Out on the edge of things

NATURE BOOK

Common Ground by Rob Cowen

(Windmill Books, £8.99)

ROB Cowen’s Common Ground is the nature book that has stayed with me more then any other in recent years. It is part memoir, part nature study, part imagination. A vision of impending fatherhood, and a study of how much there is to see in the most unpromising scrap of land on the edge of town.

Published in 2015, it is a book about looking closely. Moving from London to Harrogate, in Yorkshire, Cowen finds himself drawn again and again to this tangled stretch of pylon-studded edge land where he begins to take notice of the flora and fauna to be found there.

There has been a lot of interest in the marginal space between town and country over the last 10 years, but Cowen in particular has a real eye for the poetry of exurbia.

That said, some critics had trouble with Cowen’s push towards the poetic in his prose, others with his willingness to imagine what it is like to be other than human.

But the book’s imaginative sequences – whether told from the point of view of a dying fox, a roebuck being hunted, or even a First World War soldier spending the moments before going over the top thinking of nettles – have a real charge to them.

The result is a book that is both an education and an immersion. “We project all we are and all we know onto landscape,” Cowen writes at one point. “And, if we’re open to it, the landscape projects back into us. Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and a meshing that can feel a bit like love.”

NATURE ON TV Primates

BBC One, Sunday, 8.15pm

Narrated by Chris Packham, the first episode of this new series looks at primate survival strategies, as bush babies try to survive the South African winter and bearded capuchins brave the heat in Brazil.