The legacy Denys Watkins-Pitchford (‘BB’) and rural writing

The wonder of the world The beauty and the power The shapes of things, Their colours, light and shades These I saw, Look ye also while life lasts.

- 

THESE words, taken from a gravestone in Cumbria, were used by the countryman artist, poet and author ‘BB’—real name Denys Watkins-Pitchford (1905—90)—to preface all his 60-odd books. He was a dedicated, if solitary, fieldsportsman, who hunted to eat, and a down-to-earth conservationist, noting with dismay in The Idle Countryman (1943) the gradual disappearance of trees and hedges and the ‘choked up’ ponds, as well as taking pleasure in recovering the endangered purple emperor butterfly.