This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

At The Celtic Cafe, on Market Street in Aberaeron, I sat down to scrambled eggs on toast. Except for a table of old sheep farmers, the place was almost empty. “Shooting today, boy?” one of them called across, switching from Welsh to English. I guess he had noticed my breeks and socks. “Yes,” I replied. “Start of the duck season.”

I don’t go to rural Wales very often, but when I do I’m reminded of how friendly it is. I often think the countryside in Britain varies massively in terms of how keen people are to chat.

In Norfolk they seldom manage more than four words; in Scotland they do a sort of happy-cum-grumpy thing; in Yorkshire they tend to be rude whilst telling you they’re just saying it as it is; and in Wales you can hardly get away.

As we ate, we talked about blue tongue, a disease currently killing sheep in East Anglia. We spoke about Aberaeron’s market not being what it was: “Bloody drink driving laws now, you see.” And we talked about shooting.

None of the farmers seemed to be particularly into shooting, but one was keen to tell me that in some parts of Wales, it’s a big employer of local people. The trouble, apparently, is that English people buy farmhouses and then object to the shoots.

We ordered another coffee, the conversation turned to their grandsons, then we left. They had sheep to tend to, and I had ducks to shoot. I’d been invited by my friend Charles Grisedale, a man who works tirelessly to save Wales’ lapwings.

He once told me that when he was a boy, “there were 500 in the parish flock”. But some years now he hardly sees any. Everything he does for nature, he is doing against the odds. The trouble lapwings face is a loss of habitat, a lack of food and predation by all sorts of things. As well as raptors and corvids, Wales is full of badgers — and badgers are no good for ground-nesting birds.

A few weeks before, I had watched a clip of that great guitarist, Sir Brian May, being interviewed by one of the team at Farmers Weekly. May recently presented a controversial programme about badgers and bovine tuberculosis, which badgers are proven to spread.

Putting cattle to one side, the interviewer asked May if he thinks it’s true that badgers are destroying Britain’s hedgehog population. According to the interviewer, lots of farmers report that hedgehogs on their farms are gobbled up by the stripey-faced predators. “And they really care?” was May’s response. He went on to say that the idea of farmers caring about nature is only ever going to get “raised eyebrows” from him.

It was, I thought, an extraordinary moment. May is a man who has a PhD in astrophysics. He plainly isn’t stupid, yet his response to the question was incredible. Either he really does believe that farmers don’t care about wildlife, which would suggest he hasn’t really come across many, or he’s just a bullshitter, so swept up with the notion that he, Sir Brian May, is going to save wildlife from the scourge of farmers, that he’s lost all sense of reality.

As farmers go, Charles Grisedale is special. His passion for nature is remarkable, but he isn’t the only one. I’ve stood out on the hill with farmers in Scotland who’ve told me they’ve been brought to tears by the loss of wildlife on their ground. Recently, in Norfolk, in less passionate but still poignant terms, a regenerative farmer told me he cares about wildlife because “it’s a lonely old place here without it”.

It’s important in life to give everybody a fair hearing, but in an age when nature is struggling, we need to call out those who are, as they would say in Scotland, “getting away with it”. We all know who these guys are. They say outrageous things, the public gets excited, so they say a few more, and so it goes on. Then, before you know it, you’re in a place totally divorced from the truth where talking heads are simply looking to make waves.

I don’t suppose Sir Brian spends much time in places like the Celtic Cafe down in Aberaeron, but going there, not as some sort of missionary to tell farmers how awful they are, but just to listen would do him a world of good.