Jon Day finds a taste for wild country food.

There is a cottage in the South Downs with a small valley of a garden, sunk below the brows of the surrounding hills. It is right on the wood-pigeon flight path – at dawn and dusk hundreds of birds cruise along the tree line, finding or leaving their roosts in the dense copse behind the orchard at the bottom of the garden; taking off with an explosive rattle of leaves and branches, landing with a series of exhausted coos. In the undergrowth, lords-and-ladies stand proud like fluorescent orange hand grenades jutting through the leaf-litter, startling and incongruous. Behind the copse is a field, and in the field a dynasty of rabbits dig the ground to pieces. The farmer who owns this land is always happy for someone to take a few for the pot…