Quote

My father was a progressive farmer, and was always ready to lay aside an old plough if he could replace it with one better constructed for its work. All through life, I have ever been ready to buy a better plough.

Somerset has a wonderful wildness about it - it hasn't been tamed. This is farming country, and there's a realness here - I love it.

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.

I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.

I'm from northern Virginia, but I grew up next to the West Virginia border, so it was hills and farmland. We had that sense of adventure you get from growing up around old farmhouses and lazy, rolling hills, you know?

My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.

I spent a lot of time on farms when I was growing up, and I've been obsessed with the practical logic of farmyards - the turning radius of tractors, where the chickens and ducks might go. It's not a place where stand-alone aesthetic decisions make a lot of sense.

West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.

While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.