Botanist, academic and nature writer who wrote books on countryside, woodlands and trees
Late in the summer of 2013 I took an unusual package to the post office in the village where I live. Inside the box, stuffed with newspaper and packing tape, were Oliver Rackham’s walking boots. First class. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He had been visiting us in Dorset to deliver photographs and discuss his fist draft of The Ash Tree, and when the taxi bustled him away to the train after lunch, the boots were left behind in a corner of the office.
Oliver came to west Dorset every year to lead a short course at the Kingcombe Centre, and was doing exactly this in 2007 when I joined him for a day’s walk around the Kingcombe and Toller valleys. We looked for apotropaic markings on the clunch walls of local barns and cottages, we walked up Mary’s Well, a sunken lane in Kingcombe that buoyed with hedge-life. In the afternoon we jumped into a battered mini-bus and drove to Little Toller, where I showed him the iron sluice gates and gulleys of an abandoned water meadow, the extraordinary figures carved into the font at St Basil’s church, and the refectory building with its stone mullion windows, cruck beams, and the small sandstone figure of a bagpipe-player that is said to indicate the celebrations that the Knights of Hospitallers enjoyed under the thatch.
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