Countryside

If you’re driving at dawn or at dusk in the countryside at this time of year, you might well see shady-looking men standing around in a stubble field, their 4x4s parked close by and ‘long’ dogs — greyhound types — straining on the lead beside them. Watch and you’ll see them walk up the field, or along the edges, until a hare makes a bolt for it. The men are ready. This is what they’re there for. A dog is let off the lead, and someone with a phone videos the scene. The footage is being live-streamed to others who have placed bets on the outcome —guessing which dog will kill the most hares per ‘slip’, or chase. When the hare has been caught (or when it’s scarpered), another dog has a go.

A few years ago I was sitting on the sofa at Sandringham enjoying a ham sandwich with the Queen’s then-head gamekeeper, David Clarke. The thing about working for the royals, he said, is that if a drive’s a flop, they completely understand. What Clarke meant is that even if no royal bags a bird, they won’t complain. It’s about the day, not the numbers dead. Sandringham (unsurprisingly) provides a snapshot of a bygone sporting era, a time when most shooting syndicates were collections of friends and locals, before entrepreneurial types sussed there was a few quid to be made out of shooting. Nowadays, armed with just an iPhone, a bloke on his City law firm lunch break can book a day where a bag of 500 pheasants is guaranteed.

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former are shorn and look thoroughly careworn and knackered from having to feed their demanding and needy adolescents long after it’s strictly necessary. What’s rather spoiling my nature notes at the moment, though, is the nagging fear that next time I venture out into the fields on my morning walk with the dog, our pastoral idyll will have been reduced to a bloody shambles of discarded entrails and severed heads.

I was surprised to read the article by Ben Macdonald in last week’s Spectator urging Britain’s grouse moor owners to ‘rewild’ their estates. It argued that these Tory toffs had spent the past 100 years ‘destroying our natural heritage’, that the UK land under shoot management is an ‘economic desert’ that is ‘destroying both jobs and wildlife’ and that the ‘acts of desecration’ involved in the creation of grouse moors is a ‘debt’ that has ‘never been repaid’. There was a big clue that Macdonald might not know what he’s talking about early on in the article.

Britain’s hunting estates were once beautiful. Walking through the New Forest, we can all appreciate how the purchase of land for hunting can radically protect our countryside. Almost a thousand years after William the Conqueror set aside this wooded wonderland, we can still enjoy its aged oak pastures, Britain’s largest herds of free-roaming grazing animals, and a chorus of birdsong that has been lost in most other corners of our land. Britain’s original royal forests model is recognised around the world as a commonsense approach to hunting. From Alaska to Scandinavia, hunters, alongside ecotourists, invest huge profits to sponsor the natural world. Hunters take a quota of animals from these special places — and leave the rest.

This is the time of year when the English countryside reaches peak incredible: when we rural folk mentally pinch ourselves in disbelief at our extraordinary good fortune in inhabiting the most beautiful landscape on earth. On every walk you see something to delight the eye and lift the spirits.

‘Don’t touch anything sharp. Don’t saw anything or drill anything or sand anything,’ said the builder boyfriend as he left the house. ‘I generally agree,’ I said, mindful of the fact that this is what the keeper used to say. ‘But I’m disappointed you include sanding, because I think I made a very good job of the living room floor, and now I’m going to sand the dining room.’ I truly believe there is nothing a deranged woman with a sander can’t achieve. The builder b and I are trying to get the last bits of the house finished so it is in a fit state to be sold.

The frustrating thing about rights is that when you give them to people they don’t cherish and appreciate them. They turn them ungratefully upside down like a modest-sized Easter egg and shake them vigorously to try to work out if something better might be inside. Right to roam is like this. You would think walkers would be delighted to be told they can wander across a farmer’s land, skirting fields full of sheep and horses to take a short cut to a pub, or to make a nice circular route for their Sunday ramble. Not a bit of it. Since right to roam, walkers seem to be almost exclusively furious about footpaths. They want to know why they cannot stray off them to wander around your fields as well, letting their huge dog loose to run around chasing your horses.

This spring I wrote in the magazine about how sheep attacks were on the rise, as wayward dogs were becoming an increasing problem for farmers. Sadly, since I wrote the piece in March, the problem hasn’t got any better. Pictures of sheep that have been either mauled or killed by family pets still appear constantly on my social media feeds, and over the summer numerous dogs have had to be shot by farmers to stop them attacking their livestock. Things have got so bad in some places that in Wiltshire, for example, the National Trust has been forced to ban dogs from some of the areas it looks after close to Stonehenge.

Last month, an article appeared in The Telegraph under the headline ‘Head of Wildlife Trust faces call to resign over hunting past’. An alternative headline could have been: ‘Anti-hunting activists have whole worldview turned upside down’, because that is really the only story here. The hunting past of Mike Bax, head of the Kent Wildlife Trust, is simply proof of what every pragmatic conservationist already knows: that hunting, shooting and fishing go hand in hand with conservation. Mr Bax has been a dedicated member of the Kent Wildlife Trust for 30 years. During that 30 years he has also hunted with a pack of beagles, which, if you don’t know, are small hounds that prior to the hunting ban would gamely hunt hares.