Countryside

Londoners have had to learn, more than ever before, to master the art of fielding pity. We’ve been on the receiving end of lots of it this year from people living in the country who care about us, which makes it worse because we’re supposed to be grateful. I’m still smarting from a few recent zingers: ‘I do feel sorry for you, being cooped up in that small house.’ ‘It must be stifling there. We’ve got a nice breeze down here.’ ‘It’s all so lovely and green. Even London must be looking quite green.’ I bat away this pity that comes across as one-upmanship, bleating: ‘It’s been fine, actually’, ‘I

In modern Britain, the quickest way to prove that you’re a good person is to show that you love animals. People share cat videos and pose with dogs in pictures for dating websites. Anyone who is seen to hurt animals — like the Danish zoo that culled a giraffe or the lawyer who clubbed a fox — is sent to a special circle of social media hell. Those who participate in field sports reside in this inferno: the men and women who shoot, stalk or hunt. They are killers in a society that doesn’t like to see death. When polled, around 85 per cent of the British public are in

The cyclist pulled into our gateway, got off his bike and grabbed hold of the electric fencing. Installing game cameras, along with signs making clear to passers-by that they are on film, has not always deterred trespassers, but it has provided us with interesting viewing. And so it was on this occasion, as the cyclist pulled in for what cyclists pull in for. By this I don’t mean they necessarily relieve themselves swiftly against a bush. I mean sometimes they duck under the tape to go inside the field or stable yard where they make themselves at home, in a semi-seated position. Look, it’s not nice to have to describe

Referendum risk Sir: James Forsyth’s excellent analysis (‘To save the Union, negotiate independence’, 5 September) has one flaw: it is not quite correct to say that ‘there is no way a legal referendum can take place without Westminster’s consent’. That is true for a decisive referendum that would commit the UK to the outcome, but not necessarily true for an advisory one. The Commons Library briefing paper (29 May 2019) says that the devolution legislation is unclear and the matter ‘has not been resolved’. This view is supported by the Institute for Government. Nicola Sturgeon is likely to take the issue to the Supreme Court which, with its two Scottish

Always the National Trust sticker. It feels like every time a car parks across the gateway to my horses’ field there is a National Trust sticker in the windscreen. Sometimes there are several stickers in varied colours, the permits of different years, one above the other, like a star rating system for lefties. A few weeks ago, a shiny black car with five National Trust stickers parked sideways on, blocking not only the gateway but the stile beside it so people couldn’t access the footpath. When I caught up with the two men who got out of the car, asking them to please go back and move, they were, in

Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting forfeit the impartiality required of a television nature presenter. So it is bold of the excellent new magazine, Fieldsports Journal, to give Mr Packham lots of space in its issue designed for the start of the grouse season this week. Photographed in a butt, Mr Packham not only grants an interview, but also contributes his own article, which begins with his almost lyrical description of holding a rifle (‘I lift the fore-end and feel its weight on the bulb of my left thumb…’). Not strictly relevant, since grouse are dispatched

The whole of Surrey and south-west London seem to have gone abroad on holiday so I’ve got my sanity back. All the people who were working from home because they couldn’t risk Covid-19 but who had to go out walking and cycling in the countryside all day long have simply vanished. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of the Covid-phobics have got on planes and enthusiastically breathed as much re–circulated air as it takes to get them to a villa by the sea. The cyclists and the runners and the ramblers with backpacks with cooking pots sticking out of the top have all evidently decided they didn’t need to bother me

At last, with the partial easing of lockdown, we have the consolation of an escape into the countryside. There, in the unquestioning simplicity of it all, we can leave society’s struggles behind. A sweet idea, but now rather behind the times, as shown by BBC Countryfile’s recent stirring into action. In its programme last night, Dwayne Fields delivered a piece on how the countryside needs to lose its ‘barriers’ and become truly welcoming to all communities. Ethnic minorities, he worried, feel that they ‘don’t belong’ in the countryside. Fields has done a great deal to introduce inner-city communities to the countryside and is unquestionably an admirable man. But his framing

Nobody earns the right to respect just by having lived into old age, whenever that begins — it has happened by chance and by virtue of having dodged a few bullets. But everyone has the right to be treated with good manners and kindness by those with any power over them — even prisoners and toddlers having pyrotechnical tantrums. Mostly, politeness and consideration are forthcoming. It is always a shock if a bank clerk, dentist or traffic cop are brusque, perhaps because it is so rare. Still, I can stand rudeness more easily than I can tolerate being patronised, something older people encounter regularly. When Colonel Sir Tom Moore raised

‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood because his offer to come out of retirement to save the NHS had not so much been rebuffed as received with uneasy amusement. It so happened that I had been rereading something that might fit the strange category of wholesomeness demanded. It was The Shell Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson (1905-85). Grigson really knew about the countryside, from the Stone Age onwards, and the writers who delighted in it, from Thomas Tusser to Cecil Torr. Anyway, Grigson’s entry for barns explains that the word derives from the Old English for

If you’re driving at dawn or at dusk in the countryside at this time of year, you might well see shady-looking men standing around in a stubble field, their 4x4s parked close by and ‘long’ dogs — greyhound types — straining on the lead beside them. Watch and you’ll see them walk up the field, or along the edges, until a hare makes a bolt for it. The men are ready. This is what they’re there for. A dog is let off the lead, and someone with a phone videos the scene. The footage is being live-streamed to others who have placed bets on the outcome —guessing which dog will

A few years ago I was sitting on the sofa at Sandringham enjoying a ham sandwich with the Queen’s then-head gamekeeper, David Clarke. The thing about working for the royals, he said, is that if a drive’s a flop, they completely understand. What Clarke meant is that even if no royal bags a bird, they won’t complain. It’s about the day, not the numbers dead. Sandringham (unsurprisingly) provides a snapshot of a bygone sporting era, a time when most shooting syndicates were collections of friends and locals, before entrepreneurial types sussed there was a few quid to be made out of shooting. Nowadays, armed with just an iPhone, a bloke

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former are shorn and look thoroughly careworn and knackered from having to feed their demanding and needy adolescents long after it’s strictly necessary. What’s rather spoiling my nature notes at the moment, though, is the nagging fear that next time I venture out into the fields on my morning walk with the dog, our pastoral idyll

I was surprised to read the article by Ben Macdonald in last week’s Spectator urging Britain’s grouse moor owners to ‘rewild’ their estates. It argued that these Tory toffs had spent the past 100 years ‘destroying our natural heritage’, that the UK land under shoot management is an ‘economic desert’ that is ‘destroying both jobs and wildlife’ and that the ‘acts of desecration’ involved in the creation of grouse moors is a ‘debt’ that has ‘never been repaid’. There was a big clue that Macdonald might not know what he’s talking about early on in the article. Berating the aristocracy for the ‘terrible mistake’ of transforming their hunting estates into