Tales from The Mill by Simon Cooper
When I launched The Pilgrim magazine back in 2018, I never really understood how much we interact with the natural world on a daily working basis. I think that’s partly due to me living in a city, and the world which I recall to be more ‘countryfied’ seems like another world from the days growing up in Shropshire and Lincolnshire. However, it’s books such as Tales from The Mill where Simon Cooper feeds both my expectations and imagination.
After more than two decades living in a thousand-year-old watermill, dating back to the Domesday book, on a rare chalkstream in Nether Wallop Mill in Hampshire, we join both the author and the residential wildlife, as they follow the seasons, the trials and tribulations of village life, the committees for everything, and the all-important fetes which not only bring the communities together every year.
Starting off with the spring, Tales from The Mill, begins with a world bringing new life, whether it’s the crops, the trout stock, the rivers, Arthur the arthritic swan, or Kuschta and her pups, we feel we are being welcomed into a world which could have been created by Kenneth Grahame; I almost expected Ratty and Mr Toad to arrive at some point on some escapade or other. Our setting feels very pastoral and one in which one can dream.
However, beneath the tapestry of bucolic magnetism, there lies the very real daily toll of maintaining this thousand-year-old mill from a run-down shell to a livable, working dwelling, and the ever-increasing threats to the chalkstreams, which are increasingly damaged by industrial farming chemicals, sewage and climate change, which brings an eternal battle for survival not just for the waterways, but also the life that dwells in them.
In Tales from The Mill, Simon Cooper not only brings his passion for the natural world in which he has found himself to the pages of this very lovely book. I really enjoyed reading it, it is as calming as the open spaces which I conjured up from my youth. However, with the underlying message that our natural spaces need to be protected, it also serves as a poignant and solemn reminder that not all tales are happy from start to finish, and that we are indeed masters of our own tales from our own mills.
- Tales from The Mill by Simon Cooper is published by 10°C Publishing (£22.50). To order a copy, go to www.tealeavesandreads.co.uk
