In The English Path Kim Taplin explores how writers and poets have written about footpaths and bridleways, from Jane Austen to Iain Sinclair, celebrating these vital routes, which sustained rural life for centuries.
Until the twentieth century most country dwellers made their short journeys on foot, via footpaths and bridleways which connected villages, and took people to neighbouring villages, to church, to market, to their places of work. In The English Path Kim Taplin (1943-2024) explores the way that poets and writers, from Jane Austen to Iain Sinclair, have written about these vital routes, which sustained rural life for centuries, and which were also powerful visions of arriving and leaving, but are today under constant threat.
Our new edition, the most recent addition to the Nature Classics series, has an introduction by the writer and broadcaster Mary-Ann Ochota, and a foreword by Phoebe Taplin, Kim's daughter.
