Perch Hill

Adam Nicolson left London for an ancient, run-down Sussex farm called Perch Hill. He was looking for Arcadia, but found instead a mixture of chaos and beauty. Over the three years that he describes, he struggled with dock leaves, bloody-minded sheep, suspicious neighbours and ancient woods.

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Somewhere between an imaginary rural idyll packed with breathtaking scenery and charming rustics, and the hard end of real farming life, Adam Nicholson found Perch Hill, a run-down farm in the Sussex Weald. Driven there by the pressures of metropolitan life, he and his family moved to the failed farm and set about trying to put it to rights, working the fields again, raising sheep and (annoying) fowl, and receiving visits from BBC Radio 4's "On Your Farm" programme and a Haiku-obsessed poet along the way. This is the story of three years sent building a personal Arcadia, full of insight into rural life and society.