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Join us as Gail Simmons explores her journey in ‘The Country of Larks’ as part of our Travel Series events taking place in July.
‘In the Footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Footprint of HS2’
In the autumn of 1874 a young, unknown writer called Robert Louis Stevenson walked across the Chiltern Hills, observing the natural world at a time when England was still largely agrarian and when most people still earned their living from working the land.
Almost 150 years later travel writer, journalist and long-time Oxford resident Gail Simmons follows in Stevenson’s footsteps, tracing the changes in the landscape since he walked here, and weaving in her own recollections of growing up in the Chilterns. At heart of the narrative is the imminent arrival of HS2, the high-speed railway from London to Birmingham which will bring other changes as it tears through the Chilterns AONB.
An eloquent, evocative and timely contemplation of the changing nature of life and landscape in the English countryside, the book is both a pilgrimage in honour of Robert Louis Stevenson and an homage to the Chilterns, a land that was once so rich and diverse, so bursting with birdsong, that Stevenson named it ‘The Country of Larks’.
This event is free to attend and everyone is welcome, please register in advance. For all enquiries, please email [email protected] or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.