Four Fields: it seems at first a rather unlikely “scraping the barrel” idea for a book, writing about fields. However, author Tim Dee's fields turn out to be interesting: the first is the fen at the bottom of the author’s garden in Cambridgeshire; another is in southern Zambia; the third is Custer’s killing field at Little Bighorn in Montana; and the last a poignantly polluted field in the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl in the Ukraine.

The fields are real, all grassed over, amount to a few hundred acres in total, and his writing is very readable.

He runs through the seasons with the fen field, starting in the winter, and intersperses the foreign fields in turn.

Dee’s book is a lyrical meditation on humans’ impact on nature, and encourages readers to think about the consequences of our collective actions over time.

It’s factual and often historical, full of relevant and interesting links and it reveals both his depth of knowledge and his highly competent writing skills.

However, it is episodic and at times seems like a collection of Sunday supplement pieces cobbled together.

His love of nature, especially birding, shines through though, as those who have read his earlier The Running Sky might expect.

The one species apart from humans that links the chapters is the swallow, which flies and feeds over all the fields.

The fields do have some things in common, but inevitably much that makes them different. He does wonder if there could be any two fields in Britain that are identical and points out that, “in no field anywhere do you feel properly lost”.

I particularly enjoyed the passages referring to Tolstoy and his relationship to the land and the peasants on his estate, having visited Yasnaya Polyana and seen where Tolstoy was buried in the woods at the place of the little green stick.

Tolstoy’s eldest brother had told him that he had written the secret of happiness on a green stick and had buried the stick. This idea stayed with Tolstoy throughout his life and he asked to be buried there. Dee refers to Tolstoy several times and captures the essence of the writer and his spirit of place admirably.

This is a book that I will return to, for my pleasure increased as I read through it and began to value the writing and the author’s genuine love of fields.