When in 1947 the young writer Ronald Blythe first visited Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, the ancient house of the artists John and Christine Nash, he could not have guessed that this would in time become his own home and the centre of the writing life. It was to bring him fame with publication of his study of rural life, "Akenfield" (1969), now a Penguin Modern Classic. The old farm nestled in a valley, in a landscape little changed since the middle ages, immediately surrounded by a richly stocked garden created by the Nashes from the flinty fields. From his current perspective,...