Everyone likes a map. This is the route for the Richard Jefferies 175th birthday walk worked out by @richardjefferiesmuseum -- here's to wild lives in southern counties #RichardJefferies #RichardJefferies175

Increasingly the writing and thought of second half of the C19 seems strange and unfamiliar. I have been slow returning to Richard Jefferies. This is a very peculiar book, especially in its thinking about the body. The Richard Jefferies Museum has made a 175th birthday walk, making a loop from Worthing, through Hove, over the High Weald, to Sydenham and South London suburbs, then out west to Swindon. I want to say. 'I'm in.' #RichardJefferies #RichardJefferies175

Our gardens are coming alive again!

Photos by Suzie Simmons.

#Nature #NatureObservations #RichardJefferies #Wildlife #WildlifeWalk #RichardJefferies175

"Time changes the places that knew us, and if we go back in after years, still even then it is not the old spot; the gate swings differently, new thatch has been put on the old gables, the road has been widened, and the sward the driven sheep lingered on is gone."
The Open Air

#175WildlifeWalk #NatureObservations #Nature #RichardJefferies #richardjefferies175

The Richard Jefferies Wildlife Walk we have planned this year encourages all of us to get out and walk, to pay attention to what's around us, and to let us know what you see in terms of the nature around you.

https://www.richardjefferies.org/wildlife-walk

Photo by Ruth Read.

#RichardJefferies #RichardJefferies175 #Wildlife #Nature

You can hardly tell them apart! #RichardJefferies #Sculpture

The wonderful Steve Cox - of Mr. Love and Justice fame - spotted this beautiful marble bust of Richard Jefferies while visiting Harrogate, and it is now on long-term loan to us, where it's being looked after by our team and our own, more portable, Mr Jefferies.

Our first #NatureKids of 2023 was held during a week of good weather, the children were amazing, the art was colourful - what more could we ask?!

"Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and many-sided colours. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw."
'Nature and Books', Field and Hedgerow #RichardJefferies

"Legion is a little word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the
woods are brown with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless succession; all the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these."

Those were the words of Richard Jefferies in Field and Hedgerow – Hours of Spring.

🧵

Photograph by Rosie Tozer.

#natureobservations #175wildlifewalk #richardjefferies175 #nature #richardjefferies #butterflyconservation #butterflies #conservation

This is a promotional clip for #WildIsles , the new David Attenborough-fronted documentary.

https://youtu.be/GoIneF4hQgs

If you're involved with our walk this year (tip: anyone can join in!), we'd love contributions to our next book. More details here:
https://www.richardjefferies.org/wildlife-walk

Wild Isles will be broadcast on the BBC this spring.

Photo by Rosie Tozer.

#175wildlifewalk #natureobservations #nature #richardjefferies #richardjefferies175

This quote, from Richard Jefferies' Field and Hedgerow, seems very apt: "There was everything to repel—the cold, the frost, the hardness, the snow, dark sky and ground, leaflessness; the very furze chilled and all benumbed. Yet the forest was still beautiful. There was no day that we did not, all of us, glance out at it and admire it, and say something about it."

#nature #richardjefferies

It was another cold and frosty week at Nature Tots - but we are starting to see signs of life in our gardens! We found some beautiful frosty patterns on our library windows, plus #snowdrops blooming and daffodils pushing their way into the sun!

#nature #richardjefferies

Richard Jefferies, writing in The Hills and the Vale, put it this way: "Only by walking hand in hand with nature, only by a reverent and loving study of the mysteries for ever around us, is it possible to disabuse the mind of the narrow view, the contracted belief that time is now and eternity to-morrow. Eternity is to-day."

#175wildlifewalk #natureobservations #nature #richardjefferies #richardjefferies175 #eternityistoday

The museum is home to a robin (or two). They can sometimes be very daring - have you spotted them perched on a bench here or a branch there?

Photo of (dare we say) our robin by Rosie Tozer.

Richard Jefferies, writing in Wild Life in a Southern County, made this observation (cont'd):

#175wildlifewalk #natureobservations #nature #richardjefferies #richardjefferies175

Here in northern winter (according to a Christian calendar that is eminently secularisable), today counts as #PloughMonday -- a day to ask blessing for tools and objects of use. Here are the superb pages (226-230) about the plough in Nature Near London, 1883, by #RichardJefferies -- who was a modern, not a nostalgic writer. In an earlier section he describes a scene of ploughing with the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in the distance. https://archive.org/details/naturenearlondonj00jeffiala/page/230/mode/2up