Mr Grouser and the goblins
Eric Christiansen
THE HISTORY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE by Oliver Rackham J. M. Dent, £16.95 For a long time, most Britons either made a living out of the countryside or avoided it. There were peers. There were urban sportsmen. But on the whole, the people you met out in the fields had some business there.
But that was a hundred or more years ago. Things are different today because of the steady growth of a third category of People who now form a majority in most rural areas.
Who are they? Commuters, cockney %quires log-burning pensioners, bungalow- Wallahs, overspilt proletarians, shanty- town Hampdens, caravan colonists, Laura Ashley Levellers, dormant intellectuals, killer-dog=walkers, ArCadian Satanists, superannuated hippies, retired officers, protest-march reservists, English expatri- ates returned to sender, eco-voyeurs, Dutch millionaires, vegetarian guerilleros, rusticated hairdressers, novelists, emeritus professors, criminals, knickerbocker fan- ciers, and half the contributors to the Spectator at week-ends; et cetera. What a shower! What have they got in common? They live in the country, whether by accident or design. And they have no business there. They are numerous, but they are not a united movement. Many seem to find each other unbearable. They write letters to the local newspapers complaining about each other's dwellings, conduct, noise, smell and appearance. The tone of these once admirable gazettes is unpleasant; they are dominated by Mr Grouser, who-has retired to a smart bungalow fronted by a menacing row of whitewashed rick-stones, and takes the number of the lorry that knocks them over.
But there is one thing they all hate more than each other, and that is any intrusion into their lives of the old order. That means farmers and civil servants. Farmers own the land, and civil servants think they own everything. These are the trolls. They cannot do anything right. Mr Grouser and the goblins find them infuriating, and w, ould like to put them in their place. But theY can't. So the trolls go about their business emitting clouds of poison and policy over the landscape, with shrieks of goblin rage resounding in their ears.
The goblins have various opinions about the countryside. The land belongs to the people, they say, and the people ought to be walking all over it, preferably in earth- shoes. Or the land is an amenity; or there should be much stricter planning regula- tions; or none at all. The woods, the paths, the verges, the moors, the hills, the coast, the flowers, the animals and the birds must all be liberated; the farmers and the government have stolen them. 'This is- land's mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me' is the chorus at one end of the table. At the other end, there are cries for saving this or that form of life for its own sake. 'Where the bee sucks, there suck I' is the more modest, but equally radical refrain of the goblin natur- alist. The noise is impressive, and since the coming of the prophet Bellamy, and the discrediting of the CAP, it looks as if something may be done. But what?
The prophet does his stuff, but what they need is scripture: something to preach at the trolls, some doctrine to bring the goblins together into a fighting force. Enter Mr Rackham, a Cambridge botanist, a broadcaster, an 'acknowledged author- ity': definitely one of the green fellows. His book will be read with grunts and squeals of pleasure in every week-end cottage in the land, and possibly with some interest in farmhouses, terraces and towers.
Its most obvious merit is the amount of information it contains. If you want to know why Essex is like Herefordshire and unlike Cambridgeshire, or how to make ridge-and-furrow or date a hedge, or man- age a heath, or a decoy pond, or Epping Forest, or why rabbits became vermin, or elms are prone to disease, or fields differ in shape, or bits of woodland are called Hag, or anything of that sort, look no further. The answer, or an answer, is here. Not everyone wants to know these things, but the knowledge, such as it is, makes the view from the motorway less monotonous.
Mr Rackham also hands out rods, for the correction of public opinion. Anyone who thinks that the modern landscape was created by enclosures in the 18th century, or that iron-works and ship-building used up the woodlands, or that mediaeval Eng- land was full of impenetrable forests, mighty oakS and bad roads, or that open- field agriculture and dew-ponds are archaic, or that the Dutch drained the Fens, or that God made the Norfolk Broads will no doubt adhere to those beliefs, but if he were to read this book he might sense the need to support them by argument. I don't swallow every morsel of the Rackhamite version of rural history, because there are some flaws in his use of the evidence. For instance, it doesn't fol- low that places with Old Norse names must date from Viking times, because many Norse words found their way into Middle English and beyond. But he manages the big themes with more care and common- sense than most of us.
A third recommendation is the polemic against modern man. A big target, but the right one. There is no point in attacking agri-business or the Forestry as if they were extraneous features which could be re- moved from our lives by cosmetic surgery. The alternatives could be far more ugly, given the dominant passions of the day: profit, leisure, lebensraum and all that. In Mr Rackham's view, the countryside has a history which is not the same as the history of land-use. It depends on the survival of the native woodland, where man, flora, and fauna co-exist in such a way as to preserve the greatest possible diversity of each living form. This is the heart. Let it die, and the country becomes an inanimate space, to be scrawled on by whatever passing fashions in agriculture, housing, entertainment, and general mucking about flit through the mind of whoever is in charge. Let it live, and there will be continuity and the chance of recovery even from agri-business and the mindless im- portation of indecent exotics.
The life of woodland used to depend on carefully regulated pasture and coppicing.
Now it is threatened by grubbing, re- planting, and forestry. A wire fence and benign neglect are what Mr Rackham re- commends; protection from tidy minds above all. If the rabbit can survive myx- omatosis by changing its habits, there is no need to underrate the recuperative powers of nature. Nevertheless, man has suc- ceeded in killing off so many varieties of plant and animal for no good reason, that the opportunity of not killing off any more should appeal to those who prefer to commit genocide only as a last resort.
I think that is the drift of Mr Rackham's argument, and I suspect there is a good deal of Burke in it. He sees the oak rather as the eloquent Irishman saw the oak of the British Constitution: not lightly to be tampered with, for the sake of our past, present and future. Others may detect in his words a hint of Eden, Original Sin, Redemption and Resurrection; at any rate, there is a doctrine here which could bring discipline and purpose to the goblins, and soften the hearts of a few trolls. He may be flying in the face of economics, but not necessarily so; in the forthcoming agrarian crisis, Rackhamism may prove stronger than vested interests.
So the book is worth reading. There are too many misprints, and some of the well-chosen maps are printed too small to show up the essential details. There are points of history and topography with which few will agree. But it is a great achievement.
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