Four difficult women who fought to preserve the English countryside

One thing that Covid lockdown made us appreciate was the importance of being outdoors. When we were finally allowed into them, national and local parks became chockfull and many people rediscovered that being in the open had health benefits.

How timely, then, that Matthew Kelly has written an account of four redoubtable rural activists: Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Sylvia Sayer and Pauline Dower. He describes them as ‘the women who saved the English countryside’ – which is perhaps a bit of a stretch, though it’s true that individually they fought tooth and nail to preserve vast tracts of it. Their lives spanned the past two centuries and they were all, as Theresa May would have it, ‘bloody difficult women’, each with a driving force and often a particular region that concerned them.

We are first introduced to Hill, the social reformer and co-founder of the National Trust. Her interest was chiefly in people, and her aim was to enable city workers to enjoy health-giving open spaces within easy reach of London. She wrote of securing access for ‘the ever-increasing population to some of these airy hillsides, commanding wide and beautiful views’.

The most famous of the quartet is undoubtedly Potter, though known more for her ‘little books’ about Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggywinkle than for the work she did, and investments she made, in preserving the unique grazing uplands of the Lake District. But according to Kelly’s thorough examination of these women’s efforts, the two least known appear to be the ones who fought their corner hardest.

As chair of the Dartmoor Preservation Association from 1951 to 1973, Sayer argued that Dartmoor was ‘the most severely threatened’ of the remaining uncultivated areas in the south of England, and her campaigning made her a constant thorn in the side of all those she believed endangered its wildness, including the military and the Forestry Commission.