Bestselling author and columnist Sally Coulthard discusses the traditions of rural life from artisans to agriculture in her latest work, A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects, pulling together threads from social history, anthropology, archaeology, design and nature. She appeared in a session at Farnham Literary Festival 2025.
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00:00How would you describe the book?
00:10So I wanted to write a book about the countryside and I wanted to write because I feel like
00:16countryside history is quite invisible in the historical record. We learn a lot about
00:21kings and queens, we learn a lot about warfare, I mean, you know, there's endless programmes
00:25about the tutors. But our history, our kind of collective history is really rural lives.
00:32You know, most of our ancestors were rural. And so I wanted to kind of explore that story.
00:38I wanted to find out, how do people live? How do people do things that we take for granted?
00:44How do you have healthcare? What do people eat? Why do we farm certain animals? What
00:49was crime and punishment like? How did you get about? How do we light our homes? All
00:53these kind of questions that you don't even think about them in the 21st century because
00:59everything is so tanned. And for me, I wanted to kind of write about the courage and the
01:10resourcefulness of our ancestors and sometimes the kind of shocking bits about countryside
01:16history. You know, I do a lot of work for a magazine called Country Living and they're
01:21an amazing magazine to work for but it is a very bucolic presentation of the countryside
01:27and actually for me, the countryside isn't maples and bunting. It's complicated and it's
01:33full of complicated issues and, you know, as I say in the book, it's not a kind of landscape
01:40that's preserved in time forever. It's constantly changing, it's constantly being moving and
01:46it's quite a fast pace ever since people have, you know, seconded it. And so I wanted
01:50to tell that story because I felt like it was our story.
01:56I knew when I started the book kind of about the themes that I wanted to write about. So
02:01I wanted to write about why do we domesticate certain animals and leave other ones alone?
02:07You know, why do we call certain things vermin but we pamper other animals? You know, I'm
02:13really interested in those kinds of questions. But I didn't really know objects I was going
02:19to write about apart from two and that was the first one and the last one. And the first
02:24one is from an archaeological site that's really close to us. It's a place called Starakar
02:30and it's Mesolithic so it's 12,000 years old and it's a really important site because it's
02:36the first time that we start to see evidence of people settling down because before then
02:42archaeologists think that people essentially kind of wandered through the landscape and
02:46were hunter-gatherers. But at Starakar and there are a few other sites around that part
02:51of the world where you get the sense that people are starting to settle down for maybe
02:55just a few months at a time and they're starting to kind of manipulate their landscape. It's
03:00not farming but it's a kind of proto-farming. And there's an object from there that's really
03:05magical. It's these kind of antler headdresses and people think that they would have worn
03:12them in shamanistic rituals and the idea was that it was to kind of summon the herd and
03:17it was about ways of kind of trying to control animals and exert some power over them. So
03:23that was my first object because that was really for me the start of the countryside
03:27because the countryside is nature. The countryside is people meets nature. It's a kind of artificial
03:34landscape. So that was the first one. And then the last one is a tiny, tiny little drone
03:41and it's really, it was developed by Harvard University. It's called a RoboBee and it was
03:49developed by Harvard University and it's an amazing bit of technology but it's designed
03:56to, it's an experiment to see what you can do if all bees disappeared and they're working
04:02desperately to work out how to pollinate plants if bees disappear. That was such a
04:08fascinating object because it's not only brilliantly technical, it's also profoundly depressing
04:14that we can spend so much energy thinking of a really highly engineered solution when
04:21actually we're killing all kinds of biodiversity with our sort of casual stupidity. So that
04:30was the kind of end point of the book, although I do kind of finish on a helpful note. I think
04:34it's really important to kind of be optimistic. So that's my two bookends and then I kind
04:38of just sort of pootled between the two and tried to find connections and go through history
04:43in a kind of chronological order, which was actually really easier to do because as soon
04:48as you, when you do any kind of research, you go to interesting rabbit holes and one
04:53object that's sort of linked to another really naturally.