The Lone Swallows

by Henry Williamson

Excerpt from The Lone Swallows Most of the papers in this volume are published for the first time. A few have appeared in The Daily Express, The London Evening News, The Field, The Saturday Review, The Outlook, The English Review, and The Wide World Magazine. I am indebted to the Editors of these publications for permission to reprint them; and I am personally grateful to Sir Theodore Cook, of The Field, and to Mn Austin Harrison of The English Review for their encouragement and kindness in criticising and printing my earliest essays. "Winter's Eve," the first attempt to describe the common sights and sounds of the English countryside, I include for reasons of sentiment.

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Henry William Williamson was an English soldier, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels, as well as for his fascist sympathies. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter.

Henry Williamson is best known for a tetralogy of four novels which consists of The Beautiful Years (1921), Dandelion Days (1922), The Dream of Fair Women (1924) and The Pathway (1928). These novels are collectively known as The Flax of Dream and they follow the life of Willie Maddison from boyhood to adulthood in a rapidly changing world.

Reviews

[Tech Nossomy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of periodicals as they featured in a few English newspapers in the 1920s. Describing natural phenomena, mostly birds, both in rural areas as well as city-scapes.

Stylistically much romanticism, but very accessible. The publisher even mentions in the preface that young minds are the more eager learners rather than adults. The author even writes: "swallows already brave electric wires erected by a debased portion of humanity along their airlines.", indicating how engineering features are to the detriment of wildlife as long as they benefit society. The airlines are a term referring to migratory flight paths by birds rather than what we understand today as paths taken by aircraft.

After a few sections the stories start to look alike. Even so, around 2015 the results of a study were published concluding that bird populations in the UK decrease by about 0.5% on average annually. That is about 50% since the 1950s with road traffic alone responsible for tens of millions per year. And our collective behaviour shows that we find this state of affairs completely acceptable and comes as a gratis byproduct. Perhaps this book, recently made available on Project Gutenberg, will help to increase appreciation for what we have, and perhaps even for what we used to have.