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halfmanhalfbook's review against another edition
4.0
For millennia mankind has been shaping the landscapes that we have lived in, we have torn down trees to make fields, changed watercourses to better suit our needs and expends vast amounts of energy hauling rocks from the ground. The very land that we live on has provides all that we need. What people lose by living in a city is that contact with the soil and rocks that rural living affords, the way that the landscape changes as the seasons roll by and more importantly the roots that we put down as we settle in a particular area.
Fiona Sampson has lived in a variety of places, but the places that have made a deep and lasting impression on her have all had limestone as the bedrock. In this book she explores just what has made these places so unique and important to her and the people that she lives near. Beginning in Autumn, we are in Chambon in southern France where people still farm the land and produce the most wonderful foods. More challenging is the soupy French dialect as she struggles to translate as the strong aperitif clouds her mind. It is a place that she feels at home in.
Stepping back a season to summer we arrive in Slovenia in Škocjan in the Karst region. Sampson recalls time spent with a Macedonian lover, the slivovitz plum brandy, the walks through the woods that are full of boars and deer and the caves that permeate the area containing finds from humans who lived there 3000 years ago. We find ourselves in the village of Coleshill in spring, a place that they have lived in for seventeen years and are just about to leave. It is a place with a long history and parts that you’d immediately recognise as quintessential rural scenes. The limestone there has been shaped by the rivers that flow through it and water still plays a huge part today in the landscape particularly in the spring.
Winter takes us to a place that needs no introduction really, Jerusalem. Getting to this ancient city that sits on the sedimentary rocks that were once even older sea beds, is demanding enough with all the required security checks. When you arrive under the stark sunlight and blue skies the limestone feels like it has been bleached to a pure white. The colour of the limestone changes with the light and the area you are in, ranging from softer pinks to purples. In some ways it reflects the city, with its triparty of religions and the hotchpotch of streets adding to the atmosphere.
There is lots to like about this book. It has a certain intimacy as Sampson talks about the places that have meant so much to her where she has lived and the people that inhabit them. The final chapter was the one I liked the least, can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think that it might have been because it was a city, which tend to larger and more impersonal and it didn’t have the warmth of the other chapters. Even though it is disconcerting heading backwards through the seasons, it suits the character of the book perfectly. As I have come to expect from poets who write non-fiction, the prose is quite special. It is a fine addition to the contemporary works that Little Toller have in their Monograph range that I seem to be inadvertently collecting now.
Fiona Sampson has lived in a variety of places, but the places that have made a deep and lasting impression on her have all had limestone as the bedrock. In this book she explores just what has made these places so unique and important to her and the people that she lives near. Beginning in Autumn, we are in Chambon in southern France where people still farm the land and produce the most wonderful foods. More challenging is the soupy French dialect as she struggles to translate as the strong aperitif clouds her mind. It is a place that she feels at home in.
Stepping back a season to summer we arrive in Slovenia in Škocjan in the Karst region. Sampson recalls time spent with a Macedonian lover, the slivovitz plum brandy, the walks through the woods that are full of boars and deer and the caves that permeate the area containing finds from humans who lived there 3000 years ago. We find ourselves in the village of Coleshill in spring, a place that they have lived in for seventeen years and are just about to leave. It is a place with a long history and parts that you’d immediately recognise as quintessential rural scenes. The limestone there has been shaped by the rivers that flow through it and water still plays a huge part today in the landscape particularly in the spring.
Winter takes us to a place that needs no introduction really, Jerusalem. Getting to this ancient city that sits on the sedimentary rocks that were once even older sea beds, is demanding enough with all the required security checks. When you arrive under the stark sunlight and blue skies the limestone feels like it has been bleached to a pure white. The colour of the limestone changes with the light and the area you are in, ranging from softer pinks to purples. In some ways it reflects the city, with its triparty of religions and the hotchpotch of streets adding to the atmosphere.
