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

---

There is almost, I’m pretty sure, no form of exhaustion quite as heavy as the state you find yourself washed up in when you finish writing a book. I was grinding through final edits until 4 a.m. on Sunday, and that night I set my alarm for 4.30 a.m. to get it all wrapped up by Monday lunchtime.

I often say that you only really know what a book you’ve written is about when readers start telling you. “You’ve created,” a veteran London publisher said to me yesterday, “an extraordinary picture of how the modern English countryside actually works.” I’ll take his word for it.

What I found particularly interesting, though (in writing what is ostensibly a book about how we engage with the land, as well as about accessibility) is how much the countryside is misunderstood. I suppose I might go further and say that, in some instances, I was pretty horrified by the extent to which it’s misrepresented.

In order to understand access, it’s crucial to see how access to the land has evolved and changed historically. Whenever the topic arises, somebody will invariably mention the commons. It’s perfectly true that in centuries past, vast swathes of land were farmed in common but they were not, as is often suggested, owned by the commoners.

Last month I was in the Norfolk archives reading correspondence from a landowner who was writing to a lawyer in London in the hope of determining whether all of the residents of the three villages on his estate had the right to use the commons or not.

For all his nature-writing clout, the poor guy has never been to a rural pub for lunch in the winter

There are two obvious points here. First that he, as a landowner, was fighting the corner of ordinary men, and second that the ordinary men of the parish did not own the common.

Over the course of writing the book, I came across court cases where people had “trespassed on the commons” and had consequently been assaulted by the commoners. The commons belonged to all, the narrative runs, and were stolen from us. Whereas, “They belonged to a landowner, could be farmed by some — and that farming system was then changed” would be closer to the truth.

Some weeks ago, I read a Guardian “Country Diary”, by one of Britain’s great nature writers. It noted that pheasants from driven pheasant shoots aren’t often eaten — the inference being that they are merely targets. One assumes that for all his nature-writing clout, the poor guy has never been to a rural butcher, or a rural pub for lunch in the winter. What does he think game dealers actually get up to?

The countryside, I’ve been discovering, is whatever you want it to be. For some, it’s a sheepwrecked landscape; for others, it’s a place that was stolen from the working man, and if you like, it’s actually a no-go area if you’re not a landowner. The public is locked out. Actually, it is a canvas on which to project whatever belief or prejudice you might harbour.

The great thing about it is that so little is really known or understood about the countryside that it’s very unlikely anybody is ever going to say, “Hang on a second … ” I guess the point about pheasant shooting being bad matters more than the actual detail, and who cares if the commons weren’t really an egalitarian free-for-all.

Maybe if we keep telling people they were, what remains of the commons might be turned into a come-on-down-and-do-what-you-like space, some way down the line.

I’m not sure life quite works like that. Bullshit is great at getting movements off the ground, but after that you need to win trust. It’s now known that when Caroline Lucas introduced a debate on land access last year, the Labour party rang round afterwards to tell countryside groups they had no interest in Right to Roam. It didn’t, to them, seem to make much sense. They’d had a look, and they’d seen the carry-on behind the curtain.

There are access issues in Britain, big ones that we should seek to solve before it’s too late. My fear is that it’s very hard to move forward meaningfully when ignorance abounds.

The countryside should never just be what we want it to be, a William Morris-esque world of myth and magic where we all lived happily once upon a time. It is what it is, and some things need to change, but we can’t change what we don’t know.

---

Patrick Galbraith’s Their Country, The Landscapes That Divide Us will be published by William Collins in Spring 2025