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They stood together on a wide, flat stretch of tussocky grasses, heads lowered to the ground, and against the horizon they looked like parts of the landscape, like geological deposits.

But from the mid 1800s, agriculture was intensified and tussocky grasses full of mice and shrews were ironed out.

Now Tom’s new office window surveys an array of slender turbines on tussocky moorland.

While her writing about fox issues can occasionally verge on crankiness — misleading information in British tabloids regarding the behavior or habits of wild foxes annoys her — for this naturalist who grew up in England’s Surrey Hills, the sight of foxes can lift her prose into poetry, as when she describes the “gentle amble” of a handsome fox hunting voles in frosty winter meadows and weaving through the “quiet tussocky grasses.”

Sarah Carpenter’s drafty farmhouse, perched on a gusty North Yorkshire moor that’s all “tussocky windblown grass, clouds racing overhead, drops of icy rain when you’re not expecting them,” is the very definition of desolate.