The Blackbird Diaries chronicles a year of observing garden wildlife, alongside the species and landscapes of the author's daily walks in the limestone hills and valleys of Cumbria's South Lakeland. Geese, robins, goldfinches and swifts join the blackbirds as the regular garden visitors.The book celebrates a landscape that rarely features in the existing canon of nature writing: the quieter places on the edge of the more familiar terrain of the central Lakes. They are understated landscapes, possessed of their own intrinsic qualities; the dramatic bluffs of Scout Scar and Cunswick Scar, the lower reaches of the River Kent and the ancient woodlands north of the town at bluebell time slopes and slews of blue; the blue of distance, of memory.