There is lots to like about this book. It has a certain intimacy as Sampson talks about the places that have meant so much to her where she has lived and the people that inhabit them. The final chapter was the one I liked the least, can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think that it might have been because it was a city, which tend to larger and more impersonal and it didn’t have the warmth of the other chapters. Even though it is disconcerting heading backwards through the seasons, it suits the character of the book perfectly. As I have come to expect from poets who write non-fiction, the prose is quite special. It is a fine addition to the contemporary works that Little Toller have in their Monograph range that I seem to be inadvertently collecting now.
halfmanhalfbook's review
4.0
For millennia mankind has been shaping the landscapes that we have lived in, we have torn down trees to make fields, changed watercourses to better suit our needs and expends vast amounts of energy hauling rocks from the ground. The very land that we live on has provides all that we need. What people lose by living in a city is that contact with the soil and rocks that rural living affords, the way that the landscape changes as the seasons roll by and more importantly the roots that we put down as we settle in a particular area.
Fiona Sampson has lived in a variety of places, but the places that have made a deep and lasting impression on her have all had limestone as the bedrock. In this book she explores just what has made these places so unique and important to her and the people that she lives near. Beginning in Autumn, we are in Chambon in southern France where people still farm the land and produce the most wonderful foods. More challenging is the soupy French dialect as she struggles to translate as the strong aperitif clouds her mind. It is a place that she feels at home in.
Stepping back a season to summer we arrive in Slovenia in Škocjan in the Karst region. Sampson recalls time spent with a Macedonian lover, the slivovitz plum brandy, the walks through the woods that are full of boars and deer and the caves that permeate the area containing finds from humans who lived there 3000 years ago. We find ourselves in the village of Coleshill in spring, a place that they have lived in for seventeen years and are just about to leave. It is a place with a long history and parts that you’d immediately recognise as quintessential rural scenes. The limestone there has been shaped by the rivers that flow through it and water still plays a huge part today in the landscape particularly in the spring.
Winter takes us to a place that needs no introduction really, Jerusalem. Getting to this ancient city that sits on the sedimentary rocks that were once even older sea beds, is demanding enough with all the required security checks. When you arrive under the stark sunlight and blue skies the limestone feels like it has been bleached to a pure white. The colour of the limestone changes with the light and the area you are in, ranging from softer pinks to purples. In some ways it reflects the city, with its triparty of religions and the hotchpotch of streets adding to the atmosphere.
There is lots to like about this book. It has a certain intimacy as Sampson talks about the places that have meant so much to her where she has lived and the people that inhabit them. The final chapter was the one I liked the least, can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think that it might have been because it was a city, which tend to larger and more impersonal and it didn’t have the warmth of the other chapters. Even though it is disconcerting heading backwards through the seasons, it suits the character of the book perfectly. As I have come to expect from poets who write non-fiction, the prose is quite special. It is a fine addition to the contemporary works that Little Toller have in their Monograph range that I seem to be inadvertently collecting now.
Fiona Sampson has lived in a variety of places, but the places that have made a deep and lasting impression on her have all had limestone as the bedrock. In this book she explores just what has made these places so unique and important to her and the people that she lives near. Beginning in Autumn, we are in Chambon in southern France where people still farm the land and produce the most wonderful foods. More challenging is the soupy French dialect as she struggles to translate as the strong aperitif clouds her mind. It is a place that she feels at home in.
Stepping back a season to summer we arrive in Slovenia in Škocjan in the Karst region. Sampson recalls time spent with a Macedonian lover, the slivovitz plum brandy, the walks through the woods that are full of boars and deer and the caves that permeate the area containing finds from humans who lived there 3000 years ago. We find ourselves in the village of Coleshill in spring, a place that they have lived in for seventeen years and are just about to leave. It is a place with a long history and parts that you’d immediately recognise as quintessential rural scenes. The limestone there has been shaped by the rivers that flow through it and water still plays a huge part today in the landscape particularly in the spring.
