This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
My time at university, in one sense, was wasted. There were some great academics in the English department at Bristol, but the teaching hours were minimal and I was an infrequent presence in the library. I very clearly remember weeping by the window, one rainy Thursday afternoon, on rereading Jane Eyre and really understanding, for the first time, Bertha Mason. But generally speaking, I was either at the pub or I was out in Stokes Croft, where parties went on all night, and everyone took drugs I’d never heard of.
The students, in general, at Bristol, were London private day-school kids who didn’t quite manage to get into Oxbridge. Whenever I was asked, and I replied that “actually, I’d grown up in Scotland”, my peers tended to be taken aback. Their world, for the most part, started in Hampstead and ended in Dulwich. I never quite got to terms with their metropolitan aloofness: “No, I’ve never been to Glastonbury and no, I’ve not heard The Libertines live.”
One December day, during the Christmas holidays, I was out hunting with the Dumfriesshire and Stewartry on a borrowed horse when the secretary — who I knew vaguely — asked how I was getting on. I told her Bristol was “alright, really” and she suddenly realised, whilst we were chatting, that I was only 30-odd miles away from the Somerset Levels, where a beagle pack hunted most Saturdays.
I took her up on her offer of putting me in touch and the following term, my university life changed markedly. The Hunt was a little reluctant at first — assuming, quite naturally, that I was going to descend with a rabble of anarchic archaeology first years or suchlike who wanted to disrupt proceedings.
When I look back now, I realise that I probably got more out of going beagling at Bristol than I did from my course. We were there, frankly, just to pay chunky fees, and most of the students were simply hanging out on a sort of three-year hiatus before heading back to Fulham to live out their days working in insurance and going on the odd skiing holiday. But all of a sudden, I was with local people, people who lived in and loved the West of England. I remember the huntsman telling me one morning that he’d recently visited an old hunt follower, in a local care home. “All she wanted to talk about,” he said matter-of-factly, “were memorable days in the field.”
The Dumfriesshire and Stewartry, which has recently packed up due to the noose being tightened further around foxhunting in Scotland, was a relatively new pack, but the Chilmark and Clifton Foot Beagles had history. Some mornings, when we’d been hunting at dawn, I’d go back to the kennels with the huntsman for a beer and a bacon roll. The pack’s lore was all there, in books, paintings and taxidermy, and tied up with the history of the hunt was the history of the area: the farms and farmers, the continuity and change.
I came to realise, too, how much the hunt meant to the followers. It wasn’t so much about the hunting as it was about the community, raising the young hounds and the dinners — most of which were paper plate and plastic cup affairs in small village halls. A lot of people, I suppose, have something of a political awakening at university. I remember my friend Polly discovering the Socialist Workers’ Party, and my fiancée still has her “Vote for Corbyn” badge somewhere.
My radicalisation occurred whilst sitting on the sofa eating party rings with the sort of people that I suspect my friend Polly has never actually met. The idea that Labour sought to ban rural working-class folk from doing something they have almost always done and that holds rural society together is a disgrace. What those days on the Somerset Levels taught me, and it’s something that was at the forefront of my mind whilst writing my new book Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our Relationship with the Countryside, is that it takes a lot of time to really understand British culture.
I spent three years travelling the countryside talking to Romani gypsies, salmon poachers, farmers, conservationists and huntsmen in order to appreciate land access in Britain and try to understand what being able to properly engage with the countryside means to people. Frankly, three years probably wasn’t long enough.
Tony Blair wrote that he regretted the foxhunting ban because he didn’t actually understand the people it was going to affect. And he’s quite right — except the damage, when he wrote those words, was already done. He had accepted a £1 million donation from the Political Animal Lobby, so he threw rural people under the bus and then had a proper think about it later.
Whilst researching my book, I came across a number of campaigners still hitting out at what remains of hunting. Bizarrely, the right to roam movement has a bee in its bonnet about hounds running across open country and the people following behind.
One of the stranger moments I had was when I told a land access campaigner that I’d had an interesting conversation with the master of a well-known hunt, about the trouble they have with rich Londoners buying up small patches of land, then telling the hunt they aren’t allowed across the ground any more. “It’s this terrible ‘It’s mine’ attitude,” the huntsman said bitterly whilst sitting astride his horse. “Good,” the Right to Roam campaigner shrugged.
Initially, I thought I hadn’t been clear enough so I repeated the point. “Yes,” she replied again, “good.” At about the same time, an affable Right to Roam organiser called Jon Moses stated on social media that hunting is actually “a power performance of exactly those freedoms its early participants so often denied others”. Tell that to the Banwen Miners, who used to keep their hounds in the colliery room, or tell it to my friends at the Chilmark and Clifton Foot.
It is a typical example of hunting being presented as what activists would like it to be rather than what it actually is. They are narrativising hunting in order to narrativise their own campaign. Hunting, they tell anybody who will listen, is all about access for the wealthy, whereas the campaign is about access “for peasants”. Yes, they really do identify as such, even although Right to Roamers tend to be middle-class ramblers with a lot more social wattage than your average Somerset beagler.
It’s a simple case of educated, well-meaning people disregarding something without bothering to go out into the field to understand it. The Starmer government has repeatedly said it is going to ensure that hunting is completely banned, once and for all. Doubtless, activists would chalk it up as a marvellous win without realising what has been lost — a centuries-old and richly fabled way to connect with and understand the countryside.
All those hunting songs, all those pub names and all those Boxing Day meets in village squares stamped on by a giant shiny new hiking boot and then forever consigned to the dustbin. It would be an egregious act of destruction, praised by those who play at being victims without ever bothering to get to know the people they are actually victimising.
There is the obvious point that hunting is cruel, but so too are those rat traps in the grain store where the wheat that becomes your bread is stored after harvest. Pesticides are also cruel. As the proto-environmentalist Robert Burns recognised in his famous poem “To a Mouse”, it’s pretty cruel when a plough smashes up one of their little nests. To live as a human today is to be cruel. We can wreak cultural destruction imagining that when hunting has gone, Arcadia will come. But cruelty will still reign.
One of the few seminars at Bristol that I remember well was with an extraordinary tutor called Dr Stephen Cheeke. It was, I think, in the third year when we studied Wordsworth with him, and I can almost remember one particular poem word for word, “Simon Lee, the old huntsman”.
Wordsworth writes of Lee being a poor old man who is almost unable to work any more. “And he is lean, and he is sick; / His body dwindled and awry”. However, despite his infirmity … “And still there’s something in the world / At which his heart rejoices; / For when the chiming hounds are out, / He dearly loves their voices!”
I thought of Lee when I had the most extraordinary privilege of being, whilst I was writing my book, with a young huntsman when he was feeding his hounds. We both drank a can of beer. Whilst he drank his, he walked amongst them, speaking to them as though I weren’t there. He told them they were good “boys and girls”. Then he told me, with quiet pride, that it didn’t take him long at all to learn their names, because what you do is you remember things about them, “little things. You remember how they hunt and how some of them come to you and how some of them won’t and you remember how they look at you, and how they speak when they’re running across hunt country on a bright winter’s day”.
The young huntsman’s life hadn’t been easy, but he told me he was happy at last with the hounds. I asked him what he might do if Labour really does kill the whole thing? He replied it would be something to do with animals, “It will always be something with animals.”
Thinking of it now, I feel moved, like old Simon Lee at the end of Wordsworth’s poem, “the tears into his eyes were brought”. How dare anybody seek to destroy someone’s way of life without ever bothering to really understand what it is they live for.
