The Myth of the British Countryside
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Since Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street, great swathes of our English countryside have been sold off, in underhand and little publicised deals. In the last forty years, almost five million acres of public land have been privatised. This is ten percent of the entire British land mass.
Our countryside is not a constant. It is politicised, a hidden battleground. It’s planes are scarred with border changes, forestation and deforestation. It is both a farming landscape and a landscape still visibly affected by foot and mouth. The empty fields now luxury camp sites, cow sheds turned holiday cottages.
In my day-to-day life, I trespass all over the place. Often because I am very easily lost, but also because I feel so strongly about my landscape I believe I, we, have a right to occupy. I am not alone. The advertising of both dairy and what-derived products has spun the lie of a collective British countryside. All gentle hills and open meadows that we are welcome to frolic in and sing ecstatically about low-fat butter. We think back to our childhoods careering down cobbled streets, feet off the peddles of our rickety old bikes. We can’t remember whether or not this is the Hovis advert.
My partner and I recently walked out of our jobs in Oxford, and then continued to walk for the next seven days, with only a hammock and a change of clothes, all the way to the sea. It was a kind of cathartic response to having left a negative and chaotic work place in such a way. For much of the first day, we found ourselves dissecting and raging over the way we had been treated in our shared ex-workplace, but over time, we mentioned it less and less, as if the ebb of the tide we were walking towards was dissipating our painful experiences, and allowing us to regain again our senses of self. Our problems become as flippant as the weather.
The journey takes us through an ever-changing English landscape. It is my favourite time of year to walk, everything late-August luscious with all the trees so full of life they seem to be talking to each other and the rivers lazy and generous. It’s far from all idyllic though. A patchwork of somewhat forgotten trails we have vaguely linked together find us treading as much in the midst of golden corn-shorn fields as along the sides of A-roads thundering with lorries. Numerous times we are almost squashed as flat as the stinking badger carcasses we have to step around.
We walk along the flint-strewn backbone of middle-England until we reach Wiltshire. We see MOD tanks drive across ley lines. An army hospital standing a hundred yards from Stonehenge. Somebody has built an allotment next to a shooting range.
Surrounding the regimented towns are fenced fields and warning signs, the fields cut up and re-appropriated for target practice and as minefields. This chopped up landscape taunts us as we walk through. It is English countryside concentrate, quintessentially beautiful but totally unattainable. In fact we find so few options of where to string our hammock we end up sleeping on the ground of a public park. At 4 am we are woken by two people patrolling with flashlights.
The whole journey, in fact, is overlaid with this feeling, the land around us is bound with private property signs, fields and pathways cut off from us. We rename it Fat Boy Land. Filled with gillet-wearing Fat Boy land owners who live in oversized cottages with bulbous thatched roofs. We imagine them as huge and molly-coddled toddlers, eating stacks of hay for breakfast like Weetabix and draining the rivers for their own personal lakes. They’ve privatised what was public and turned it into their personal play grounds. As much as we are hoping this walk will regain us our sense of freedom, the Fat Boys consistently direct us on where we are allowed to go.
Now more than ever, we have a critical need for our countryside. We are living through a climate crisis. Mental health issues are at an all time high, cities are growing, and the immediate effects of pollution are present under our finger nails and in our hair. But it’s going, chopped up and sold off for short-term gain. It makes sense that it plays so heavily in myth and fable, as ours is becoming ever more fictional. Soon we will only be left with our sculpted city parks, while the privileged few slowly destroy what we’ve always imagined, but which was never ours.
