Galleries: The Place That Roger Built

In 1969, Roger Deakin--the celebrated author of Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain (1999), and most recently Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (2007)--purchased an old ruin of a farm house in Suffolk. He had noticed the chimney poking up from the trees and bushes which were trying to consume the property. The house belonged to an old-time farmer who lived nearby and had been keeping pigs and chickens inside it. This wildness and animal habitation did not deter Roger in the slightest and only added to the charm of the house, so he visited the farmer regularly over the course of few weeks until he agreed to sell the house to him.

Roger slept in the back of a van for a while as he started to strip the house down to its original skeleton of oak, ash and chestnut timbers. He then began work on rebuilding the house into what it is today, sleeping in a bivouac with his cats inside the huge central fire place until he had created himself a bedroom. The house contained 323 beams of wood and Roger estimated that 300 trees would have been felled to build it. Walnut Tree Farm, as Roger named it, is the on land equivalent to the Cutty Sark.

Walnut Tree Farm stands in 12 acres of meadows. It also came with its very own 16th century spring-fed moat which Roger preserved and maintained, and in which he would regularly swim. For the next 37 years--until his untimely death from a brain tumour on the 19th August 2006, aged 63--Roger set about shaping the place to his liking, turning it into his kingdom of semi-tamed nature and wildness. He would share the house with all kinds of creatures, from crickets to ducks, and the land around him became a haven for wildlife. He planted a wood and maintained the ancient massive mile long hedge which surrounded the property, harvesting its fruits in the autumn.

A visit to Roger's place also revealed his idiosyncrasies. He had placed an old claw-footed cast iron bath tub at the back of the house and could be found wallowing in it on sunny days. He had a great fondness for camps and all forms of vernacular shelter. He dragged shepherd’s huts and railway wagons onto the meadows and would regularly sleep and write in them. He believed there was more truth in these temporary dwellings than a house, as they reflected our true nature of 'just passing through' in this world. And then there were the cars. Roger had a long time interest in old vehicles, especially Citroëns; and when a car was no longer road worthy he would just abandon it on his land, often in the bushes so it became part of the natural landscape, but always with the intention of at some point reviving it to take him on another adventure across the country in search of Britain's wildness.

Robert Macfarlane, a close friend of Roger's, and fellow adventurer and author on the subject of landscape and wildness, has described him as 'a latter-day Thoreau.' This was evident not just in the way he thought and wrote, but also in the way he lived at Walnut Tree Farm.