Excerpt from Bird School by Adam Nicolson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The bit-by-bit practices of Wealden farming enabled a kind of heterogeneity that was patchy in both time and space, precisely the environment in which a wide variety of natural life can thrive. If there was any place in which to come to understand birds, this careful, knitted and half-broken farm was it.

I had always loved one of our smallest fields at the bottom of the farm called Hollow Flemings, named after the man who also farmed its neighbour Great Flemings long ago. For many years we used it as rough grazing, the cows picking at the grasses and shoving their noses into the edges of the wood. It is tucked away in one of the small side valleys with which the land is pleated here. Dyer's greenweed grew in the summer and meadow brown butterflies used to flitter across it in June and July, pairs of them dancing around themselves as they fled across the hillside in dark, double, guttering flames.

Then, one wet winter, two things happened. The stream at the foot of the field, gorged with rain, started to cut down into its bed. At the same time the springs in the field itself were running hard, lubricating the upper layer of clay. One morning I found about three acres of Hollow Flemings had slipped, leaving a little cliff at the top of it, two or three feet high, and a tumble of fallen and half-fallen trees at the bottom where the clay was now clogging the stream. Over the next weeks, still more of the land slumped downwards. It was clear that the use of that field was over. We couldn't mow it or even fence it and so we let it go. It was no longer any part of the farmed world.

Brambles bubbled up into thickets that no deer could enter. Willows and alders sprouted beneath them, followed by the blackthorn and birches. Within a year or two young ash trees were raising their heads above the thorns. Now young oaks, some fifteen feet high, stand around the old landslip, the tips of their branches just beginning to touch, perhaps the product of jays forgetting a cache of acorns they had buried there.

Garden-scale farming: part of a 1600 map of the Sussex Weald now in East Sussex Record Office

Deer graze in the narrow tongues of grass that persist between the clumps of new woodland. And then, one spring, two nightingales made the brambly thickets their territories, one at each end of the landslip, sigh-shouting at the night sky for any wives that might be passing.

In one way, that field is a ruin; in another it is reaching for a kind of wholeness, a reassertion of itself that shows abandonment is not abandonment but a form of emergence and release. The forgotten field, years before anyone much spoke of rewilding, had rewilded itself.

I met a man on the road one day – we were both out walking – and started to chat. He had worked at Perch Hill as a boy in the 1940s, looking after the cattle, making the hay. He looked at me quizzically when I told him how much I loved being there and after a pause asked the question that had been on the tip of his tongue. 'Perch Hill, still slipping, is it?'

Yes, still slipping, as fields of other farms in this valley are. When I went to the local county record office I searched through the documents that might describe this farm. It was a detailed story, going back through a sequence of tenants and landowners, fifty-one names over six centuries, their mortgages and debts, their legacies and inheritances. In the 1820s it had belonged to a local estate and a surveyor had mapped it, listing one of our fields as Slide Field. Neighbouring farms were equally rough, their sixteenth-century parcels labelled as Slidden Mede, Little Bramble, Broomy Field, the Stumblets, the Wagmires. None was easy.

Despite the roughness, an organised life was being lived here. Over and over again, copying out the listings from the earlier documents, the lawyers described Perch Hill's 'Stables Outhouses Edifices and Buildings Closes yards gardens pastures arable orchards and woodlands' like a diagram of order, an embroidered sampler of rural life. But twice in among them, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents, a phrase jumped out at me: rough grounds.

Excerpted from Bird School by Adam Nicolson. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Nicolson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.