Winter takes us to a place that needs no introduction really, Jerusalem. Getting to this ancient city that sits on the sedimentary rocks that were once even older sea beds, is demanding enough with all the required security checks. When you arrive under the stark sunlight and blue skies the limestone feels like it has been bleached to a pure white. The colour of the limestone changes with the light and the area you are in, ranging from softer pinks to purples. In some ways it reflects the city, with its triparty of religions and the hotchpotch of streets adding to the atmosphere.
There is lots to like about this book. It has a certain intimacy as Sampson talks about the places that have meant so much to her where she has lived and the people that inhabit them. The final chapter was the one I liked the least, can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think that it might have been because it was a city, which tend to larger and more impersonal and it didn’t have the warmth of the other chapters. Even though it is disconcerting heading backwards through the seasons, it suits the character of the book perfectly. As I have come to expect from poets who write non-fiction, the prose is quite special. It is a fine addition to the contemporary works that Little Toller have in their Monograph range that I seem to be inadvertently collecting now.
jackielaw's review
5.0
“which came first, geography or history? And where does one end and the other begin?”
Limestone Country, by Fiona Sampson, is the ninth book in Little Toller’s monograph series. These are beautifully written and presented meditations on subjects that impact personally on each of the authors. They are varied in scope but focus on human interactions with the environment and forces of nature. In this work what is offered is a portrait of life in four particular limestone landscapes:
Chambon, a farming hamlet in Périgord, southern France;
Škocjan in the Karst region of Slovenia;
Coleshill, a rural parish in England;
Jerusalem, Israel.
The author has lived in or travelled around these locations and opens each of the four sections of the book with a short personal anecdote from her experiences. They set the scene for a lyrical and sympathetic study of the very different lifestyles of the locals, how these have been established over time, and the natural, cultural and political forces that subject them to change.
“the liveliness of tradition doesn’t come from where and how it originated, but from its use today.”
Locations are steeped in a constantly evolving history. Residents must adapt as generational exposures change. Modern incomers trying to capture whatever drew them to the place with their tidy, sterile renovations may be welcomed but rarely blend in.
As people have fought wars and moved borders there has been a shift in tolerance to certain visitors. This is particularly striking in the Karst region which the author travels with a friend from Macedonia, also a region of the former Yugoslavia, who is made to feel unwelcome by some who would previously have been his countrymen. Yet the land remains largely the same – the woodlands where walkers are warned of bears, the caves which draw tourists and provide income.
“Geological time is incomprehensibly grander than human history.”
There is the seemingly ubiquitous addition of holiday homes for the wealthy offering heritage chic. Visitors are drawn to admire centuries old churches that have survived through iterations of belief, places of cultic pilgrimage containing:
“graves of important figures […] who, like the rich everywhere, seem to have planned on the front row in paradise.”
In Coleshill the author observes how the working English villages have become satellite residences for wealthy metropolitans. Old traditions have been monetised if not valued by landowners such as the National Trust.
“It’s as if the techniques of land work, whether dry-stone walling or game-keeping, don’t count as knowledge if someone has practised them all his life, but only when they’re acquired by someone young and middle-class. The public schoolboy who grows his hair and chooses a holistic lifestyle as a craft worker, and the graduate of land management courses who plans to spend his life in an estate office, are alike in being valued as ‘experts’. Whereas Walter from number 17, now in his 70’s and bow-legged by arthritis after a lifetime of outdoor work, is regarded as merely old-fashioned; a burden to be laid off.”
Kept awake by the B52s taking off and landing from the neighbouring airfield at Fairford the author mulls the payload of death and destruction they carry to regions currently undergoing catastrophic change. From her rural idyll she notes that the cities of which visitors are most in awe
“have been destroyed almost as often as they’ve been rebuilt.”
Jerusalem is one such place. Each of her fellow visitors is there to come away with a personal experience based on their own ideas of what the place has been, the dreams and nightmares that whole societies entertain.
