Ronald Blythe - who is known for his 1969 book Akenfield, which is an account of village life in Suffolk - died aged 100 in 2023. He left his home, Bottengoms in Wormingford, Essex, to the Essex ...

All Ronald Blythe had thought about, as he sploshed through the muddy fields of east Suffolk and the ditches running with yellow winter water, was the deep obscurity of the lives of rural labourers.

No novelist could have invented the long, charmed—and charming—life of Ronald Blythe. The son of labouring parents from the Suffolk underclass, he saw his oral history (and veiled memoir) Akenfield ...