Countryside

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

Britain’s hunting estates were once beautiful. Walking through the New Forest, we can all appreciate how the purchase of land for hunting can radically protect our countryside. Almost a thousand years after William the Conqueror set aside this wooded wonderland, we can still enjoy its aged oak pastures, Britain’s largest herds of free-roaming grazing animals, and a chorus of birdsong that has been lost in most other corners of our land. Britain’s original royal forests model is recognised around the world as a commonsense approach to hunting. From Alaska to Scandinavia, hunters, alongside ecotourists, invest huge profits to sponsor the natural world. Hunters take a quota of animals from these

This is the time of year when the English countryside reaches peak incredible: when we rural folk mentally pinch ourselves in disbelief at our extraordinary good fortune in inhabiting the most beautiful landscape on earth. On every walk you see something to delight the eye and lift the spirits. First the blackthorn exploding in the hedgerows like cascading white fireworks; then the ramsons pushing their lance-shaped leaves through the floor of the dingle, pleading with you to turn them into wild garlic pesto; then the lambs — so wobbly, white and cute when newborn — which turn surprisingly quickly into boisterous adolescents gambolling and head-butting and racing one another in

This spring I wrote in the magazine about how sheep attacks were on the rise, as wayward dogs were becoming an increasing problem for farmers. Sadly, since I wrote the piece in March, the problem hasn’t got any better. Pictures of sheep that have been either mauled or killed by family pets still appear constantly on my social media feeds, and over the summer numerous dogs have had to be shot by farmers to stop them attacking their livestock. Things have got so bad in some places that in Wiltshire, for example, the National Trust has been forced to ban dogs from some of the areas it looks after close to Stonehenge. It’s

Last month, an article appeared in The Telegraph under the headline ‘Head of Wildlife Trust faces call to resign over hunting past’. An alternative headline could have been: ‘Anti-hunting activists have whole worldview turned upside down’, because that is really the only story here. The hunting past of Mike Bax, head of the Kent Wildlife Trust, is simply proof of what every pragmatic conservationist already knows: that hunting, shooting and fishing go hand in hand with conservation. Mr Bax has been a dedicated member of the Kent Wildlife Trust for 30 years. During that 30 years he has also hunted with a pack of beagles, which, if you don’t know,

February Fill-Dyke. But north Norfolk is dry, at least in terms of rain. Instead we have coastal flooding. Three years ago, a tidal surge caused major damage and destruction to sea defences, wildlife habitats, paths and buildings. Another surge last month was less dramatic but still reached the gate of a friend’s house, set well back, behind marshes and road. It is terrifying to experience this unstoppable force and hear its mighty roar. Whole shingle banks were flicked aside. As a small child, I stood on the cliff top above raging seas in Scarborough, and the storm seemed biblical. You never underestimate the force of nature, and possibly the wrath

British placenames are so good you can read the map for entertainment rather than navigation. Hardington Mande-ville, Bradford Peverell, Carlton Scroop — they sound like characters in a novel. In fact, P.G. Wodehouse often raided the atlas when writing: Lord Emsworth is named after a town in Hampshire, while a village in the same county gave Reginald Shipton–Bellinger his surname. There’s plenty of silliness out there — Great Snoring in Norfolk, Matching Tye in Essex, Fryup in Yorkshire. Some good old-fashioned smut, too: Lusty Glaze, Pant, Bell End and a couple of Twatts. Kent boasts a Thong — and it’s only a mile or so from Shorne. But enough of

The astonishing has happened at Stonehenge. Some prehistoric force has driven ministers to make a decision. It is to spend half a billion pounds burying the adjacent A303 in a tunnel, to bring ‘tranquillity’ to the ancient place. The result has been a predictable outcry from protestors. The television historian Dan Snow has compared the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, with Isis in Palmyra: ‘vandals and zealots who destroy ancient artefacts’. Stonehenge drives men mad. The stones have for a quarter of a century been as impregnable to change as they have always been to interpretation. Whitehall has been unable to decide what to do with a single-carriageway road which runs