Field Notes

On land I wasn't looking for

I have a question for you… are you more of a country person or a coastal lover by heart? And if you had to choose to live in one or the other for the rest of your life, which one would it be and why?

I have always found myself in a calmer state of mind by water. The particular grey green of a low tide. The way the edge of my local coastline forces me to stop, because there is literally nowhere left to walk.

Since moving from Mid Wales to South Wales in 1991 as a vulnerable seventeen year old, my life has organised itself around edges, not just physically but emotionally, in a place where Welsh land runs out and something else begins. So it has taken me by surprise, this past half year, to fall so completely for the opposite. For the middle of things. For fields that don’t end in anything at all.

“I need solitude. I need space. I need air.” Virginia Woolf

My 2026 project Cartrefle, sits literally on the sea edge, so much so that I sometimes wake to the sounds of the waves as though I was on a ship, but the renovation of the beach house has pulled me inland in ways I didn’t expect. Up abandoned farm tracks, alongside prickly hedgerows, and deep into the scorched, golden countryside that Ceredigion keeps mostly to itself.

Each morning I walk and walk through a tapestry of fields with my ridgebacks, not because I’ve become a country girl exactly, but because the renovation meetings end and the silence immediately afterwards needs somewhere to go. What I’ve found, hidden behind old twisted gates, that I’v been given permission by the farmer to walk through, are acres and acres of nothing much happening.

No major plans.

No looming deadlines for the rest of the day.

Just grass doing what grass does, overgrown brambles catching on my t-shirt, and the ridgebacks running the kind of distance that finally tires them out. I never realised how liberating it would feel knowing I’d be the only dog walker, for as far as the eye could see. With the unlikely chance of bumping into anyone, literally not a soul about, I look forward to the beautiful sight of red kites, buzzards, the local fox and the odd squirrel, who I’ve now secretly befriended.

Another thing I didn’t expect, was how fields could undo me the way the ocean does. I noticed that there’s a particular vastness that has nothing to do with the horizon. The sea’s vastness is loud, it announces itself, it has power, and oh my word does it perform. A field’s vastness is much quieter. It doesn’t ask to be looked at. You have to walk into it before it gives you anything, and for me what it gives is this strange relief of being unwitnessed. No other soul about. No one’s eyes on the state of how I look, not that I care much about that these days. Just me and my dogs, moving through the long grass, one step at a time, entirely uninterested in whatever it is I’m supposed to be managing for the rest of the day.

I think this is what I mean when I write about my ultra real self, the version of me that exists underneath the project manager, the retreat host, the woman fielding messages from architect to designer to builders. That self is competent and useful, but if I’m honest, I’m still trying to work it all out. She seems good at this new role. But she isn’t the whole of me, and lately I’ve noticed how much energy it takes to keep being her, hour after hour, decision after decision.

"What I want to do is live in as much silence as possible." Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence

What’s lush is that the fields don’t want anything from me. They don’t need my opinion on anything. And in the absence of being needed, something else gets room to surface, something slower, less articulate, I guess I’m getting closer to a more authentic self.

I don’t think this is what i would have once called escapism. It’s more closer to recalibration. I’ve noticed that I cannot hear my own mind clearly inside a life full of other people’s requirements (but this could be a midlife thing). As crazy as this sounds, the field is the only room in the house with no one else in it.

There’s a particular relief, too, in being somewhere that asks nothing of my coastal identity. The sea has always been where I go to feel, because it’s dramatic, it’s responsive, and mirrors whatever mood i bring to it. Whereas the fields in which I walk every morning don’t mirror anything. They’re indifferent in the best possible way. I’m just walking. But while I manoeuvre through the meadows, stepping over streams, hiking up hills, my mental clutter starts to clear. Not because the land is empty, but because for once I’m not required to fill it with meaning.

When was the last time you wandered carefree across acres of fields? I wish you were here, to witness this rewilding, in what I’m going to call my freedom fields.

Now it’s your turn to write, especially if you’re like me who craves an hour alone in an empty field. These prompts are for walking with, or for sitting with afterwards, notebook open, bare feet in the grass. There’s no right way, go at your own pace, and the willingness to let a thought finish itself before you reach for the next one.

Journal with Ease Prompts

1. The Threshold

Describe the exact moment you cross from ‘managing your life’ into the field, the gate, the stile, the last gap in the hedge. What do you put down at that threshold, even if only for an hour?

2. What the Body Knows

Walk for ten minutes before you write anything. Then answer: what is your body doing that your mind hasn’t caught up with yet?

3. Unwitnessed

Write about the relief of not being seen. Who, in your ordinary life, are you performing for, and what changes in you the moment that audience disappears?

4. The Uncleared Path

Not every walk needs a destination. Write about a part of your life right now that doesn’t need resolving yet, and give yourself permission, in writing, to leave it open.

5. Your Ultra Real Self

Who is the version of you that only turns up in solitude? Describe her the way you’d describe a friend you haven’t seen in years. What she looks like, what she needs, what she’d say if she could.

Before I sign off, here are just some of the books that have inspired me about how our landscape can heal us, nurture us and restore positivity in to our sometimes hectic lives…

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. An Orkney memoir of recovery through land and solitude, searing and completely unsentimental. The film is also epic.

Wintering by Katherine May. On retreat, fallow seasons, and the necessity of withdrawing from the world. It’s a natural companion if you’re in midlife.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Grief, wildness, and the strange clarity that comes from disappearing into something other than yourself. Another superb film adaptation.

The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud. I highly recommend all of Clover’s memoirs. This one in particular resonated the most with me. It’s about appreciating the landscape, belonging and the longing for home.

Rough Edges by Natasha Carthew - still reading this one. Mind blown!

I don’t get much time to read press or magazine articles, but this one caught my eye - a recent interview in The Guardian with Hagitude aithor Sharon Blackie on why, perhaps in her 60’s, she has found her way home.

Until the next time

Take care and stay cool x

About me… I’m Tanya Lynch, a mother, a ridgeback owner and the founder of Ease Retreats. I love what I do, collaborating with authors and creatives, hosting retreats in beautiful venues across the UK. I’m also a therapeutic journalling coach and through my online programme Rage on a Page, I help midlife women channel their emotions into something more positive and creative. Each Thursday I host an online journalling club called Journal with Ease and it’s FREE for paid subscribers to attend. If you have any questions about the wellbeing benefits of therapeutic journalling, please reach out and connect. I’ve decided to pause my writing on Substack during August, so I can concentrate on completing the first draft of my book.

Right now I’m taking a sabbatical from hosting retreats to focus on project managing the renovations of Cartrefle, home to Ease Retreats. If you’d like to join one of my retreats, they start back up in 2027, find more info here.