A Home for All Seasons

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What starts out as a straightforward house history morphs into something else, a wide-ranging meditation on place and past, taking in climate change, rural depopulation, the Reformation and folklore. I listened to the audible audio edition but it isn't on Goodreads yet and I can't find the asin number to add it.

A wonderful meeting of memoir and landscape, both rigorous and freewheeling, expansive and intimate, rendered in dreamy prose.Engrossingly fusing domestic history, memoir and art, Gavin Plumley’s A Home for All Seasons tells the fascinating story of a couple’s journey of discovering the full past of their ancient Herefordshire house. Corvus Atlantic’s commercial fiction list which includes women’s, historical, romance, sci-fi, crime and thriller.

Beautifully written and structured, Plumley’s writing is vivid and captures bucolic scenes perfectly. We get a little of the history of Stepps House in Pembridge but then are too many "filler" sections, presumably to pad out the word count. I don’t know if the filling stations are still disturbing the village, but if they are, there are plenty of compensations: a 14th-century church with, so the story goes, the marks of Cromwellian musket balls still showing in its west door; a spectacular pagoda-like bell house dating back to the 1200s; an early 16th-century market hall; 17th-century almshouses; and streets stacked to the gills with picturesquely wonky black-and-white houses.

Those involved Protestants escaping mainland Europe and the consequent difficulties they had in integrating with the existing population. If I’m honest, the art history was less interesting to me than the social history aspect of the book, but it has inspired me to take more interest in historical detail and the bibliography included will be invaluable for this. What I found a bit of a bore was the author (there I have said it) he seemed to drone on a bit if I am honest. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Unfortunately, it veered away from that and turned into an odd sort of history of the English village and a discussion of one particular artist’s set of paintings.