This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“So there I was, at the summit of Old Man Mountain” — Linden Green has an amusing habit of anthropomorphising his subjects — “and what did I feel? Well, awe obviously. And a sense of continuity at the thought that others had trod this path before, and would tread it again.”
“But above all, you know” — and here Mr Green raises his line of vision to a point slightly above his audience’s heads — “a terrific feeling of freedom. As if I could leap off the crag I was standing on and soar off into the crystalline sky that lay beyond … ”
Needless to relate, Mr Green’s listeners, whether at the Cheltenham Literature Festival or one of the specialist gatherings of eco-warriors and environmental activists, lap this up.
Later in the proceedings he will probably talk about the time he explored an underground river in Patagonia, took all his clothes off and lay naked on the black sand as phosphorescent sea creatures went gliding by in the murk. Later still, he will sit in the book tent signing copies of The Stream of Life and discussing his latest BBC radio series, It’s All Gone Green.
Mr Green was not always a nature writer. At an earlier stage in his life — he is in his early fifties — he worked as a local government auditor. There was also a job proofreading tax manuals. But it was a stint at Suffolk County Council’s highways and byways department that propelled him towards the celebrity he now enjoys.
West of Woodbridge, his account of a walk along the Suffolk back lanes and the conversations he enjoyed with some of their picturesque inhabitants, was praised by Robert Macfarlane and he was invited to write a weekly column for the Observer entitled “Old Farley, he say … ”
An unkind story in Private Eye maintained that Mr Farley did not actually exist
“Old Farley” was Daniel Farley, a veteran pig farmer supposedly met in the course of these wanderings whose pronouncements on rural life, the weather and other subjects became a feature of the column. An unkind story in Private Eye maintained that Mr Farley did not actually exist, but by this time the barrelling boxcar of his creator’s career could not be derailed, and he appeared on Question Time to denounce the secretary of state for the environment for “betraying a sacred trust”.
On the short side, bearded and invariably dressed in a shabby corduroy suit, Mr Green’s impression of rustic mundanity is always counterbalanced by the reverent nature of his approach, the “humility” he feels when out in a thunderstorm, and the “ant-like insubstantiality” he experiences when walking in the Lake District or prospecting the Somerset Levels.
If he has a fault it lies, alas, in a slight tendency to vagueness. Even his admirers were forced to concede that a recent online call to arms for demonstrators to conduct a mass trespass on some private land near Dartmoor lacked both a time and a date.