“Those fantasies devour the places they fix on through colonial exploitation, through war and plunder, even through mass tourism. Every city is as much unreal as real.”
Landscapes are formed over millennia and shape the lives of its settlers. These personal adaptations are passed down, altered by events and evolving attitudes but still umbilically tied to home regions. We are each a constituent of where we live, and it of us:
“We make places our own in part by the stories we dream up about them”
This book is a perceptive, thought-provoking observation of nature with man passing through. The exquisite yet substantive prose is a pleasure to read.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Little Toller Books.
Limestone Country, by Fiona Sampson, is the ninth book in Little Toller’s monograph series. These are beautifully written and presented meditations on subjects that impact personally on each of the authors. They are varied in scope but focus on human interactions with the environment and forces of nature. In this work what is offered is a portrait of life in four particular limestone landscapes:
Chambon, a farming hamlet in Périgord, southern France;
Škocjan in the Karst region of Slovenia;
Coleshill, a rural parish in England;
Jerusalem, Israel.
The author has lived in or travelled around these locations and opens each of the four sections of the book with a short personal anecdote from her experiences. They set the scene for a lyrical and sympathetic study of the very different lifestyles of the locals, how these have been established over time, and the natural, cultural and political forces that subject them to change.
“the liveliness of tradition doesn’t come from where and how it originated, but from its use today.”
Locations are steeped in a constantly evolving history. Residents must adapt as generational exposures change. Modern incomers trying to capture whatever drew them to the place with their tidy, sterile renovations may be welcomed but rarely blend in.
As people have fought wars and moved borders there has been a shift in tolerance to certain visitors. This is particularly striking in the Karst region which the author travels with a friend from Macedonia, also a region of the former Yugoslavia, who is made to feel unwelcome by some who would previously have been his countrymen. Yet the land remains largely the same – the woodlands where walkers are warned of bears, the caves which draw tourists and provide income.
“Geological time is incomprehensibly grander than human history.”
There is the seemingly ubiquitous addition of holiday homes for the wealthy offering heritage chic. Visitors are drawn to admire centuries old churches that have survived through iterations of belief, places of cultic pilgrimage containing:
“graves of important figures […] who, like the rich everywhere, seem to have planned on the front row in paradise.”
In Coleshill the author observes how the working English villages have become satellite residences for wealthy metropolitans. Old traditions have been monetised if not valued by landowners such as the National Trust.
“It’s as if the techniques of land work, whether dry-stone walling or game-keeping, don’t count as knowledge if someone has practised them all his life, but only when they’re acquired by someone young and middle-class. The public schoolboy who grows his hair and chooses a holistic lifestyle as a craft worker, and the graduate of land management courses who plans to spend his life in an estate office, are alike in being valued as ‘experts’. Whereas Walter from number 17, now in his 70’s and bow-legged by arthritis after a lifetime of outdoor work, is regarded as merely old-fashioned; a burden to be laid off.”
Kept awake by the B52s taking off and landing from the neighbouring airfield at Fairford the author mulls the payload of death and destruction they carry to regions currently undergoing catastrophic change. From her rural idyll she notes that the cities of which visitors are most in awe
“have been destroyed almost as often as they’ve been rebuilt.”
Jerusalem is one such place. Each of her fellow visitors is there to come away with a personal experience based on their own ideas of what the place has been, the dreams and nightmares that whole societies entertain.
“Those fantasies devour the places they fix on through colonial exploitation, through war and plunder, even through mass tourism. Every city is as much unreal as real.”
Landscapes are formed over millennia and shape the lives of its settlers. These personal adaptations are passed down, altered by events and evolving attitudes but still umbilically tied to home regions. We are each a constituent of where we live, and it of us:
“We make places our own in part by the stories we dream up about them”
This book is a perceptive, thought-provoking observation of nature with man passing through. The exquisite yet substantive prose is a pleasure to read.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Little Toller Books.
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