Each of the individuals considered in the book had a different relationship to landscape. This reflected the varying circumstances, situations, events and influences (including cultural influences) that shaped their lives. Despite these contrasts, it is possible to identify four broad groupings. Adherers like Hallam and Cresswell were motivated by a passionate need to maintain their connection with a cherished past. Rural landscapes associated with this past served as a guarantee of its continuity. Withdrawers such as Dickinson and Spear Smith sought to escape from an oppressive present, be that family tensions and social prejudice as in Dickinson’s case, or Spear Smith’s vocational difficulties. Restorers turned to the countryside as a place in which they could reconnect with and re-energize belief systems that had been challenged, disrupted or pushed aside by personal exigencies or professional demands – medical practice for Johnston and probation work for Bissell. Finally, Explorers like Barmes and Catley valued rural landscapes above all as sites of self-discovery and self-development.

Ostensibly the most privileged of the diarists considered in this book, Violet Dickinson had one of the most difficult lives. She had a fraught, distant relationship with her mother, her often-absent art dealer father played an ambivalent role in her life, and for many years the family had no permanent home. As a young woman, underneath the superficial, nouveau-riche assurance, Dickinson was deeply uncertain of her direction in life. She fled her high-society milieu for the safety of an East Kent smallholding, in company with her younger brother Cedric. Rural self-sufficiency and craftwork appears to have provided a measure of stability, fulfilment and peace of mind for Dickinson. However, her successive moves to smallholdings in Sussex and then Somerset were indicative of continuing emotional tensions (some linked to her closet lesbianism), and her efforts to construct a new ‘family’ about her in these secluded rural settings were only partially successful.

Landscape played many roles in Beatrix Cresswell’s life. Left as a young woman by her older siblings to look after their ageing and querulous mother, she sought relief by walking on nearby Haldon Hill or taking long cycle rides through the Devon lanes, mud and snow notwithstanding. Flower-gathering ministered to her sense of beauty and gave opportunities to connect with friends. She delighted in Dartmoor’s wildness and open spaces, which spoke to her refusal to submit to personal or social constraints. Above all, her ruralism expressed deep-seated loyalties formed early in life to the Anglican faith in which she had been raised, to her county and to her beloved clerical father, whose unexpected death affected her profoundly. These unwavering commitments came together in the central project of her life, a remarkably ambitious attempt to visit every one of Devon’s Anglican churches, which took her up hill and down dale across the Devon countryside. For Cresswell, what mattered most about the countryside was that, in her eyes, it was stable and unchanging, guaranteeing continuity in a way she had learnt she could not rely on other aspects of life to provide.

A friend and follower of Walt Whitman’s, John Johnston loved the countryside for many reasons. In one sense he was an Adherer like Hallam and Cresswell: the landscape he loved most of all was that of his native Annan with its river, bridge and meadows. He was also an Explorer, whose careful observations of nature were prompted by a quest for spiritual more than scientific knowledge, and a Withdrawer, who repeatedly turned his back on dirty, smoky Bolton to find refuge in nature. Yet more than he was Adherer, Explorer or Withdrawer, Johnston was a Restorer. He went to the countryside to recompose something that was impaired and disordered by the constant turbulence to which his very active life exposed him. ‘Loafing’ quietly in secluded rural locations played a crucial role in sustaining the ethical and spiritual framework he drew on to endure professional difficulties and personal losses.

Always at the centre of things, Sadie Barmes loved the warmth, merriment and camaraderie of organized camping with youth groups such as the Girl Guides. The countryside provided a setting for these occasions. Out in the fields or woods, distractions, diluting elements and outside loyalties could not intrude and the camp could temporarily become an all-embracing, self-sufficient community. The natural environment also became a means of personal discovery, development and fulfilment for Sadie. Long, footsore tramps over the South Downs brought a kind of spiritual union with the landscape induced by physical exhaustion. In the woods, Sadie found transcendental ecstasy expressed in spontaneous dancing with friends or alone. Thus the countryside provided a natural space in which, unhindered by convention or social expectations, Sadie could discover herself and unite with others.