One of the things I have loved about country life is that you have to get on with your neighbours, no matter who they are. If you live in a city, you may construct your own personal village of friends and neighbours scattered among the anonymity, or you may find a part of a city which suits you, full of like- minded people and cafes with good coffee. Or you may find yourself on Twitter living in a village of agreement protected from disagreeableness by algorithms and by being able to block people. It is not so easy to do that in the country.
I have had neighbours that I have liked and respected, although I did not share many of their views, and I have had neighbours that I would definitely not have chosen as inhabitants of my own personal village, but with whom I have been determined to stay on civil terms. I have believed that it was important to respect and understand and socialise with people of different views because that should be fundamental to a tolerant democratic society where we are all prepared to acknowledge that we may not be right even in our cherished beliefs. I have believed that this was one of the strengths of country life. Many of my neighbours who have moved here to retire have a vision of harmonious country life which they try to realise by starting community associations or village choirs.
My neighbour and I divide the roadside verge alongside us in two. He mows ‘his’ bit every other day and sets mole traps. I treat my bit like a hay meadow. I hope he may eventually notice that my half is rich with wild flowers in summer, though I doubt it, and I hope that he will not figure out why his mole traps seem to go off without catching any moles, and with luck we will at the very least rub along.
Among my neighbours are two farmers that I really like and get on with. And there is one with whom I seem to have fallen seriously out. The two parishes here have three farmers who own almost all the land, with the exception of a few fields down by the river owned by a farmer from the next parish along. The two farmers I get on with farm in a traditional way in the best sense of the word, by which I suppose I mean without excessive greed. The farmer by the river cultivates land that should not be cultivated and is being slowly washed away with every flood. And then there is Bob. The sort of bloke who buys you a pint in the pub to make sure you know your place, and won’t let you buy him one back just to make sure.
It all started when I heard a lot of shooting a couple of fields away and went to investigate. The field was newly sown with fodder turnips. A few rooks were eating some of the seeds. When I was a kid they said, of seeds like this, ‘One for the mouse and one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow’. But someone had set up a few rook decoys in the field. One of these was powered by a car battery and was supposed to look like rook flapping its wings. There were rumpled rooks lying here and there, dead, and other young rooks that might have been looking mystified and perplexed if they had had as many facial muscles as we do, puzzled by the way their siblings were lying round untidily.
I walked nervously across the field to where the gunman seemed to be, but by the time I got there he had sneaked off, leaving behind him various military-looking items of camouflage netting in his little hideout in the hedge.
Although wild birds are protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act, there is a scheme under which Defra can declare General Licences to permit farmers and landowners to shoot various birds to protect crops or game or for conservation purposes. At the time of this incident there had been a lot of pressure on General Licences from the Wild Justice campaign, and as a result you could not shoot rooks without first making an application to Defra to explain why you needed to protect a particular crop. I didn’t think Bob would have done this; in fact I suspected that some rural Rambo had asked him if he could shoot some rooks for fun, or sport, and Bob had just said yes. So I phoned the local police and asked if they could check if Bob had followed the rules. The copper couldn’t be bothered to check the rules but went to see Bob anyway, and Bob told him he didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t known that anyone was making loud shooting noises on his farm, a farm where he does not welcome visitors.
His farm actually has no public footpaths on it whatsoever. Word in the village has it that when the footpaths were being registered in 1984 the parish council was packed with farmers who denied the existence of footpaths as far as possible, and certainly earlier OS maps show several footpaths crossing Bob’s farm that are not on the maps now. So technically he can exclude everyone from the enjoyment of his farm. All you can do is look at it –should you want to - and even that can be questioned. Recently another farmer asked me why I had stopped on the public roadside alongside his farm, saying ‘Well I hope you aren’t snooping!’
Whatever you think of the morality of someone being able to exclude us all from the benefits of the enjoyment of nature – in many European countries including Scotland there are extensive Rights to Roam - you might want to question whether the farm subsidy system might have given us some rights to enjoy bits of the planet that have cost us so much cash. Under the EU Single Farm Payment scheme and then the Basic Payment Scheme farmers have been paid just for owning land for most of this century. If you look on a German website that gives details of such payments you can see that in quite a few years someone in that parish with the same name as Bob was apparently paid 753,423.65 euros annually – well over half a million pounds. One year he is listed as having been paid 153,706.99 euros as well, and in one lean year he seems to have been only paid 153,706.99 euros, (a mere £132,000, which would have been over twice the salary of the prime minister at the time). During that period he bought two separate fairly large pieces of land, which might just possibly have been enabled by these large subsidy payments. One of these parcels of land was subsequently used for housing, which is likely to have netted him a serious gain when sold as development land with planning permission.
Planning applications include a process whereby people living nearby can make submissions before the application is considered. Recently Bob applied to put 3 holiday lodges in the centre of a large open area of farmland. In my submission I suggested that the site was in the middle of the kind of farmland that we know to be among the most nature-depleted 10% in the world, and that if they were minded to give Bob permission the least they could do was to make him replace a large wood that had been on the application site and was visible on the same maps which showed the old footpaths. This kind of procedure is now quite standard, and in fact farmers now have a nice little earner called Biodiversity Net Gain by which they can be paid by developers for creating biodiversity to compensate for developments which damage the environment. There are now also schemes where farmers can get paid for allowing the public onto their land. What I was doing in making the submission was part of the democratic process by which the way landowners who get rich by being awarded planning permission can be slightly moderated by neighbours bold enough to stick their necks out. As it happened the application was eventually withdrawn, probably on the advice of the planners. The upshot is that I have been banned from ever going on Bob’s farm – a fairly empty threat since no-one is allowed anyway and there are no footpaths.
If Bob ever applies for the subsidy for letting people on his land, will he make an exception and bar me? Will we know when we are allowed there? There is already a scheme where owners of estates with notable works of art in their stately homes get a tax break for allowing the public occasionally to view them. They are not obliged to tell the public that this is the case, and the Inland Revenue won’t tell you either because tax matters are confidential, so if the farm access subsidy is handled with this kind of typically British discretion, I may never find out.
Maybe I was wrong about neighbours. Maybe real country life is more about living with people with whom you have long-standing disagreements, if you have enough about you to disagree with them on matters of principle, masked by politeness or avoidance. In Spain when the Civil War broke out, or in the former Yugoslavia, villagers with such grievances seem to have felt liberated to start slaughtering neighbours with whom they had apparently lived peaceably for years. Maybe falling out with Bob marks a new stage of my belonging in the village, membership at a deeper and more visceral level than that achieved by more recent villagers. Maybe a village with seething feuds under the surface is more authentic than the harmonious community of which some of my new neighbours dream. Perhaps it also marks the sad recognition that farming now sits on the front line in a disputed landscape, where concerns about the right to enjoy nature, biodiversity loss, river pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and the rest confront a bewildered farming community that has been encouraged and indeed paid to do such damage, which any ecologist or conservationist is bound to challenge before it is too late.
Fantastic piece of writing as always Richard… Andrew and I were laughing out loud at various points!
Thanks for that Richard. In another matter, I do miss the sessions at Arvon. You, Angie and Nick, jamming. Happy days