If you are lucky enough to witness roosting horseshoe bats, you may see them gently swinging to and fro, rather like a gymnast about to start a routine on the high bars. They have switched on their directional sonar and are detecting your whereabouts. They know you are there.

Trees have character, just like animals and people. Some have grown tall and rangy in a rush for elevation; others have a more rounded crown and are already strongly branched. When I am alone among the trees, I often stand under my favourite, a fourteen-footer that spreads its tent of foliage over a young tree’s muscular limbs, and casts a cosy, yellowish gloom of light around me. Seán Lysaght on watching trees grow.

‘We no longer camp as for a night’, the American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven’. Philip Hoare on reconnecting to the earth, the sea and the tangible universe.

“In its light I know where the world is.” A powerful piece by Abi Andrews on our ‘small communions’ with the natural world.