Countryside

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is there any way to wriggle out of a phone invitation?

Q. Is there a tactful way to keep one social offer on hold while waiting to see if you have made the cut for something ‘better’ you know to be happening on the same date? It’s easy enough if the invitation comes in by email or letter, but not when you are put on the spot by someone ringing up. This happened the other day and the caller, a slightly bullying woman, sensed that I was prevaricating and said, ‘I don’t want you to feel ambushed. Take your time, think about it.’ Not wanting to be rude, I quickly accepted immediately. Inevitably the invitation for the preferred event came in

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

Taxpayers fund farmers to wreck their landscape and flood their homes

Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire or east towards Oxford. You may notice something that is so commonplace in British river systems most people ignore it: the woods, marshes and wetlands are all but gone. Farmers have ploughed fields up to the banks. Because there is nothing – or next to nothing – to soak up the rain, water and silt

Thursday

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins’s notebook: Why a wind farm will never be as beautiful as a railway viaduct

Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to nominate a favourite church or house or even town and they will casually suggest a few. Ask for a view and you delve deep. A view is personal, intimate. It is not a landscape but the experience of a landscape. Many suggested places where they had fallen in love or found consolation. A number said simply, ‘The view from the end of my garden.’ Rejecting such a choice for ‘England’s best views’ could be a personal slight. That may be why Hazlitt advised his readers always to walk the countryside

Monday

The Spectator

When bats trump people

The grey long-eared bat is threatened by extinctions, according to various news reports this morning. Scientists at the University of Bristol, who made the discovery, have called for more protection of ‘foraging’ habitat in marshland and lowland meadow in southern England, where the climate is ideal for the grey long-eared bat. The scientists will probably get what they want, because the Bat Conservation Trust wants for nothing. Melissa Kite explains in this week’s issue of the Spectator: ‘Imagine: it’s Sunday morning, and the warden of a medieval village church arrives to get the place ready for communion only to find the altar covered in bat droppings.  As he gets scrubbing,

Thursday

George Monbiot

Meet the greatest threat to our countryside: sheep

The section of the A83 that runs between Loch Long and Loch Fyne in western Scotland is known as the Rest and Be Thankful. It would be better described as the Get the Hell out of Here. For this, as far as I can tell, is the British trunk road most afflicted by landslips. The soil on the brae above the road is highly unstable. There have been six major slips since 2007, which have shut the road for a total of 34 days. The cost of these closures is estimated at about £290,000 a year. It’s a minor miracle that no one has yet been killed. The Scottish government

Thursday

Sam Leith

Feral, by Geoge Monbiot – review

One of the greatest difficulties environmental activists have always had in the war for hearts ’n’ minds is that they so often seem priggish and negative. Everyone knows what they are against (central heating, fun, cod and chips, James Delingpole etc). Fewer people know what they are for. Here, therefore, is George Monbiot’s attempt — shot through — no, positively ravished — with personal feeling — to tell us. He offers, he says, a set of ideas ‘not about abandoning civilisation but about enhancing it […] to “love not man the less, but Nature more”.’ ‘Rewilding’, in his definition, means something different from ‘stewarding the environment’ or ‘conservation’: the idea

Thursday

Wynn Wheldon

Holloway, by Robert Macfarlane – review

This is a very short book recording two visits to the hills around Chideock in Dorset.In the first Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go searching for the ‘holloway’ in which Geoffrey Household’s hero holes up in Rogue Male. A holloway (not to be found in the OED) is, in Macfarlane’s words, ‘a sunken path, a deep & shady lane’ and, according to Household, ‘a lane not marked on the map’. The second trip, made with Macfarlane’s co-authors after Deakin’s death, revisits the holloway, and the hill-fort at the top of Pilsdon Pen. After Macfarlane’s Edward Thomas-infused account follows Dan Richards’s more subjective prose poetry describing

Thursday

Melissa Kite

The tyranny of the cycle track

If Joni Mitchell were writing her song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ today, about the ruination of the natural world by the march of modernity, the lyrics might run something like this: ‘They paved paradise, put up a cycling route.’ Not content with demanding cycling lanes through our towns and cities, the cycling lobby — by which I don’t mean old maids bicycling to communion, I mean the Lycra brigade — are starting to turn the countryside into a surface on which they can pedal themselves into an endorphin-rich sweat as well, it seems. The tarmacking of a six-mile track through unspoilt Warwickshire countryside near my parents’ home is the latest evidence

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Since I moved to the country, I’m on the side of the squirrel-killers

What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA? The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken any pleasure in poor, sweet, bushy-tailed Mr Nutkin’s death. This was the mistake made by Defra secretary of state Owen ‘Butcher’ Paterson, who was revealed over the weekend to have upset visiting Tory colleagues by showing pictures of himself cheerfully posing with the decapitated victims of his Kania 2000 squirrel traps. ‘I’m not sure what

Sunday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Brace yourself for the real experience of going to a rural parish service on Easter Sunday

