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Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith: Everything wrong with Right to Roam
Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith (William Collins £22, 368pp) Right to Roam is a vociferous pressure group that demands far greater access to the countryside for 'the ordinary people of Britain'. This demand depends upon a very particular narrative: at some point in the past, rich aristocrats stole the land from the people and shut us out. We must take it back. It's a matter of social justice. Does any of this make sense, asks Patrick Galbraith? What effect would it have on our precious, beleaguered countryside if Right to Roam triumphed? After all, one of their leading lights recently tweeted a demand for 'the People' to be allowed to wander freely anywhere along field margins. It caused uproar. Field margins are some of the most precious wildlife habitats of all, where our rarest birds nest. Yet what makes Uncommon Ground such a superb read is Galbraith's generous even-handedness, his endless curiosity and his energetic research among all sorts of people, including the Right to Roamers themselves. They like to dress as Morris dancers or woodland sprites, wear face paint, play ukuleles and sing folk songs. He likes their eccentricity but despairs of their ignorance. It isn't true we are excluded anyway. We enjoy an amazing 140,000 miles of rights of way across England and Wales. Some open-access campaigners, meanwhile, are bluntly destructive. They destroy crow traps, even though control of corvid numbers is crucial to bird conservation. An old Devon gamekeeper tells Galbraith about one activist who tore down a lot of fencing as a protest. Yet it wasn't put up by some greedy landowner but Natural England. 'It was to stop the sheep getting in the ancient woodland.' Other problems created by careless or selfish 'human access' include Scottish mountain bikers disrupting capercaillie breeding grounds and jet skiers terrorising wintering birds on the coast. Still, he enjoys his wild swim with a mass trespass group in a reservoir owned by United Utilities. Galbraith never argues puritanically, like some militant eco-warriors, that his fellow humans should be excluded from swathes of the countryside to protect wildlife. In fact he wants far more engagement between people and nature. In his ceaseless quest for a truly 3D, multi-faceted portrait of our country, he goes walking with the British Naturist Ramblers in a bluebell wood, appropriately attired (ie boots and socks, no more.) They're an amiable bunch, harmless and nature-loving, but rather lacking in female members, he notes. He meets the Earl of Leicester, proud proprietor of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, just the sort of toff that the Roamers despise. Yet fully one fifth of his 25,000 acres is superbly managed nature reserve. Public footpaths thread across the other 20,000, and Holkham also hosts a regular 5k Parkrun, which the earl joins in with! This is the kind of aristo we can warm to. Especially when he tells Galbraith, while rolling a cigarette, that it gives him 'great pleasure to beat farmers on the estate who are half his age'. The idea that 'they' are to blame – that is, rich landowners and aristos – is a hopeless oversimplification. 'Landowners and farmers aren't the cause, but they could be part of the solution.' In the end, lack of access isn't the problem, it's lack of understanding. Millions go to the seaside every year, he points out, yet how many know there are two different species of seal in the UK? If only more people did country things in the country. Our countryside is changing fast. Could the solution be a win-win for all concerned? With commitment and imagination, yes, says Galbraith.
Daily Mail
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
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.
Scotsman
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith review: Uncomfortable truths about 'right to roam'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It's difficult to find a conversation where more than two voices on land access are raised, those being the campaigners for 'right to roam' and the elite landowners or farmers who are said to be blocking it. But Patrick Galbraith's second book, Uncommon Ground, offers exactly that. As the title suggests, it is filled with voices from people who don't always make the headlines in the UK land access debate, which has taken a different turn since the UK Government dropped it as a policy in 2023. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Patrick Galbraith From sitting in the nude talking to a naturist over a bowl of cereal to tracking down poachers in the Outer Hebrides and venturing out at dawn with working men from a wildfowlers club who've had to crowdfund to find the unmarked grave of their founder, Galbraith casts the net far and wide when it comes to gathering perspectives on access. There are, of course, farmers and estate owners interviewed. But Galbraith does well to refresh some of the reductive statements about the farming and land-owning community. He reminds us that they aren't all 'Old MacDonald or Mr Darcy' with some of the people he speaks to, and why some restricted access boils down to food production or the birds and the bees, rather than simply 'I'm rich you're poor and there's nothing you can do about it.' Then there are anecdotes from people who don't just want access to be protected, but need it, for deeply personal or cultural reasons. The intimate conversations and experiences the author has with people often overlooked in the land access debate makes this a must read for anyone holding up the megaphone to say something about it. The book includes shoddy examples at both ends of the 'right to roam' spectrum, from activists getting figures wrong to inflate online followings, to landowners sitting on swathes of acres failing to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with it. 