Russell Higham on a Wealden Walden.

Walter Murray was, in many ways, the Henry Thoreau of Sussex. Copsford, his account of a year spent in an isolated, dilapidated cottage near Horam over a century ago, still enjoys a small but cultish following. This beguiling book, which predated the modern conservation movement, continues to inspire subsequent generations of environmental writers, transcendentalists and ‘nature mystics’.

Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 chronicle of his time spent living alone in a remote log cabin in Massachusetts, Walden, or Life in the Woods, is considered a classic of American literature. His writings – including his other famous work, Civil Disobedience – have inspired novelists and filmmakers, as well as political leaders and activists including Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and even Greta Thunberg.

Across the pond here in the Sussex Weald, another young nature writer recorded a similar experiment in simple, sustainable and – if the phrase is not yet passé – mindful living. Walter JC Murray was born in Seaford in 1900 and had a short run, after stints in the merchant navy and RAF, as a Fleet Street journalist. He could not abide, however, ‘the hive of London’, as he called it, and made his ‘escape from the misery of a third-floor-back off King’s Street, SW1’ in order to ‘find a cottage in the heart of the country’.

What he found, though, was not some bucolic idyll, as one might find in the property pages of Country Life, a magazine for which he later wrote. Copsford, as the small cottage near Horam on the northern fringe of the Weald was called, was ‘a mile from nowhere’ and had not been lived in for more than two decades. Woefully neglected, it had broken windows, no electricity or running water, and was infested with rats.

The book is a captivating, and at times haunting, description of Murray’s evolving relationship with his surroundings as he first sets about making the cottage habitable and then begins growing and selling herbs from the land around him. In this new life, however, he initially sees Nature as an adversary. Surveying the property for the first time with trepidation, he describes how ‘the rough grass of the field swept in unhindered, lapped the walls of the cottage, washed around behind it. Like a flood-tide it swamped everything; the cottage stood, a barren, inhospitable rock in the midst.’

Although he later comes to terms with the isolation and deprivations of living so far from society – his loneliness tempered by the enjoyment of an intimate connection to the flora and fauna around him – what Murray writes is no pastoral puff piece. He describes with raw honesty the challenges and bittersweet joys of living in absolute solitude with Nature, and the innate need for human company that no downland view, however idyllic, can replace.

Tom Wareham, Murray’s biographer, describes him as ‘unconsciously philosophical’, as opposed to the more self aware, ‘consciously philosophical’ style of Thoreau’s Walden. In the introduction to his biography of Murray, The Green Man of Horam, Wareham compares him to natural history writer Richard Jefferies who had, similarly to the author of Copsford, ‘connected with Nature in a striking and deeply mystical fashion.’

Despite having written the biography nearly ten years ago, Wareham says that he still regularly dips back into Copsford as a form of spiritual renourishment: “It’s one of those books that’s a bit like The Wind in the Willows. You have to go back and read it every once in a while to recharge. It has that quality to it which is life-affirming in some ways.”

Many sections transcend nature writing to attain an almost spiritual level. Murray describes, in Proustian detail, a morning bath taken in a wild pond nearby, and of its effect upon him: ‘In those golden moments I understood every word on a single page of the magic book of Life inscribed in a language neither written nor spoken. There was a sublime tranquility … a brotherhood of life in all living things … I was part of all creation.’

Copsford has been in and out of print since it was first published in 1948, more than a quarter of a century after the events which Murray describes in it had passed. The exact reason for the gap is unknown, although it may simply be because Murray kept himself busy with so many other interests. Besides nature writing, he had successful side careers as a TV presenter, radio broadcaster and teacher. Together with his wife, Winnifred, a music mistress whom he married shortly after leaving Copsford, he ran a well respected school in Horam until his retirement in 1965.

A beautifully presented and illustrated edition of Copsford has recently been published by Little Toller Books, with a foreword by Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path and The Wild Silence. In it, she writes that ‘Copsford has an innocence, a freedom in thought and life.’

“It’s one of my favourites from the classics list,” says Little Toller’s Jon Woolcott. “And I think it’s because Walter Murray did something many dream about: abandoning a city life for a simple rural one, despite its many hardships. It was relatively cheap to rent a tumbledown cottage in Sussex in the 1920s, and many writers and artists did the same. It’s also a love story, of course – Murray met Winnifred whilst living at Copsford – and I think it’s the combination of the personal story with the dream of escape that’s given it longevity.”

Murray, who died in 1985, was one of the first people to write about Nature as artist or creator, God even: an idea that was possibly frowned upon in his more religiously minded era. Copsford the cottage is long gone, demolished in the 1970s, Wareham believes. But its footprint remains firmly planted in the ground, as does the book along with its message of harmony with nature based upon a stoic acceptance of what we as humans are both capable of and limited by.

Wareham’s biography features a quote from Henry Thoreau in the introduction: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Murray didn’t just look and see the Sussex countryside around him. He felt it.

Russell Higham is a Sussex-based freelance journalist who writes on art, culture, heritage and travel for, amongst others, the BBC, Country Life, The Times and The Telegraph.

Copsford by Walter JC Murray is published by, and available from, littletoller.co.uk

The Green Man of Horam: The Life and Work of Walter JC Murray by Tom Wareham is available from Amazon.