Pastoral Peculiars: Curiosities in the Countryside - Softcover

They could be off-beat water towers, singular obelisks or jackdawed hilltop follies. These are the isolated curios of the English countryside- the landmarks that tick-off our rural progressions, oddities out of the corner of the eye that always raise a query, a need for an answer. Are those really army badges scoured from that downland chalk? Why do those stout brick castles have no doors or windows? Was that a towering gibbet or a sinister trick of the light? Pastoral Peculiars puts us into metaphorical wellington boots, taking us out into the fields and scurrying along the hedgerows to dig out the curious and to tell us the stories that placed them there. The fading reminders of past industriousness alone in a sheep pasture; dressed stone for an abbey rising up out of fenland peat and the discarded and forgotten icons of rural life still wanting to tell their tales. In his inimitable style, Peter Ashley gives us an alternative view of the vaguely familiar, an idiosyncratic account in words and beautifully atmospheric photographs of the blips in the measured pulse of the English countryside.