It’s an interrogation, an excavation, an interview with the very ground beneath our feet - its people, politics, economics, society, class, gender, race, food production, ecology, history and environment. Ware’s book is a profound, wide-ranging look at rurality and the local’s position on the world’s stage, in time and place. Now the colours of the heath and those ‘local landscapes of arable England are almost interchangeable, their hues determined by policies and prices set far away’.

Pill Heath itself is a recent, stealth-enclosure of former common land. As well as how a small hamlet comes to meet the world, too.įar from being the unspoilt, rural idyll of estate agents’ dreams, Ware reveals the countryside as a place of change and contention, progress and resistance, capitalism and commons. It examines, through deep, forensic social archaeology, and a collection of interviews spanning twenty-five years, how the world comes to this, and every small corner of England. Return of a Native is a remarkable book that takes its pastoral, particular position, physically scuffs and scratches at the flinty, chalky soil there, then raises its enquiring eyes to the horizon. The actual middle of nowhere.’Īnd so it is - and yet, also isn’t. The Pill Heath signpost is one and three-eighths of a mile from Ware’s mother’s home in the deliciously named hamlet of Wildhern a place any of my three teenage children would describe with fond eyerolls, as ‘the sticks. Though it is not one of the distances marked in raised letters on the black-and-white post, the high chalk of Gallows Down is a mere 7.1 miles from this point, and my house barely a mile from there. Vron Ware’s book Return of a Native begins where she herself began - near a rural crossroads, marked by a Hampshire fingerpost, crowned with a finial like a Polo mint, bearing the name ‘Pill Heath.’ It is a spot I know well.

Published by Repeater Books, Vron Ware’s ‘Return of a Native’ seeks to show how the artificial divide between rural and urban obscures the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement.

Return of the native book