30-04-2025
JOHN MACLEOD: Skewering of the urban radicals by a countryman who knows and loves rural Britain
The signs were everywhere – KEEP DOGS ON LEAD – but the estate-manager bumped into a local pair he knew well. Lovely couple. Their spaniel dog was unleashed, bouncing around. It had earlier, trilled the lady, killed a hare.
He swallowed hard. 'Probably had leverets…' They stared. 'Leverets: Is that so? We didn't know hares got a disease.'
Into the midst of such blithering ignorance and the Right To Roam movement, Patrick Galbraith pounces generally like a leopard on a goat.
Uncommon Ground is as good a book as you will read this year. An informed, sharp and often very funny look at rural realities and the current clamour for 'access' – and not by some lounge-lizard from Islington.
Galbraith is exuberant, involved, hands-on. In the unfolding chapters, he bounces around Britain like an enthusing Tintin.
There are some beguiling, bucolic lines – 'After going to see the cheesemaker, I drove to Little Snoring to see an egg farmer called David Perowne.'
Or, visiting Appleby in high summer, noting 'the river beneath us, which is down on its bones in the sun…'
But our Patrick also heads out with poachers, crashes an illegal rave, drops in on gipsies, sups with lairds and gamekeepers, shoots the breeze at a foxhunt (Reynard's final fate is tactfully unrecorded) and joins a chap foraging for magic mushrooms.
The author, too, engages patiently with activists demanding total abolition of the right to own land. And he even, for a few pages, wanders naked with naturists, though that chapter is much less exciting than you might think.
Patrick Galbraith knows his stuff. He is still only thirty-two and hails from Dunscore, Dumfries. Attended some frightfully good school, has a a weakness for squashy huntin'-shootin'-fishin' hats. And he's about to marry; his young lady is a serious wildfowler.
Galbraith himself is a qualified deerstalker, writes like an angel and, for seven years, was the editor of Shooting Times.
The sort of educated Scot who, one metropolitan evening, might sip English sparkling wine at some black-tie private viewing – and, not a day later, be lying on his tweedy tummy on the Clisham bog with an unwitting 10-pointer stag in his crosshairs.
Galbraith loves rural Britain. Better still, he knows it – the sort of enthralling companion who can identify distant mallards at a glance, distinguish in an instant a salmon from a seatrout, effortlessly gralloch a deer and identify any tree, even in bare and twiggy winter.
And there are two points he keeps hammering in Uncommon Ground. For one, he questions the general obsession on the Marxist-Lentilist Left with who owns a given chunk of Britain.
In many – perhaps most – instances, the question is academic. What really matters is who lives on the land, how they work it, and how to greater or lesser degree the public can engage with it.
Devolved Scotland's ongoing obsession with 'community ownership' is something Galbraith delicately questions. And with reason. In North Harris, for instance – bought by its residents from a cider-mogul two decades ago – it has proved very difficult to generate income and balance the books.
Uncommon Ground's second great strength is another repeated point: that, often, the best thing you can do for endangered wildlife and a given, fragile environment is not to go anywhere near it.
In this respect, the beasts are wiser than us. Seals do not show up in your living-room to hog the sofa and use your carpet as a latrine. Yet – wind-surfing, kayaking, snorkelling, bouncing onto remote tidal shores or stomping into their caves – we repeatedly invade their territory.
And then suddenly, some summer, wonder why we don't see local seals any more. The gorge, too, has risen in my own throat when I spot raucous tourists making merry by a ghetto-blaster amidst a tern colony, heedless of the frantic birds – circling overhead – desperate to feed their young.
This matters in a Britain where the lapwing population has crashed by 90 per cent, untold counties have seen their last curlew, most will never hear a nightingale and the Scottish wildcat may be within twenty years of extinction.
Mountain-bikers do not actually have a God-given right to batter repeatedly through the fragile ground of grey-legged partridges and even the dedicated birdwatcher, however clever his camouflage or long his lens, can scare black grouse away from their 'lek' forever.
Galbraith, too, repeatedly skewers the preachy pretensions of Right To Roam and its ocean-going ignorance of responsible land management.
In one lovely scene, he purrs of a Right To Roam love-in in London, 'Mark is a sort of floating radical on the radical Left, and it was diverse in the sense that there were people there from almost every Oxbridge college...'
Elsewhere, Galbraith drawls, 'There is something cultish about wild swimming, like people who have sourdough starters or go to the Tate Modern.'
But, when he needs to be, he is rightly angry. In one immersive chapter we spend time on the Arundel estate, where Charlie the gamekeeper – at the decree of the gentle Duke – studies and delights in the songbirds, hatches curlew eggs under a heat-lamp, and responsibly traps voracious predators like crows and magpies.
He layers hedges; fences off the plots where lapwings breed, keeps partridge feeders topped up… and his reward? Guy Shrubsole of Right To Roam boasts, online, how he has deliberately freed crows from a Larsen trap under Charlie's remit.
Weeks later, Right To Roam summon protestors for a mass-trespass on the Arundel estate – 'to bear witness to the 'ecological destruction' that goes on behind those fences.'
In a world increasingly terrified of difficult debates and fraught controversies – the BBC's Have I Got News For You, two weeks ago, completely ignored the biggest story of the week, the Supreme Court's ruling as to what, in law, is a woman – Patrick Galbraith jumps confidently into every complexity he meets.
In one of the book's funniest exchanges, an Isle of Lewis poacher confides, 'Never eaten salmon in my life…' Though perhaps, he muses, he should probably try it before the fish-stocks go instinct.
Uncommon Ground has its occasional lacunae and would have benefited from proper proof-reading with an eye to detail. But it's an enthralling journey, a vision – and, in its own way, a manifesto.
Essentially, our problem is ignorance, Galbraith concludes. In what is now an overwhelmingly urban country, we know little of rural reality, and care less.
In a land where an advertised vacancy for an editorial assistant – the lowest rung in publishing – can see a thousand applicants, how many of those young people 'would have welcomed the opportunity to learn crosscutting and tree-felling? How many would have welcomed the opportunity to learn how to use a billhook?
To Patrick Galbraith's delight, a campaign by a tireless Bristol woman, Mary Colwell to get a Natural History GCESE on the school curriculum was, last year, on the brink of success.
Then, in December, it was paused by the new Government. Labour, sources whispered, had decided it was a 'Tory initiative.'
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Countryside. By Patrick Galbraith. William Collins. £22.
