Hardback, G. P. Putnam's Sons, new enlarged and illustrated edition, 1933 (first thus); with woodcuts by C. F. Tunnicliffe.
Book condition: lacks the dust wrapper, front and back joints cracked but intact, some slight spotting on endpapers and top and front edges, but otherwise a nice copy in a cellophane wrapper.

On the back flap of the dust wrapper to this 'new enlarged and illustrated edition', Henry Williamson writes: '"The Lone Swallows" . . . represents both my earliest and latest writings. "A Boy's Nature Diary" was written at the age of sixteen, just before the Great War which engulfed the schoolboy-naturalist; the essay on the cuckoo at nineteen, while on sick leave from France; "The Nesting Boxes" and "Winter's Eve", at twenty-one, when the young old-soldier returned home a few days after the signing of the Armistice.

'After the Great War there was for me a vacancy on the earth, a sadness of vanished scenes and faces. The essays grouped under the heading of "London Papers" were written while life was still without direction in that vacancy (1920).

'In March, 1921, I determined to begin an entirely new life. I went to Devon, to live alone in a labourer's cottage to WRITE. On the Atlantic coast the sun was the only master and the only clock – newspapers unseen for a year – an immense belief in the present and the future – zestful happiness in a village where a motor-car arriving caused heads to crane from doorways, and an aeroplane passing in the sky made dogs run to cover, and hens squark scattering in terror.

'In that far-away time, from those far-away emotions, in the fields and by the sea, in freedom yet always with memory of 1914–1918 with me, were most of the essays of this book written.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Lone Swallows.)