'Humans and the land are inseparable', Galbraith writes, 'and landowners have an immense responsibility.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But the author also doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths when it comes to access in rural Britain that will make anyone who likes a walk in the countryside shuffle in their seat when reading this book. Take dog owners, for example. The book shows complications that land access presents since the rise of dog ownership; what this means for sensitive sites with ground-nesting birds nearing extinction, livestock and the pollution of rivers and waterways. And yet despite some heart-wrenching anecdotes, including a seal pup separated from its mother who was likely spooked, Galbraith doesn't deliver these with a damning tone. Throughout the book, and in a punchy conclusion, the author talks about the need for education and engagement. He says it is up to us to be intelligent about creating a countryside that works for all forms of life. While Scotland's 'right to roam', a colloquial term for the country's general public right of access introduced in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, is hailed as a shining example for what is needed south of the Border, Galbraith ventures north to unpick some of realities on the ground where people are said to wander free. These include hearing about no camping zones beside Loch Lomond, where bylaws have since been introduced due to unintended consequences of opening up access. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad There are some characters that Uncommon Ground unearths who leave you thinking 'if only there were more people like that with more influence', like Nicola, a stalker in the Highlands who is pro-access, but who says it must come with engagement and effort on both sides. While his own voice neatly sews together the diverse community of voices in his book, Galbraith's personal views on access rights aren't entirely clear. But this is perhaps deliberate, and fitting with a book on a complex topic that doesn't have a straight yes or no answer. Galbraith is trying to encourage more of a discussion rather than what currently seems more like a two-dimensional debate. Aside from this, there's an undertone of the author's commitment to nature throughout the book, particularly some of Britain's declining bird species; a nod to his debut book, In Search of One Last Song: Britain's disappearing birds and the people trying to save them.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In brief: Uncommon Ground; The Pretender; All That Glitters
Patrick GalbraithWilliam Collins, £22, pp356 Nature writer Patrick Galbraith's excellent second book more than fulfils the promise that his equally fine debut In Search of One Last Song suggested. In a series of acutely observed and often very funny vignettes ('it was diverse in the sense that there were people there from almost every Oxbridge college'), Galbraith travels across rural Britain in an attempt to look beyond the usual cliches of country life. In his exploration of everything from economic turmoil to the concept of 'belonging', he proves an erudite guide. Jo HarkinBloomsbury, £18.99, pp452 'Wolf Hall meets Demon Copperhead' is an impressive billing for a first-time novelist, but The Pretender mostly justifies it. Jo Harkin veers closer to the grittiness of Dan Jones's medieval-set fiction than the visionary sweep of Hilary Mantel, but it is still an auspicious venture into fictionalised history. Loosely based on the real-life royal pretender Lambert Simnel,The Pretender explores the machinations of the wars of the roses with authority, bringing the frightening world she depicts to life. Orlando WhitfieldProfile, £10.99, pp336 (paperback) If Orlando Whitfield's readable and fascinating memoir-cum-exposé of the art world isn't turned into a big-budget film, it will be an opportunity missed. The author explores his friendship with the charismatic art dealer-cum-convicted fraudster Inigo Philbrick, detailing how he becomes increasingly successful and ever more grandiose in his ideas. All That Glitters would be a considerable accomplishment for a veteran writer, but the knowledge that it is Whitfield's debut makes it all the more impressive. To order Uncommon Ground, The Pretender or All That Glitters go to Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Why an English ‘right to roam' is a bad idea
