The book begins with an introduction by Blythe’s friend, the distinguished writer and broadcaster, Richard Mabey, in which he, rightly, gives a brief biography of Blythe and prepares the reader for what is to come, but what is most touchingly evident is the respect and admiration from Mabey (educated through independent schools and an Alma Mater of St Catherine’s College, Oxford) for Blythe (largely a product of self-education), and the mutual acceptance of unwavering and enduring friendship between the two, despite diverging thoughts on some salient issues. Blythe was a Lay Reader in the Church of England who brushed off suggestions that he might become ordained with the counter-argument that laity have a specific place to play in the work of the church, as part of the quietly gathered congregation, rather than standing outside and above their number – he was ahead of his time; it is only in recent days that the church is slowly opening up to the importance of laity. Mabey claims no organised interest in faith. Blythe’s views on farming and land management occasionally differed from Mabey’s own, but both had the preservation of the countryside and its eco-system at their cores. The things they had in common far outweighed their dissimilarities, and I sensed a deeply warming humility in reading Mabey’s summation of their friendship, In an interview in 2001 for Anglia Ruskin University he described himself as "a chronic reader", in his youth immersing himself in French literature and writing poetry. He served during the early years of the Second World War before being demobbed in early 1944 when he gained, what was at the time. his dream job as a reference librarian in Colchester's Old Library. No one had much money but it was a good pub time, a great time for talking,” he recalled later. “People weren't getting drunk or anything like that. There was no music. There were just quiet places where people used to meet each other. Blythe has long championed the poet John Clare, and there are similarities, as Olivia Laing observes, in Blythe’s “attentive and unsentimental” view of the countryside. When he writes about “gaudy” fields of borage, Blythe knows how it is harvested and where it will be sold. “A very Clare-like knowledge, this, obtained by the steady, perpetual listening that gave Akenfield its power,” Laing writes. By using the words of the real farmworkers and their families, Blythe dealt matter-of-factly with the notions of life, death, farming, religion and the countryside.

Blythe recovered, and also survived a recent fall. His dear ones bring him three meals a day and everyone is determined that he will still be in his home, as he wishes, when he dies. It is an introduction that honours a friendship that is as rare as hen’s teeth, and writing this review following Blythe’s death, my heart goes out to Mr Mabey, who will miss walking and talking along those wildflower strewn pathways and the extraordinary gentleman he had the privilege of knowing so well.Some of the best field naturalists I know grew up in working-class rural communities, skipping school like Billy Casper to practise forms of natural history that bent or broke the law: they ferreted rabbits, collected eggs, broke into quarries, kept pigeons, reared finches, climbed fences to poach for fish. Today they can still spot a linnet’s nest in a furze bush at 50 paces and possess fieldcraft skills that would put many a birder to shame. There’s little room for them in today’s culture of nature appreciation and even less so in nature writing, which tends to entrench a sense that the correct relation to the landscape is through walking and distanced looking. I treasure books such as A Kestrel for a Knave, Cynan Jones’s The Dig and Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming novel At Hawthorn Time for engaging with this marginal pastoral tradition, showing the depths of its attachments to nature, and for refusing to treat those attachments in a romantic, nativist way. Nature is not a singular thing; nor are we and nor are the practices that take us there.

A capacious work that contains multitudes … a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions’ THE SPECTATOR

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

An indication of just how prescient Ronald had been was demonstrated in 2004 when he met Sir Peter Hall and Akenfield cast members Peggy Cole and Garrow Shand at Hoo Church to shoot extras for the DVD release of the film. For many years, Blythe was a lay reader for his local parish, often performing the de facto job of vicar without a stipend. Collins feels Blythe was slightly taken advantage of by the Church of England, despite the Church Times giving him the weekly column that arguably delivered his best work. Mabey, an atheist, admits he has never discussed with Blythe his “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith”. In an interview with this paper in the mid-1970s, he said: “When I wrote Akenfield, I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished just as the book came out.