My great-grandfather John Bent Wallis, writer and painter
My great-grandfather, John Bent Wallis, was a self-taught painter and journalist. He painted the picture above in 1901 showing the …
Category Archives: Crich and the farms
A soccer mom from Boston, Massachusetts, goes fashion forward in the Peak District of Derbyshire
This is a piece I wrote during our “trial run” when my daughters and I spent four months living in …
Sheep Drive
–Gordon’s sheep in a field near the village of Fritchley “How did the sheep drive go?” Sue asks. Her husband …
Stone-picking
This afternoon my cousin David and I headed up to the top fields to pick stones. It’s back-breaking work, but …
Cattle Drive
This morning Frank had to get all of his fifty bullocks to the barnyard for their TB shots. Most of …
Muck-spreading on my Uncle Frank’s farm
The smell of manure lies heavily over the countryside this week in mid-February, and there was muck all over …
My grandfather’s pleached hedge
Today I went in search of a hedge that my grandfather, Henry Victor Smith, pleached as a young man over …
How to Make a Christmas Wreath
During the spring and summer, my cousin Julie runs a one-woman plant business on the farm in the Peak District …
A moon, a lost key, and the wondrousness of cousins!
After the beautiful mildness of the last three months, the frigid weather has come as a shock. When I went …
Bonfire Night: Burning the Guy and a Recipe for Bonfire Toffee
November 5th is Guy Fawkes day in England; the anniversary of the day in 1605 when a band of men, …
The Year of Living Englishly 