Buckinghamshire is more than a countryside backdrop in Helen Macdonald’s account of T. H. White and his goshawk Gos: it becomes a landscape in which the wish to belong, the wish to escape, and the possibility of loving without exposure meet. White’s muddy fields and old estate roads hold both the discipline of social life and the solitude he seeks. The county’s apparent lack of distinction, as he describes it, also becomes a mirror for a man trying to conceal his own individuality.

Setting and social landscape

White’s Buckinghamshire is rural but not simply remote. The county’s ordinary character is central to its literary use. In England Have My Bones, White presents it as lacking outstanding beauty, historical importance, or qualities likely to draw the world’s attention. That apparent anonymity suggests safety: Buckinghamshire can preserve its individuality by keeping it out of view. Macdonald reads this account of place as a reflection of White himself, whose efforts to fit in also depended on concealing what made him different.

The landscape was also a social arena. After leaving Cambridge, White tried to pass as a gentleman, taking up pursuits including foxhunting. Hunting demanded more than willingness to ride: it involved money, social fluency, horsemanship, and a dense body of rules. White worried over the correct clothing, asking a friend whether his coat, breeches, and other details were suitable. His hunting diaries recorded miles ridden, coverts searched, obstacles crossed, people encountered, and whether he had behaved properly. Their careful, defensive assessments show how the county’s rural customs could become tests of belonging rather than uncomplicated recreation.

White’s country pursuits

When White was a schoolmaster at Stowe, the countryside was the setting for performances of courage that he undertook despite being afraid. He rode with the Grafton across Buckinghamshire’s muddy fields, anxious that he might ride badly, fail to appear a gentleman, or bring down the disapproval of the Master of Foxhounds. His sporting activities were therefore not evidence of an easy confidence. They were attempts to meet the demands he associated with bravery and social acceptance.

That tension also informs the way he approached falconry. The wider history of the sport distinguished between falconers who could fly peregrines over extensive open country and austringers who trained goshawks for close-range hunting. Access to the land needed for falconry could reflect wealth and social connection; the noble status granted to falcons was bound up with the aristocratic settings in which they were flown. Buckinghamshire’s hunting culture thus belongs to a larger landscape of class, privilege, and regulated access, even as White’s own work with a goshawk gave him a different way to engage with the countryside.

The Ridings and the limits of escape

White’s cottage, where he trained Gos, has often seemed in his book to stand far from other people, deep in a wood and half a mile from the nearest road. Its actual position complicates that impression. The cottage stood on the Stowe estate, beside one of the old carriage routes known as the Ridings. A grassy route passed the house, crossed a sheep-cropped hill, and continued towards the doors of the school. The rustic dwelling had an earth closet and a well; in its barn, a Victorian gamekeeper had pencilled records of game bags on the back of a door. These concrete traces place White’s apparent retreat within an inhabited and worked landscape.

The old road makes his separation from Stowe feel incomplete. Although he had left the school’s central routines, he remained on its estate, close to the institution where he taught. The cottage offered a change of scene, but not a clean break with the world he hoped to leave. Macdonald connects this geography to the falconry itself: White could imagine an education of the hawk unlike the punitive methods he associated with schoolmastering, yet he had not escaped the bounds of his own professional life. Place gives that contradiction a visible form.

Walking, memory, and pastoral belonging

White also entered Buckinghamshire on foot. He walked along small roads and grassy rides, crossed fields, and returned through high-hedged lanes. On one evening walk he watched the red moon rise after seeing it sink yellow at dawn. In the emptiness of night, the Ridings became a setting for solitude and for an imaginative journey into the past. The landscape did not merely surround his falconry; walking through it shaped how he experienced time, weather, and distance from ordinary social life.

Those walks belonged to a wider 1930s enthusiasm for rural rambling. Walking clubs and special railway excursions drew people into the countryside, often seeking an imagined communion with an older England rather than a test of athletic endurance. The popularity of such excursions was connected to the aftermath of the First World War and anxiety about another conflict. Pastoralism offered a vision of native traditions, ancient places, and a recoverable national past. White’s walks with Gos took place within that cultural mood: his solitary routes through Buckinghamshire could be both intimate encounters with local ground and participation in a broader longing for a reassuring history.

Landscape as self-portrait

Buckinghamshire’s importance rests partly on the way it lets concealment and attachment occupy the same ground. White describes a county that keeps its identity by avoiding notice, and Macdonald recognizes in that description a parallel with his guarded character. His love of countryside could be expressed openly where other forms of love felt unsafe to acknowledge. The landscape offered something he could value without asking it to return his affection, while its quietness seemed to promise protection from scrutiny.

Yet the county is not a simple refuge. Foxhunting’s codes measured White against a social ideal; the cottage remained linked to Stowe; and his imagined escape unfolded along roads laid out for the estate. Buckinghamshire therefore holds together the safety White sought and the structures from which he could not entirely detach himself. Its fields and lanes make visible the book’s central tension between belonging and disguise, and between a desired pastoral freedom and the history that continues to shape it.