Stop scapegoating Britain's landed classes

Telegraph

30-03-2025

An essential tenet of today's land access movement is that landowners are villainous and the larger their holdings, the worse they are. It's an attractive idea but it doesn't withstand all that much scrutiny.
Last year, the Right to Roam campaign published a collection of curious essays titled Wild Service. The premise is that farmers and landowners have ruined English and the public need to make the countryside great again. It's an argument I sort of like, except I'd go in for doing it in a less antagonistic way. Turning up uninvited on somebody's farm with a JCB and a plan to create a wetland habitat is quite likely to end in tears and prosecution.
Team Right to Roam, in the introduction, single out Richard Benyon's Englefield Estate for a bit of a kicking. His 'vast domain' is, according to Wild Service, ''shut, at all times, to the public'. A clumsy comparison with the church on the estate is made, which is apparently, 'open to all'. The grace of God, it goes on, 'and the meanness of man, side by side'.
You can imagine my shock when, as part of the research I was doing for my own forthcoming book, Uncommon Ground, I turned up at Englefield to find that the front gate was in fact open. I wandered up the drive and happened to meet David, a lovely Ghanaian man. He told me he was just so thankful that people open their property to the public in Britain because in Ghana there is 'nothing like this'.
Curiously, over the next couple of hours, I had half a dozen similar experiences. A month later I wrote to Richard Benyon and he invited me to talk. He too had read Wild Service and his take would be best summed up as bemusement. Not only are 1,700 acres of Englefield accessible but the public being able to enjoy the countryside is something he's championed all his life and, as for that church, his 91-year-old mother opens it every morning.
The narrative that large landowners are hell-bent on keeping the common man off their acres is juicy but it simply is not true. In fact, generally, the larger the holding the greater the access.
Take the Holkham Estate, for instance, where Jake Fiennes – the conservation manager – told me proudly that over 20 per cent of Lord Leicester's 25,000 acres can be enjoyed by joggers and picnickers. Conversely and quite understandably, I discovered too that the smaller the holding, the less good the access often is. Sure, let's break up large estates but will there be rambling after the revolution?
I met a young activist who had been sent down to the Arundel Estate to 'bear witness to the ecological destruction' that goes on behind those hedges. Funnily enough, on a place famed for wildlife conservation, she had found it anticlimactic. Not only was it teeming with birds but nobody chased her away. She concluded, resignedly, that her adventure had been a 'symbolic thing'.
Last week, the news broke that Clan MacDonald's 20,000 acre estate on the Isle of Skye has gone up for sale. Some cheered – but not apparently the tenant farmers and crofters who've benefited from centuries of ownership. The Scottish government continues to give landowners a kicking and tenants suffer – it's like hammering a CEO while ignoring the impact on everybody who relies on the company.
Benyon is a thoughtful man – life is too short, he told me, to care about people writing nonsense. What matters to him more apparently is the happy sound of schoolchildren visiting his estate. The week I was there, they'd had 1,700 of them through the gate. 'I want young people to understand,' he told me, 'that the countryside doesn't just happen. There are skilled people who make it happen. I want them to understand where food comes from.'
We desperately need to rethink our relationship with the countryside, but if we allow half-baked narratives to foment, we will all lose.