. This ‘personal exploration’ of the ways in which a mind interacts with a landscape might have been a gallery of psycho-geographical selfies in picturesque settings; which, to some extent, it is. She relives an early love affair with a chain-smoking Macedonian in the ‘intractable, dense and mysterious’ Slovenian Karst and observes her past and present selves ‘trying on possible ways of living — or dying — in limestone country’. But this geologically themed nature walk swarms with objective facts, and the limestone itself hardly matters. A digressive and polymathic tour-guide, Sampson has little time for the famous attractions of sedimentary rock — all those boring caverns with their tediously intrepid potholers and weird formations with silly names: ‘surely these attempts to make them more interesting are an admission of dullness?’

This bewitching little book, which might have been designed to sit prettily in a lime-washed cottage, is a long after-dinner causerie on 1,000 different topics: vegetable gardening, domestic plumbing, ludicrous peasant lore, Galilean ornithology, the National Trust and the Chicxulub extinction event.