Dear Country Squire Magazine,

I must pen these few lines while seated at my desk, having just read Dominic Wightman’s magnificent evisceration of Dr Stuart ‘Barbara’ Cartland’s recent ramblings (“The English Countryside Does Not Exist?”). My wife insists I shall do myself an injury laughing so heartily, but I tell her it is worth the risk to see one of these metropolitan savants so thoroughly and deservedly filleted.

Mr Wightman’s prose was, as ever, a tonic. The image of Dr Cartland peering through a steamed-up train window at the “theoretical inconvenience” of actual fields will stay with me for many a long day. One does so tire of these cultural theorists who imagine that a weekend spent glowering at a copy of the Guardian in a converted barn constitutes “field research.”

But Dr Cartland is merely the latest in a long and ignoble line of cultural Marxists who have sought to impose their peculiar fantasies upon the English countryside. Mr Wightman’s splendid article has emboldened me to recount a few other outrages that have befallen our rural spaces in recent years, the memory of which still causes the blood to rise.

I recall, with a shudder that has little to do with the British climate, the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Here was Mr Boyle, a man of undeniable talent, using £27 million of public money to present a billion global viewers with what one commentator correctly identified as “a strictly Marxist interpretation of British history”. We were treated to “happy peasants” gambolling about pre-industrial Arcadia, only to have their idyll destroyed by “satanic mills” – a vision lifted directly from the Communist Manifesto. The industrial revolution, which pulled millions out of ignorance, disease, and illiteracy, was presented as nothing but capitalist oppression. There was, naturally, no room for the Empire, the Church, or any of those inconvenient inventions like railways and telegraphs that actually built modern Britain. Just suffragettes, the Windrush, and a great deal of jumping on beds. One half-expected a hammer and sickle to descend from the Olympic cauldron .

Then there is the curious matter of the Battle of the Beanfield, which recently marked its thirtieth anniversary . In 1985, several thousand New Age Travellers (or “hippies,” as we called them in those simpler times) decided they wished to hold a free festival at Stonehenge. English Heritage and the National Trust, with a perfectly reasonable desire to protect one of the nation’s most precious monuments, obtained an injunction. What followed was a confrontation in a Wiltshire beanfield that left over 500 people arrested – the largest mass arrest of civilians since the war .

Now, I do not for a moment condone violence from any quarter, and the PCA report did find that “excessive force” was used by some officers. But what fascinates me is the subsequent mythology. The Peace Convoy has been romanticised in certain circles as a noble counter-cultural movement crushed by the forces of rural reaction. The reality, witnessed by the Earl of Cardigan (who testified against the police, betraying his class to such an extent that the Telegraph accused him of it – he later bought a BMW with the damages), was rather more complicated. Yet the cultural narrative persists: the wicked countryside, defended by brutal police, attacking peaceful travellers. Never mind that the travellers were, in the main, headed for someone else’s land with the intention of doing pretty much as they pleased.

More recently, we have had the ongoing spectacle of hunt saboteurs descending upon rural communities, convinced that they alone understand animal welfare. These urban warriors, many of whom have never been closer to a fox than a BBC wildlife documentary, patrol the lanes of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire in the firm belief that they are striking a blow against feudal oppression. They seem genuinely perplexed when the locals fail to greet them as liberators.

I was reminded of the Ledbury Set affair of 2004, when five young men – including Otis Ferry, son of Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry – stormed the House of Commons chamber in protest at the hunting ban. Whatever one thinks of their methods (and invading Parliament is not, perhaps, the done thing), they were responding to a genuine grievance: a government determined to impose urban sensibilities upon a rural way of life it neither understood nor valued. The then-Prime Minister, Mr Blair, seemed to imagine that fox hunting was a pastime of toffs rather than an activity that supported farriers, saddlers, vets, publicans, and a whole ecosystem of rural employment. The Ledbury Set may have been “dashing, charismatic young men with impossibly good bone structure,” as one journalist put it, but they were also defending communities that felt, not without reason, that they were being legislated out of existence by people who had never mended a fence or pulled a lamb.

Amidst all this, there is occasional cause for hope. The BBC recently ran a programme, Battle Grounds, which told the story of Alistair, a former nomadic, dreadlocked, vegan fire-breather who now – wait for it – milks cows for a living. It transpires that when you actually live on a farm and see the conditions in which animals are kept, when you work alongside the people who have done this for generations, you discover that much of what you believed from campaign videos “lacked crucial context”. One farmer even invited him round for beef stew. His vegan former friends were, predictably, less enthusiastic. There is hope for us yet, if even the fire-breathers can be converted.

Mr Wightman was too polite to mention it, but Dr Cartland’s entire thesis is essentially a reheated version of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City, published in 1973. Williams, a silly Welsh Marxist, argued that the countryside was an “ideological construct” designed to obscure the realities of class exploitation . It is a curiously persistent notion, this idea that the rural working class – the very people who have actually worked the land for centuries – are somehow the dupes of a ruling-class fantasy, while the academic who has never pulled a root vegetable from the earth sees things as they truly are.

One might have thought that the intervening fifty years would have produced some refinement of the thesis. But no, Dr Cartland serves it up fresh, with a side order of Nigel Farage anecdotes and some seventh-century burials that prove, apparently, that Anglo-Saxon England was a UN peacekeeping mission.

The real offence, as Mr Wightman rightly identified, is the condescension. These people do not wish to understand the countryside; they wish to instruct it. They wish to tell farmers that their existence is illegitimate, their traditions exclusionary, their very presence on the land a form of violence. And they do so from the safety of university offices, with guaranteed pensions and zero risk of ever having to test their theories against the reality of a wet November morning on the hill.

One is reminded of the Ashridge College lectures of the 1930s, where Conservatives sought to articulate a vision of rural life that was precisely the opposite of Marx’s “idiocy of rural life” . For them, the customs of the countryside were “manifestations of ancestral wisdom, more reliable than anything that could be found in the town” . Solidarity, mutual respect, the accumulated knowledge of generations – these were the keystones of a society that emphasised experience over theory.

Dr Cartland and his ilk would do well to remember that experience has a stubborn habit of outlasting theory. The countryside will be here, long after “The English Countryside Doesn’t Exist” has been remaindered and forgotten. It will be here because people work it, tend it, live in it, and – yes – occasionally drive Land Rovers through it. And it will not be lectured into non-existence by assistant professors who cannot tell the difference between a field and a text.

Yours etc.,

Al Green
Dorset