Peter Fiennes – Chipping Campden Literature Fest

27th April, 2018

‘Bad things happen in woods…It’s possible that we have cleared and destroyed our woods because we fear their wildness’
Chapter 8: Blood in The Forest
Peter Fiennes’ illustrated talk on The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain. ‘Fiennes mixes a deep knowledge of trees with an acute eye for the best writing about them, quoting liberally from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kipling and Tennyson. He acknowledges that the “lives we have chosen are prising us apart from the natural world, and we are more likely to experience a woodland through watching Countryfile than by breathing in the actual, living trees”, then sets out a clear path by which we might reconnect with nature…It feels set to become a classic of the genre’ The Observer
‘Steeped in poetry, science, folklore…& magic Fiennes is an eloquent, elegiac chronicler of copses…& the wildwood’ Sunday Express
‘A passionate ramble through Britain’s complicated relationship with its woodland’ Daily Mail
Peter Fiennes as publisher for Time Out published their city guides as well as books about London’s trees and Britain’s countryside. He is the author of To War With God, a moving account of his grandfather’s service as a chaplain in the First World War.