The queer rural is a small but growing canon, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. These are some of the books that chimed most sonorously in my research.

Every village had its hen lanc, and his female equivalents too. In Wales, there is a long tradition of yr hen lanc (literally “the old lad”), the unmarried uncle who might live with, or next door to, his equally unmarried friend. The truth was clear: we are not newcomers to the countryside. Even more than is normally the case with LGBT+ history, that meant learning to read the shadows, to spot fragmentary connections that had previously been denied or ignored. There wasn’t much, at least not explicitly so. In researching it, I read widely around the topic of the “queer rural”. My book On the Red Hill is that story – and so many others. Their legacy was far greater than that though, for it included an archive of letters, diaries, photos, art and books that told a remarkable story. In us, they saw themselves, and the feeling was mutual. When they died within a few weeks of each other in 2011, aged 94 and 84, my boyfriend and I found that they had left us their old farmhouse. They became much-loved members of our thinly scattered community, and great friends. So it was for George Walton and Reg Mickisch, an elegant couple who met in the postwar rubble of London, and in 1972 headed for the sticks, opening a B&B in a tiny mid-Wales village. It didn’t feel like a choice, but something intrinsic that would have been dangerous to resist, like the act of coming out itself. For many of us, this is a pattern that never fitted, and though we did the urban thing to burst (or tiptoe) from the closet, the lure of the rural soon overwhelmed the anonymity of the city. I f the countryside appears at all in LGBT+ stories, it is usually only as somewhere to escape from.

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale