Sitting in the folds of the Essex countryside at the end of a sunken lane, the modest home of writer Ronald Blythe is to become an unlikely nature reserve.
When he died in 2023 at the age of 100 the acclaimed author of Akenfield, a classic account of rapidly changing rural life in the 1960s, left his ancient farmhouse to Essex Wildlife Trust.
Bottengoms, an overgrown garden home to badgers, hornets and the occasional singing nightingale, will be opened up as a sanctuary for people and wildlife – a place of education and inspiration for writers and artists, young and old.
The three-up, three-down yeoman farmer’s house, which in part dates back to the 15th century, was bequeathed to Blythe in 1977 by the artists John and Christine Nash who had moved there in the 1940s, meaning it has hosted 80 years of artistic endeavour.
“It’s not our natural territory but it’s an amazing gift for the trust,” said Rich Yates, the chief executive of Essex Wildlife Trust. “Ronnie is an icon of nature writing and we need him to be an icon of nature conservation too. If conservation is going to be successful it needs the best creative minds working for its cause. John Nash and Ronnie wanted it to be a place where nature and art could intersect – not just writing and painting but any artistic forms that have a nature conservation message.”
The house’s new role will include welcoming visiting schoolchildren and students. Essex Wildlife Trust, working closely with an advisory group featuring Blythe’s biographer Ian Collins alongside writers and academics Jules Pretty and James Canton, says it welcomes further ideas for how Bottengoms can connect people, nature and artistic creation.
Blythe was famously hospitable, and local children used to camp in his garden while young writers made pilgrimages to his – always open – door. He once happily allowed your Guardian correspondent to perch in a tree in his garden one evening to watch the badgers living below.
When the trust opens the house to visitors – after a programme of much-needed repairs – it will not host high volumes. “It’s not practical and it’s not in keeping with the spirit of the place – people need to be able to come and commune with the spirit of Ronnie,” said Yates. “I think of him as a modern-day Peter Pan or Tom Bombadil from Tolkien – the spirit of the countryside, some force of nature. And Bottengoms is the architectural expression of that. You need to have an experience of Ronnie when you come here.”
The house has the quality of an elixir, thinks Collins, whose new biography of Blythe’s remarkable life has received glowing reviews.
Blythe was born in 1922 and grew up in grinding rural poverty – so poor his family relied on straw from their cousins to stuff their mattresses. Lacking a university education, he read voraciously, and became friends with a lively bohemian artistic set including EM Forster and painters John Nash and Cedric Morris, whose home, Benton End, is nearby.
Akenfield, Blythe’s stark and poetic portrait of a Suffolk village at the time of the second agricultural revolution, was a smash hit: 15 million people watched the film adaptation when it was broadcast in 1975.
“He’s given all these marginalising labels – a rural writer, a Christian writer. He’s just a great writer,” said Collins. “He’s John Clare, he’s Thomas Hardy, he’s completely wonderful and he got better. Most of his books are published from his 80th year, including his best ones. He possessed an amazingly light, philosophical and time-travelling perspective in 400-word essays that connected the universe.”
According to Collins, the good health and tranquility Blythe found here helped him live long, and in astonishingly good mental and physical health.
“There is an amazing feeling of health and wellbeing in this place,” said Collins. “Ronnie never took an aspirin or paracetamol until he was 90. It was ridiculous when we gave him a panic button towards the end of his life because this was a man who never panicked. I’m sure my blood pressure goes down in this house and this garden.”
Blythe celebrated his 100th birthday at Bottengoms two years ago with the publication of Next to Nature, a compilation of his weekly columns about rural life, ancient and modern, with admiring contributions from writers including Vikram Seth and Richard Mabey.
Blythe was cared for by a circle of friends he called “dear ones” until he died peacefully at home in January 2023.
His friends were then amazed to discover that Blythe, who never lived with anyone, never learned to drive and rarely travelled, left a fortune of £500,000 squirrelled away in 20 savings accounts. This will help fund the urgent repairs required on the house.
“From the moment he was working as a writer – from 1955 – he paid his way,” said Collins. “All his life he was in fear of the workhouse and he never spent anything.”
Yates added: “We want to make sure the house continues as Ronnie’s life force. It can be a force for everything that he represented. We need that now more than ever.”
