An amazing farming film

I’ve just read Henry Williamson’s The Story of a Norfolk Farm in which he describes how in 1936 he used an inheritance to buy a small farm at Stiffkey, near the Norfolk coast. Best known for writing Tarka the Otter Williamson was able to subsidise his farming by writing and managed for several years to do both, albeit burning lots of midnight oil.

Talking with the Chairman of the Henry Williamson Society I learned that HW had known Adrian Bell, a Suffolk farming writer, and also Lilias Rider Haggard, whose father also was a farmer and author.

But what really caught my attention was a BBC film titled Vanishing Hedgerows which was made in 1972 and written, and narrated by Williamson itself. The film compares farming with horses as Williamson did in the 1930s, with farming in the 1970s, which I did whenever I could, helping my father in law on his farm.

Each new discovery takes me closer to my next book, and perhaps a PhD too.