My brother has trouble with magic mushrooms. They grow on the fields he farms near Norwich, to which people come each summer, armed with carrier bags. In the 1970s, our grandfather sprayed the mycelium with fungicides so toxic they're now prohibited across Europe; but the mushrooms have since returned, and with them, the hippies. 'One guy,' my brother harrumphed, 'thrust a paper in my face, and said he had a right to roam. I told him, 'Mate, look at the top. It says 'Scottish Parliament'.'' England is full of such arguments. The custodians of the land are aggrieved by the carelessness of its visitors – trampling crops, menacing flocks – while the visitors reason that the countryside is a public good, and they have a natural right to tread where they please. The situation has ground on for decades, generating plenty of heat but little light. Bravo, then, to the young journalist Patrick Galbraith, who has travelled across Britain for the past three years, making himself the wiser head. Uncommon Ground is a sympathetic book of those personal encounters, framed by big questions: are the masses really locked out of the English countryside? And are they even unwelcome there? Duller books argue, repetitively, for ' access ', and display an Us vs Them mentality. For instance, Guy Shrubsole's Who Owns England? and the essays in Nick Hayes and Jon Moses's Wild Service tend to hallucinate a squirearchy bellowing 'gerroff my land' with a shotgun in one hand and a G&T in the other. These authors argue for an English right to roam, and Galbraith knows to watch such people closely. He describes a rally before a mass trespass on Dartmoor, where the landowner, Alexander Darwall, has successfully challenged camping on his land: All down the road, cars are beeping their horns, and one of the leaders of the protest, standing on the steps of the village cross, calls for quiet. 'And if I could ask. If everyone could put your hand on someone's shoulder just to feel our deep connection to each other.' Some of the crowd move towards each other, and just as many move apart. A man standing beside me, who has a Devon flag draped over his shoulders, places his hand on my arm and closes his eyes. Balanced phrasing, perfect imitation of tone, bone-dry diction: the effect is devastating. Galbraith visits high and low, rich and poor. Class is a major theme, subtly elaborated. He ventures out at dawn with the Humber Wildfowlers' Club, working men who've had to crowdfund to find the unmarked grave of their founder, then to bid for an access strip to reach the Crown Foreshore where their sport is legal: the National Trust, that Fabian icon of the common people, abruptly turned them back. Nichola Williamson, a ranger who grew up in suburban Fife, is 'a hero' while she's toting a mountain-rescue stretcher, whereas holding a rifle on the river Beauly she gets called 'a f-----g toff'. The chairman of the North Harris Community Trust, a crofter, looks like 'the laird'. The affect of class comes from what we do, not from deeds of ownership; many urban prejudices against 'the toffs' land against people of much more slender means than themselves. Ironically, it is the genuinely aristocratic estates, such as Holkham in Norfolk, that have both greater leeway and motive to admit the public. A chaperoned path in your great park, perhaps ushering visitors to a profitable café and gift shop, provides a more complacent prospect than having your 17-acre wood grubbed through by strangers, tying dog bags to the branches. Galbraith concedes that race is a real dividing line, but he finds more evidence of racism against Travellers and the Romani than against ethnic minorities from the cities. (He also notes that cities themselves have 'no access zones' for those, like drug dealers, who have a defined territory: an ex-dealer in a boxing gym tells him: 'Can't go Peckham, can't go Lewisham, can't go Brixton'.) Galbraith's friend Amir, an Iranian, teaches some scouts how to skin and butcher a roebuck. They write him a thank-you letter. Similarly, Flavian Obiero, a young Kenyan man, is shown happily rearing pigs on a council farm in Hampshire. Our farmers are not either 'Old MacDonald or Mr Darcy', as they may appear to Right to Roam campaigners. People will welcome incomers who stick it out or show understanding, and country folk are well aware of which landowners are good, and which are useless. 'If every landowner had to reapply for their job,' Galbraith muses, 'there are probably very few of them who would regain their role.' The point of applying this corporate standard is not to say 'good riddance' to the family farm, but to illustrate that landowners are stewards of a public good. Last year my parents, landed farmers, were nearly thrown off their horses when a hobbyist flew a drone low above them. 'If they could just learn about farming,' my mother fretted, 'how it all works. The local children used to help with the harvest. They need to come out and see it.' Galbraith has the same prescription. First, end the caricatures. End the false articles, absurd headlines, poor history. End smashing crow-traps for TikTok. Second, improve opportunities such as scouts, fairs or drag hunts, where people can get involved with nature, not just as a backdrop as in, say, kayaking, but by being led by it. And third, spread education. Mary Colwell's Natural History GCSE, for instance, has finally been approved after much delay. Finally, rather than taxing British farmers to death for their 1 per cent returns, tie their grants, where appropriate, to hosting public activities. After examining our history (complex), our true rates of access (comparatively high), and the likely effect of hordes of walkers and their dogs on habitats (apocalyptic), Galbraith concludes that the current Right to Roam campaign is mostly bluster. His sympathies are with the doers: the foragers, keepers, ravers, farmers, wild swimmers, naturist hikers and huntsmen who attend to nature. Galbraith is only in his early thirties, but he edited The Shooting Times for seven years, and this is recognisably the book of a person with eyes front, foot forward – in short, a good shot.
