One Moor Chance

If there is a central question in Madeleine Bunting's intricately layered book, it is of how to belong. Her narrative is propelled by a Native American saying - "Wisdom sits in places" - and her chosen place is the "Plot", an acre of land in the North Yorkshire moors. The Plot was her father's, a place that she often felt alienated from, or oppressed by, but which was, for him, the foundation of life.

Bunting's journey into the depths of the well-trodden earth of the Plot, its history and its politics begins with the death of her father, "a man who had been so hard to love, so hard in his loving". Her prologue asks an awkward question that seems to have come straight from a publisher's script: "Can I discover the Plot for myself, and in doing so find the difficult man who was my father, and finally lay all the ghosts to rest?"

The question does Bunting a disservice as a precursor to her investigation, suggesting a book that will wrestle with sentimentalised notions of filial relationships and self-discovery. In fact, Bunting is much more ambitious. Not only that, she is subtle, avoiding a quasi-therapeutic exercise and embarking instead on a much more meditative voyage guided by the life of her father.

Her recollections of him are suffused with sadness. John Bunting was a London-born sculptor, consumed by an idealised image of rural England, which he attempted to realise by making his home in a remote corner of North Yorkshire. Weaving in and out of his life, Bunting tells the story of his acre, the place where he felt he belonged.

Bunting goes back to the very beginnings of life on the Plot to the Romans and the Middle Ages, to the era of roaming wolves and banditry on the moors and half a millennium spent driving cattle from Scotland to London's meat markets. She brings the drovers, the men who guided the cattle south, to life, imagining them drinking ale at a local farmhouse "thick with mud and shit" underfoot.

Her narrow focus on this patch of land forces her to burrow into an array of local histories, from the Cistercian monks who lived and worked nearby for centuries, to the story of the sheep that scatter the hillsides. Through the prism of a single acre, she plays witness not only to the moors, but to England and its people - how our lives have transformed over the past thousand years, and how our connection with the land has itself changed.

Bunting is equal parts historian, journalist and diarist. She has the historian's love of research, relishing the detail and the sources, as well as the unearthing of letters and diaries. But as the excavation of the Plot drives her through time, past the Industrial Revolution and on to the present, the journalist takes over. She interviews local farmers and challenges gamekeepers on their conservation strategies. Her intellectual engagement with the place is balanced by her physical and emotional relationship with it - the love of the earth beneath her feet. And it is the sheer force of this emotion that keeps the book so alive.

Towards the end, she reflects on what she has learned in the years she has spent circling the Plot, on foot and on the page. She concludes that belonging is about "how one pays attention". Attentiveness is a quality she cultivates in her prose. Even when locked in the more intense periods of her family history, or her father's ill health and decline, she maintains a quiet distance.

Yet her dispassionate gaze does not prevent her from revelling in linguistic detail. This is evident as she lists, "entranced", the names of the moths that live on the Plot ("Purple Bar; Small Phoenix; Dark Marbled Carpet") and those of the wild flowers that grow on the verge nearby ("knapweed, ox-eye daisies, harebells, buttercups"). She is often lyrical as she describes walking the moors, the romance of the place permeating her writing. But Bunting can switch gracefully from the elegiac to the wry. The suburbs of London, for example, "are where the city comes to play golf and be buried".

In an effort to separate herself at last from the Plot, Bunting takes to the air. Before she flies off in a glider, she explains the mechanics of staying airborne. The glider must seek out cumulus clouds so that the thermal current within the cloud can suck the aircraft upwards. As you leave the cloud, you lose height, dipping towards the earth until you find another cloud to lift the glider again.

This spiralling and falling makes for a perfect description of Bunting's achievement in this book. She swoops over her subject with the ease and grace of a glider.

Sophie Elmhirst is a contributing writer at the New Statesman

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