Shorelands Winter Diary

"Charles Tunnicliffe was very important for me personally. He was a farmer’s son from Cheshire who had a huge talent for art and went to the Royal College. He was one of our greatest wood engravers and he first of all got commissioned by pet food people, like Bob Martin’s dog foods, and did lots of farm animal drawings. His draftsmanship of anything to do with the country and domestic and farm animals as well as wildlife is unimpeachable. He broke out when he began doing engravings for Henry Williamson’s series of nature books, starting with Tarka the Otter . His list of work is extraordinary. It ranges from work like the pet food or agricultural ads or Brooke Bond tea cards to fine oil paintings at Royal Academy exhibitions. He illustrated many, many books. I loved his work from childhood. I grew up in North Wales and he and his wife moved to Anglesey to a house called Shorelands, and I used to see him there and watch him paint from a respectful distance. He occasionally came on walks with us. This is a wonderful book of his paintings and sketches and also his observations of birds. He’s a concise and interesting writer – his notes amplify the artwork brilliantly. There is a parallel text – Shorelands Summer Diary – but the Winter Diary appeals because I love winter birds such as the waders and wildfowl that used to come to the estuary and lagoon just opposite where he lived. Most of his books are out of print but the ones that made the biggest impression on me as a child were a quartet of Ladybird books for children called What To Look For In Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter and they have the most sublime tableaux of imagined life through the whole year. There will be a shepherd in a sheep pen feeding his sheep on swedes in winter, who is looking up into a grey stormy sky to see a great skein of wild whooper swans flying over, or a pair of magpies chattering to one another on the branch of a larch against a backdrop of distant Welsh mountains, just like the ones I could see from my bedroom window. As a child it was just magic – almost as good as being there. He’s very high up in my pantheon of ornithological art."