Page 12 - Mark Cocker News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

In Field Work : What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land, Bella Bathurst identifies a series of painful truths about Britain’s relationship with its land. This is a country whose self-identity is closely bound up with its agriculture, and yet farmers have, over the course of a generation, become “the sort of profession which everyone disrespected without really understanding”. Farmers are responsible, so the narrative of several books goes – see Mark Cocker’s Feral, for instance – for genocidal cruelty to the animals they process, and for the destructi...

Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows is an excellent, balanced portrait of fisher folk in Britain Fort’s new book is alive to the poetry that stirs the human soul while fishing.   According to Tom Fort, the carbon dating of fish traps found at the Thames-side localities we now know as Vauxhall, Chelsea and Hammersmith is proof that fishing was part of our national life from at least AD 650. Fort, the author of this excellent, balanced portrait of fisher folk in Britain, goes on to argue that devices of a similar kind were probably in operation on British rivers since humans first arrived on th...

When an unusual bird publication reached bookshops in 2005 it was greeted with universal acclaim and admiration.

Sunny Hogshaw: this photo was was taken by local naturalist Mark Cocker The mum-of-one, who has lived on Hogshaw Villas Road since 2007, described Hogshaw - bordered by allotments, homes and the railway - as “a little oasis”. She said: “We’re a very close-knit community all living close to the field - if there’s ever any trouble we deal with it as a community. “If this is allowed to happen it’s going to change the place so much - that green space is so important because none of us really have gardens.” As well as the loss of a crucial green space residents fear the traffic inc...

Want to read more? At the start of the pandemic in March we took the decision to make online access to our news free of charge by taking down our paywall. At a time where accurate information about Covid-19 was vital to our community, this was the right decision – even though it meant a drop in our income. In order to help safeguard the future of our journalism, the time has now come to reinstate our paywall, However,  rest assured that access to all Covid related news will still remain free. To access all other news will require a subscription, as it did pre-pandemic. The good news is tha...