Letter of the week
Bringing Ratty back to Cookham
I READ with particular interest your wonderful article about Kenneth Grahame (‘And still, as he lived, he wondered’, October 25). As both an avid reader of COUNTRY LIFE and a resident of the beautiful Thameside village of Cookham, I read The Wind in the Willows to my children, sadly aware that they were the first generation in the 200 years or so my husband’s family have resided here not to hear the ‘plop’ of a water vole in the brook. Grahame’s Ratty is of course not a rat, but a water vole, a mammal critically endangered through a combination of habitat loss and predation by the invasive American mink.
I’ve been working with local charity Wild Cookham () to reintroduce the water vole back into this beautiful habitat. We are now a group of more than 40 volunteers working to help make this reintroduction a reality. I think Grahame would approve.
