Uncommon Ground: An Interview with Patrick Galbraith
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You speak to a range of figures – from hunters to ecstasy-binging rural ravers – what unites them in their engagement with the countryside?
One of the things I’m really interested in is where people who think they are utterly different from each other actually have the same interests. So, for instance, there was the terrierman I met when we were hunting who said that he’d read Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass. He said that there was a lot in that book that he really agrees with. And then there’s the master of the hunt who said the great difficulty they have is this terrible ‘it’s mine’ attitude: when rich Londoners buy a hundred acres and then put up fences and say: ‘You can’t come here anymore!’ That’s exactly what the Right to Roam crowd seem to be saying. But they wouldn’t see themselves as having much in common with the fox hunting community. So that, to me, is really interesting: the shared struggle is actually seen as a conflict.
You mention Thomas Gainsborough and how his paintings present as much a fantasy of the countryside as modern narratives of ‘stolen common land’. Has our image of the English countryside always been a fantasy?
To a large extent, the answer is yes. Fox hunting is thought to be something that has roots right back – and that’s not very true. It’s quite a modern thing, quite a Victorian thing. And the whole notion of the connection between Right to Roam and the displaced Anglo-Saxon peasantry: that’s nuts.
I think another thing is that England’s gentry class (that still exist) like to imagine that: we’ve been here for blah, blah, blah. Often, they haven’t been there for very long at all. You’re talking about people, for example, like the Wills Tobacco family. They made most of their money, not through slavery as is often supposed, but through patenting a rolling cigarette machine, and then marketing cigarettes to working men. We’re talking about really not that long ago at all. And then they sort of carry on as though they’ve been there for a thousand years.
So, it’s not just that we project these kind of fantastical things onto the countryside; the countryside is a place where you can go, and you can imagine this self… For example, there’s this moment where I’m walking along with this naturist. He’s on the cusp of a slight kind of – slightly mad, for want of a better word – and I said to him: ‘What’s all this about, this naturism?’ And he says: ‘One, it’s about rampant nature worship. Two, it’s about recreating yourself.’ And that’s what the countryside allows.
I don’t think that we treat the rural working-classes well, to the extent we even recognise they exist.
When I went to Hull, to see Britian’s second oldest naturist community, they went up the Humber and found this place where they could live differently. You go hunting, and you can see this sort of fox worship thing, which is both old, and not old… Right to Roam with their face paint… Everybody’s at it. And I think that’s kind of why they hate each other so much.
What was the moment in history when our idea of land ownership changed?
I mention in the book the correspondence between that Fenland landlord and lawyers in London about who had rights to graze on the common. In a way, it was the landlord’s right. But there were also villages that had the right to graze who seemed to be saying that other villagers, in other villages, didn’t have the right to graze. He didn’t seem to know what was what. He was referencing the Reformation, in terms of who had rights prior to the Reformation. You realise it’s a whole complex web of rights and traditions.
And how has this been interpreted – or misinterpreted – by the land access movement?
I think one of the reasons that campaigns [such as Right to Roam] have managed to make so much hay out of this is because we really don’t know that much historically. So, for example, before the Norman conquest, was hunting a free for all? Did people just go fishing all afternoon? Or was it actually a socially inscribed pursuit? That seems to be up in the air, and a growing amount of evidence suggests that, before the Norman conquest, life wasn’t an egalitarian free for all.
Why was it so important for you to highlight rural working-class figures in your book?
The figure of the gamekeeper, in particular, is a good one, because they keep themselves to themselves. But these guys are important to listen to. That bit when I go to the protest at Dartmoor. You’ve got Snowy [a gamekeeper] down the field. He’s really worried his pens are going to get smashed up. You have this thing where two things can be true at once. Snowy went up there to the protestors and later said, there wasn’t a bad person among them – which is great to hear. And yet, at the same time, you had people there protesting against pheasant shooting. Now that’s the whole reason Snowy’s there, and that he’s so proud of his lapwings.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that we treat the rural working-classes well, to the extent we even recognise they exist. You get these wealthy figures who will leave London for a week’s stalking and will tip them a few hundred notes and a bottle of whisky. At the same time, you get the middle-class Right-to-Roam campaigners thinking that they are ‘lackeys’ for the landowners. Is that why, in the city, we’ve distanced ourselves from the countryside, because we believe it’s just these cap-doffing ‘lackeys’ for rich landowners…?
Three key terms in your book are ownership, access, and engagement – you seem to want to tip the discursive scale towards the latter?
Ownership to me is interesting. I meet landowners who own thousands of acres, and I realise they don’t really know what they own. They don’t really have an appreciation of it. If I said, what’s your favourite oak tree on your estate, they couldn’t tell me sometimes. They just see it as a tax efficient store of wealth. Sometimes they will have a gamekeeper there who they don’t regard as being special in a way. But the gamekeeper is the only person who actually has an understanding of that land, and what lives there – and is also often resisting the destruction of that.
If people really engaged with the countryside, there would be fewer calls for more access.
The fundamental thing about access is that I get a very clear sense from Right to Roam that they seem to think the whole world is like them. But if you opened up the meadows where I live, and you could come with a dog, you’d just get dog walkers five times a day, sometimes on the lead, sometimes off the lead. They’re not going to walk down there and think: ‘Oh, this chalk stream must be improved!’
There are some really well-meaning people out there who think that the whole world wants to go camping, and forage, and admire rowan trees. You get to that point through engagement. If people really engaged with the countryside, really understood it, I think there would be fewer calls for more access.
There are areas that I can go to this time of year to shoot deer that I won’t go to, because I don’t think it’s right to go there when stuff there is breeding. I don’t want anyone to be there. I shouldn’t be there, and dog shouldn’t be there – unless you’re a gamekeeper. But I only understand that through engagement. If there are more functions through which we can engage, then we would really understand the fragility of what we still – just about – have.
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Image credit: Alex Krook.
Patrick Galbraith grew up in Scotland. His writing has appeared in Observer, The Spectator, The Times, The Telegraph and The Fence. He was editor of Shooting Times for several years. He is now a columnist for Country Life and The Critic. Currently he works as a commissioning editor at the independent publisher, Unbound, where he also runs Unbound’s literary magazine Boundless.
Tommy Gilhooly is an English graduate of the University of Cambridge and was runner-up in the review category of The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalist’s Award 2023. His writing has appeared in publications including Literary Review, The Telegraph, The Fence and Engelsberg Ideas.
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