When I made my living making cider and perry I was visited once every autumn, always on a Saturday when his sons were watching Wales playing rugby in Cardiff, by a farmer from Radnorshire with a horsebox full of wooden barrels and bags of cider apples. He tended to spend as much time as possible in the cider sheds improving the deal by sampling as much free cider as possible while I was in the mill pressing his fruit and pumping the juice into his barrels. This reduced the time available for conversation, and maybe his coherence, and it was a year or two before I found out why he always chose a match day. He was afraid that if he left the ‘boys’ in charge of the farm they’d start up the digger and push out the trees in the cider orchard. I have ever since then doubted the wisdom of letting farmers play with diggers.
A farm over the river changed hands a while ago, and I was soon alerted by the arrival of a digger. The farmer started off making a new hedgerow across one of the fields, and gapping up the hedge along the roadside with quickthorn whips, and I was fooled into thinking he might be looking after the environment on his new farm, though I knew the first enthusiasm of a new farmer can be very dangerous.
The next move, to the old railway embankment, took me by surprise, as this is clearly not productive agricultural land, and I suppose the motive must have been to ‘tidy’ it. All the bushes were cleared, and the few trees left standing had their side branches removed leaving them with tufts at the top like palm trees. He then moved to the two woods along the roadside. Both of these have been completely removed. The small wood has now been sown with grass-seed, and the bigger one, a conifer plantation, is now cultivated soil.
Having stamped his ownership on the land he then bought four big signs to warn us all that the land was private and there was no access.
I was not the only person to be concerned by his actions. Many people in the village are distressed by what he is doing, and some have been making enquiries about the legality of what he has done. Someone has been annoyed enough to smash his “Private Property” signs, and some of the villagers seem to have been privately and discreetly pleased by this direct (if inarticulate) way of expressing disapproval.
These people are mostly annoyed, I suspect, by the change in the appearance of the land; a smaller number maybe are annoyed at the damage done to the (already meagre) biodiversity, and all are probably more annoyed by this very visible kind of vandalism than by the more insidious damage caused by poisonous farm chemicals. But all of these reactions reveal an almost unconscious resistance to that sacred tenet of our modern property laws that a landowner possesses his land exclusively and can do what he wants with it, subject only to a few very rudimentary controls. Their concern, even if mainly for the visual beauty of the landscape, reveals a deep seated belief that we all, and our children, have some kind of vested interest in the land.
My reaction was to start checking up on the controls on farmers’ behaviour. They are not allowed in general to grub out hedges, but then they have grubbed out so many in the past that they probably don’t feel the need. (In the 1950s there were one million kilometres; by 2007 there were 477.000 kilometres, well under half). If you grub up a hedge you may be prosecuted if one of your neighbours is feisty enough to complain, but if you cut it off at ground level on the pretence of letting it to regrow or coppice, and then let the stock browse it until it dies, you will not have committed any offence. You can also quite legally get rid of hedges by neglecting them, so that they turn into a line of short-lived thorn trees .
Farmers seem able to fill in ponds quite legally, too, unless the ponds form part of a Nature Reserve or a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and we have lost three-quarters of them - over a million – in the last hundred years. All those lost frogs and newts and dragon flies nose to tail would stretch from here to Armageddon.
You need a felling licence to fell woodlands. A licence may be valid for several years. In this case one of the licences runs until 2026, and the Forestry Commission tells me that they cannot start checking, let alone enforcing the replanting conditions, until then. By which time it is quite likely that the fuss will have died down, the forest official who approved the felling will have retired, the farmer will have replaced his vandalised ‘Get Off My Land” signs, and we will all have realised that the farm is so environmentally degraded that we won’t want to walk on it anyway.
I lived in Sweden for quite a while, where they have legislation based on ancient custom that allows anyone to walk anywhere in the country, and to pick berries and mushrooms, with the proviso that this right (Allemansrätten) does not apply to land within the curtilage of someone’s house, nor to their landing stage, and that you must not trample standing crops. The Swedes are lucky that we did not invade them and impose our concept of land-ownership as we did in so much of the world.
