But now alas! those scenes exist no more;
The pride of life with thee, like mine, is o’er,
Thy pleasing spots to which fond memory clings
Sweet cooling shades, and soft refreshing springs.
And though Fate’s pleas’d to lay their beauties by
In a dark corner of obscurity,
As fair and sweet they bloom’d thy plains among,
As bloom those Edens by the poets sung;
Now all’s laid waste by desolation’s hand
From Helpstone by John Clare, 1819
I write this open letter to express my concerns about the British countryside. I write it to those custodians of the countryside, from landowners to conservationists, politicians to scientists, with the
hope that it will rekindle a serious debate about how it is failing: how it fails to feed the nation; how it fails financially, but more importantly, how it is fails to protect the ‘natural’ flora and fauna.
From the outside, from the distance of a car travelling through or a plane flying over, everything looks ‘rosy in the garden’. However, if you have walked through the landscape, as I have done for decades, covering tens of thousands of miles, the empirical evidence is different. A different picture evolves: a picture that is fading, fading so slowly that unless you have been, touched, watched it carefully, the failing nature of it is almost unperceivable, leaving each new generation believing this is how the countryside is and always has been.
Let us look at some government statistics. Roughly eighty five percent of Britain is rural, most of it farmland and associated industries. This is easily enough land to feed the nation, yet Britain only produces 59% of the food it needs (this peaked in 1984 at 78%). One of the main factors is that seventy to eighty percent of this land is used for the rearing and feeding of livestock, which only contributes to twenty percent of the protein this country needs. (I may add that this is not only a British statistic, many other countries across the world have similar statistics). The countryside
contributes less than one percent towards the British National Income. Only 10% of the British population live in rural areas. Over the past five decades, hundreds of millions of pounds of
taxpayers’ money, mainly from those living, working and creating wealth in urban areas, has been pumped into the countryside through subsidies, grants, schemes, tax incentives etc. and yet, from
the empirical evidence I have seen, there has been no improvement. The depressing fact is: the countryside continues to fail on all fronts.
As a child in the 1960s I lived on a council estate in the industrial town of Gateshead. I was lucky, as our house was on the edge of the estate; it backed onto an open field which ran down to the next
industrial conurbation of Felling. My sister and I spent many summers in that field looking for and collecting wildlife, yes wildlife in an area where everyone burnt coal fires and factories poured out
toxins of all types. The field sang with the sound of crickets, butterflies danced around us, skylarks sang in the sky above and swifts – remember those once numerous migrant birds? – dived and swooped all around. We used to go on ‘expeditions’ to ex-industrial water tanks where we found and collected crested newts and every autumn, the starling murmurations were immense. Now, six decades on, when I walk through the countryside, through farmland and managed moorland, this experience has become scarce, sometimes it is as if nothing lives there but sheep, grouse, deer and cattle. The swifts have all but gone. I rarely, if ever, hear a cricket. Skylarks are nowhere near as numerous. Butterflies only seem exist in any numbers in nature ‘corridors’, gardens and allotments and I have not seen a newt in three decades. And what of those immense starling murmurations? Sadly, only a distant memory.
If I may, I would like to give a few thoughts on why this may be the case. We live in the 21st Century and much of the technology we use to farm, manage the land and conserve the land (fauna and
flora) etc. is technology from that century: this technology has its benefits and its drawbacks, but it is at least from the century we live in. This seems to be less so for the people that live, control and
manage the countryside. Each set of custodians, I am sure, truly believe that what they are doing is
best for the countryside, but is this really the case? It seems to me, from the outsider point of view, that what they are really doing is not best for the countryside, or the nation, but best for
themselves, for their ‘traditions’, and let us be frank, most of those traditions are rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries , with thinking, attitudes and practices to match. For me, this cannot foster a way
forward, a way to halt the decline; we are a quarter of the way through the 21st Century and with the added pressure of the changing climate, things can only get worse. History tells us that ‘tradition’
only exists if the ‘body politic’ wants it to exist. As an example: I live near the ex-steel town of Consett. The foundry there made some of the best steel in Europe, if not the world. Forty five years ago the ‘body politic’ decided it was surplus to requirements, 300 years of steel making ‘tradition’ in the area gone overnight. I would suggest that it is these ‘traditions’ that need to be focused on and
changed, before they and the countryside disappear forever.
These suggestions are not only focused on farmers and landowners, they are not alone in this way of thinking, as other custodians involved in ‘protecting’ the countryside seem to hold similar attitudes. The nonsense of so called Nature Reserves that allow hunting, shooting, trapping and have domestic stock grazing in them. Areas of countryside that are supposed to be ‘sites of specific scientific interest’ or areas of ‘outstanding natural beauty’, which are completely man-managed, like virtually all of Britain. I am not saying there should not be compromise, but to sell the public this nonsense,
for me is verging on the criminal. Tell it as it is, that is all I am saying.
So we could ask four questions:
1. Does the taxpayer get value for money?
2. Why can’t Britain feed itself?
3. Why does 85% of the landmass of this country contribute so little to the GNI?
4. Why does the fauna and flora of this country continue to decline?
I am in no position to answer these questions – that is for the custodians. I am expressing these views as an outsider, a voyeur even, but someone who cares deeply about the countryside. I am sure that all the different custodians of the countryside would express that ‘I have no true understanding’, but sometimes an outsider, someone with a ‘different’ eye and mind, is what is needed to foster, to revitalise thinking, and to change entrenched ideas of tradition, science, politics and land management.
Finally, the view from the outside is not always correct, it is just a different perspective, but the countryside of Britain needs and deserves better, and it is for those custodians that control it, to
understand that, and make the changes. This will not be easy, but it is, in my view, vital for all those that love, live and have hope for the countryside.
Long distance walker, and many other hats and disguises. Author of the ‘East Highland Trail’: a long distance path from Inverness, through the Cairngorms, the Trossachs, to Drymen. Walked and
mapped to enable the intrepid explorer to circumnavigate the highlands using this trail, the West Highland Way and the Caledonian way.
The two images for me represent the best and worst of the British countryside
Statistics – https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics
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Mark Carr
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