Changes

|title=Four Fields

|author=Tim Dee

|publisher=Vintage Books

|date=August 2014

|summary=Inherently rural and exclusively impressionistic and personal, this nature ramble across four very diverse fieldlands offers many a fine picture, but wasn't always in perfect focus for me.

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If asked to name, or even think of, four fields, the common man might well struggle, such is the chance of him living in a city. He might not think of the local park as a field, and he may turn to the field of the cloth of gold if a historian, the field of dreams perhaps, or he might at least have something looking like a football pitch in his mind's eye. Tim Dee, not a nature scientist as such but so in tune with the outside world he really doesn't seem to have stopped indoors but to write this book in the past decade, seems like the sort of person who could hardly name four buildings, but would relish the chance to itemise his favourite fields. He is very doubtful any two in Britain are the same. Like snowflakes, then, they can bear a closer examination to show their full picture – and Dee picks on four, across the world and noted for events across the last few thousand years, to focus on. The result is a rich – if at times over-rich – summation of the birdlife above the fields, and everything Dee knows and loves about them.