This Is Not My Land

A new Cotswolds farming memoir that offers nature writing and the ultimate in slow travel

This Is Not My Land is award-winning travel writer Caroline Mills' personal and powerful memoir of owning and managing a 65-acre farm on the edge of the north Cotswolds with her husband.

It follows Caroline and her husband through 30 years: from the original purchase (which they had thought would be impossible) to living on and with the land; discovering an extraordinary history stretching back over 1,000 years; moving to organic certification before it became fashionable (again); and raising a family that became part of the farm's identity.

They walk and work the same five fields and woodland over and over again: from the water meadow

beside the river that floods the butterbur in winter, to the top field where brilliant yellow bird’s foot trefoil highlight the stripes of medieval ridge and furrow in summer; the historic hay meadows, thick with rarities that make it a designated Priority Habitat and Wildlife Site; the hedgerows, decorated by the eruption of ditzy hawthorn blossom in spring and holding on to rare English elm; and the ancient

woodland, the only one in the area marked on the Ordnance Survey’s first map in 1805.

All the while they witness wildlife:

• The barn owl that tracks up and down the meadow at dusk
• The plumes of chimneysweeper moths that feed on the pignuts in spring
• The migrant redwing flock that returns each autumn
• The blackbird that steals strawberries from the fruit garden to feed her young
• The ecstatic excitement of a skylark’s arrival after 20 years during Covid lockdown
• The grass snake that disconcerts any attempt to walk through the long grass in sandals

This Is Not My Land charts slow travel in its most microcosmic form: walking the same five fields and

woodland repeatedly, watching and witnessing how it, and the surrounding landscape, changes over a period of three decades.

"During our 30 years here, I have concluded that what we once regarded as merely ‘land’ is an exceptional and ever rarer mosaic landscape. We've fallen in love with the land so deeply that it

becomes unthinkable that anyone would wish to harm it, least of all those that have the power and duty to protect.

"In the wider perspective, thirty years is not long, though it has been the privilege of our lives to be

here. I hope we will still be here in another thirty years as custodians of the land, with the duty and

challenge of ensuring it survives."

Order This Is Not My Land

Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides

RRP: £10.99

ISBN: 978-1804693476 - published January 2026

"The book looks absolutely gorgeous"

Anna Moores, Editorial & Creative Director, BradtGuides