As far as I can find out*, from Anglo-Saxon times right through until maybe the eighteenth century most of the land in the UK was either owned in common or owned by persons who had to share the use and produce of it with others in the community who had various kinds of common rights. The period of the enclosures, and the way the law was developed and used in order to facilitate the enclosures, achieved, among other rank injustices, the notion of the landowner having absolute and exclusive rights over the land to which he had ‘title’.
According to the lawyer Blackstone (d.1780), property-owning now meant the ‘sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.’ An extraordinary statement, but one meant and taken quite literally.
John Clare, poet and labourer, lamenting the enclosure of his village of Helpston in Northamptonshire, had another view, much less often heard than the views of the powerful who enriched themselves by enclosing the common lands:
“Fence now meets fence in owners little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease.
By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On Cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
And crossberry way and old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again
Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still
It runs a naked stream cold and chill.
Footnotes*
The subject of land ownership, common rights and shared land-use in English history is very complicated, but my reading leaves me in little doubt that we moved during the period of the enclosures to dismantle an ancient system where land was mainly either owned or used in common. Even the royal forests were shared with the local people who had rights to wood, peat, stone, gravel, grazing and so on. The enclosures brought a new private and exclusive view of land ownership.
One of the arguments used to justify property ownership was devised by the philosopher John Locke, in the face of the obvious truth that all land had been originally taken or stolen rather than being legally ‘conveyanced’. Locke suggested that title to land was originally acquired by actions of the person who laboured to cultivate and improve it, though strangely this does not seem to have meant that the actual labourers ended up owning the land. Locke’s argument was also used to justify taking the lands of Native Americans, for example, particularly where they were hunter-gatherers. All you had to do was to start ploughing and the land started to become your property.
As a result of Empire, British ideas about land-ownership were imposed on much of the world. The Scottish Highlanders, used to the idea that the lands of the clan belonged to everyone, found that after Culloden the lairds and clan chiefs were able to claim exclusive ownership rights under London law, and to clear the clansmen off their land to replace them with sheep. But although this view of land ownership has become dominant, it is clearly not the only possible model.
It may be possible for our attitudes to land ownership to change over time, and one starting point might be to recognise that the activities of landowners do not always have the consent of the people who subsidise them through their taxes, and to concede that we are all stakeholders in the land (the planet) we live on even if we do not own it. This kind of cultural change will be slow. Even if the ending of the Common Agricultural Policy leads, as has been suggested, to farmers being paid to farm in a way that delivers environmental ‘goods’ in recognition of popular feeling, this change in policy will not imply a recognition of our rights as stakeholders. But one or two recent initiatives give me hope that some of our land can be managed in a more communal and consensual way.
Community Land Reform in Scotland was originally a movement to support crofting communities in the Western Highlands to buy their land from the landlords, but it has led to nationwide land reforms giving communities in Scotland the opportunity to register an interest in the land of their community, and eventually the right to buy the land with advisory and financial support from the government. (see https://www.gov.scot/policies/land-reform/community-right-to-buy/ ). Community land trusts now manage 560,000 acres in Scotland. One of the most recent buy-outs is at Langholm ( https://www.langholminitiative.org.uk/ ) just north of the border, where the community has already acquired 5200 acres of former grouse moor from the Buccleuch estate, and plans to manage the land for the benefit of the community, creating employment and opportunity and improving biodiversity through plans that include the new Tarras Valley nature reserve. Other buyouts are well advanced at Wanlockhead and Newcastleton. Land management by and for the benefit of local people is central to these plans, and central to Community Land Scotland’s ethos is the belief that ‘we cannot create a more socially just Scotland without tackling land ownership’.
Nearer home Stump up for Trees (https://stumpupfortrees.org/) in Abergavenny is well advanced with a pilot project planting trees on Bryn Arw common, with the eventual aim of planting a million trees in the Brecon Beacons. Upland common grazings are often areas where the landowners’ rights are limited by the common rights of others, and such lands probably account for 30% of the UK. There is the potential here for graziers and landowners and conservationists to come together to plant new life into these landscapes and communities, recognising that present agricultural practices have turned what would be forest landscapes elsewhere in Europe into degraded wet deserts. I’ll be writing more about this soon.
Richard - a really great article - I will keep it and share it.
Check out the battle lines at Bartonsham, Hereford, ‘owned’ by the Church Commissioners.www.Bartonshamhistory.org.uk Nice piece Mr F.