This Is Not My Land

This is Not My Land is award-winning travel writer Caroline Mills’ enchanting narrative about life on a small farm in the heart of the English countryside. In 1995, when Caroline and her partner Paul were in their early 20s, they bought 65 acres of land on the edge of the north Cotswolds. Initially, they regarded it innocently as just land – something, hopefully, from which to make a living. Then they gave the land a name, and it became something. In almost 500 years, Caroline’s land has had just four owners, including King Henry VIII. Walking repeatedly around the same five meadows and woodland, she witnesses how the farm and the surrounding landscape evolve across three decades. Realising that five fields and a wood is a big world in a small space, Caroline’s nature writing exemplifies slow travel in its most microcosmic form. This is Not My Land brings the English countryside to life through a series of vignettes or ‘journeys’. Learn how Caroline and her partner learn to manage and expand a designated wildlife site, how they build an eco-house and how they interact with nature. Join Caroline in finding enjoyment in wildlife: the barn owl that tracks up and down the meadow at dusk, the plumes of chimney-sweeper moths that feed on the pignuts in spring, the migrant redwing flock that she awaits every autumn, and the ecstatic excitement of a skylark’s arrival after 20 years of waiting. This is Not My Land recounts 30 years of living on and with the land, discovering an extraordinary 1,000-year history, transitioning to organic certification before it became fashionable (again), raising a family that becomes integral to the farm’s identity, and learning its sense of place. Ultimately, Caroline realises that what she once regarded as merely ‘land’ is an increasingly rare and exceptional mosaic landscape – one with which she falls in love so deeply that it becomes unthinkable to her that anyone would wish to harm it, least of all those that with the power and duty to protect.

Caroline Mills (carolinemills.net) is an experienced, award-winning travel writer, specialising in travel throughout the UK and Europe, who has written or contributed to ten books. More importantly, she is a country girl. Although she loves inspiring others to travel through writing extensively about the countryside, she likes nothing better than to return to the farm on the edge of the Cotswolds, where she lives with her husband and three children. Having moved no more than five miles from where she grew up, she has called the region home for more than 50 years – and draws on her deep local knowledge to write Bradt’s The Cotswolds (Slow Travel). It is to her farm, bought 30 years ago, that Mills turns her attention in This is Not My Land book – inspired by her passionate love of the countryside to paint a personal portrait of a very special place.