‘And we extend a special welcome to all our visitors here today.’ That’s the vicar speaking; and this Sunday is one of the two days in the year when you are likely to be one of those visitors. You’re spending Easter with in-laws or friends who live in the country. Easter wouldn’t feel like Easter without Eucharist at the local C of E church after the first mini-egg of the day, so here you are, in tweed and wool, breathing in the timeless smell of damp and candle-wax as you try to prop up the paperback hymn book called Praise! on the pew shelf but it is too big and

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Gordon Wilson, a hero for our times

If there was any justice in the world, Yorkshire pensioner Gordon Wilson would feature in the New Year’s Honours list – but I suppose it’s too much to hope for. The Wilkcockson family, from Hunmanby,  kept noticing that their pussycats were going missing, never to return – but they did not suspect the kindly old gentleman living next door. Mr Wilson, however, was outraged that these noisome creatures were crapping all over his lovely garden and had constructed special wood and steel mesh traps baited with tuna fish. Having ensnared Tibbles et al he would then release the animals “in the countryside”, ie presumably in close proximity to an arterial

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Why are Conservative MPs so intent on wrecking our countryside?

Last week we had Nick Boles extolling the virtues of concreting over what green space we still have in order to tackle an alleged housing shortage. And now, in today’s FT, we have Conservative ‘Climate Change Minister’ Greg Barker claiming that wind farms are not merely ‘wonderful’ and ‘majestic’ but so much so that those near his Sussex constituency have become a ‘tourist attraction.’ What an extraordinary vision of the Conservative future he summons up. Has Mr Barker ever considered, among other things, the law of diminishing returns?  I suppose it is possible that someone might get in their car once in order to gawk at the despoliation of our

Friday

Hugh Thomson

In England’s green and pleasant land

The idea came to me after I had just got back from South America after a long trip to Peru.  Perhaps because I was badly jetlagged, everything about England looked strange, different — and certainly worthy of as much exploration as I would give to a foreign country. The few other times I’ve ever had really bad jet lag — the sort where you walk in a trance, as if under water and sedation — have been when I’ve travelled abroad, not travelled home.  The only cure then has been total immersion in the new culture. So I felt like plunging into England — and to do so by the

Saturday

James Forsyth

There’ll be no u-turn on planning

This government has developed rather a reputation for u-turning. But I would be extremely surprised if it did one over its planning reforms. When you talk to ministers and advisers one is struck by how up for this fight they are. They’re convinced that it is only by taking on these vested interests that they’ll get their message across to the public. And unlike on forests or the NHS, Number 10 and the Treasury are fully on board. There are those who claim that these reforms are profoundly un-conservative. But, in fact, the opposite is the case as Charles Moore argues with his typical eloquence in today’s Telegraph. As Charles

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The government has been weak over forests

A very dangerous precedent has been established today over the forest fiasco. Caroline Spelman earlier gave the most extraordinary interview on Radio 4’s PM. “We got it wrong,” she said in the Commons. “How so?” asked Eddie Mair. She wouldn’t say. As he kept asking her, it became increasing clear that she didn’t think they got it wrong. They conducted the U-Turn because they were losing the media war.   Really? Is that all it takes to defeat Cameron’s government? A decent two-week campaign with a couple of celebs? The forest policy was a good one: why do we need state-run timber farms? Not that this argument was ever aired.

Saturday

Victoria Glendinning

Country matters

Clive Aslet was the long-time editor of Country Life, and now, as its ‘Editor at Large’, is released into the environment. Clive Aslet was the long-time editor of Country Life, and now, as its ‘Editor at Large’, is released into the environment. It obviously suits him. He writes wonderfully in Villages of Britain about building materials such as mud and stud, wattle and daub, and cob, which is where our oldest houses meet African mud huts. Cob is just earth ‘that has been sieved to a fine tilth and laid over straw; water is put on it to make it sticky, and more straw laid on top’, with a seasoning

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

Cross Country Guide

This is a book which, along with a packet of extra strong mints, deserves a place in the glove compartment of every car. This is a book which, along with a packet of extra strong mints, deserves a place in the glove compartment of every car. Any motoring trip into the British countryside, any hillside picnic or stroll will be made the more interesting with The Shell Country Alphabet to hand. In these pages you can find out about singing sand, church architecture and fossils. You may learn that heart burial was common in the Middle Ages, that marine luminescence causes ‘herrings to glow on a plate in a dark

Wednesday

James Forsyth

How the Tories will repeal the hunting ban

The Guardian has a story today about how field sports enthusiasts are donating heavily to Nick Herbert, the shadow DEFRA secretary. The paper links the donations to the fact that the Tories are committed to holding a vote on the repeal of the hunting ban. As the Norwich North by-election showed, Labour will have a go at turning this into an election issue—hoping that it will aid their attempt to paint Cameron and Osborne as people most interested in looking after their wealthy friends. Norwich North suggests this attack won’t have that much cut through. But once elected, the politics of repealing the hunting act will be tricky. It would