It is only in fairy tales that people fall asleep for a hundred years, but I can personally vouch that it’s perfectly possible to slumber through a decade or two. It feels like yesterday that we came to our North Yorkshire village in the middle of “James Herriot Country”, a place of little hills, bubbling springs, sudden fords, packhorse bridges, old water mills and secretive waterfalls, yet nearly twenty years have come and gone.

Unable to drive, and rarely roving further than a bike ride or a branch-line train journey, this is the perfect place to write a regular nature column, and penning my Glimpses of Eden nature diary weekly for The Tablet is a great privilege and joy. This week, a selection from more than 800 of the columns is published, each with an added meditation: Glimpses of Eden: Field Notes from the Edge of Eternity.