You could look very hard in Purleigh and not find any physical evidence of the Tolstoyan anarchist community that was founded there in 1897. The experiment, near Maldon, Essex, was short-lived, and the core settlers soon moved west, to Whiteway Colony on a (then) bleak Cotswolds plateau. It is there still, now comfortably huddled and well treed, its continued existence due in part to a decision by the founding colonists to destroy their title deeds, leaving the settlement to be held perpetually in common.

In the global league of immense sporting events, the Tour de France is third to the Olympics and the World Cup, or so the Essex Chronicle says. So how can a narrow lane in this corner of Essex between Chelmsford and Ongar, intensely rural though hardly thirty miles from London, accommodate the event?

Even though I was born almost in Essex, giving me an enduring taste for the exceptional qualities of an unexceptional landscape which I often indulge by walking in it, I hadn’t read (or, frankly, even heard of) J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine until it was reissued by New York Review Books a few years ago. Robert Macfarlane’s introduction says that almost nothing is known about Baker except that he was born in 1926 and was diagnosed with a serious illness around the time the book was published in 1967. The NYRB blurb added that ‘he appears to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life.’ There was no date of death. The book is written in the form of a journal over six months, from October to April. Criss-crossing on his bicycle a small area of countryside to the east of Chelmsford, Baker is on the track of a peregrine falcon – less murderous in intent than Captain Ahab, but no less obsessed.