Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Countryside, Patrick Galbraith, William Collins, £22

‘There is a nature crisis,’ writes Patrick Galbraith. ‘There is a crisis in ecological understanding… But what is much harder to identify is an access crisis.’

Not so much ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ as ‘Crisis, which crisis?’.

Uncommon Ground is in part a response to the latest incarnation of the ‘Right To Roam’ movement, a coalition of environmentalists and activists whose headline claim – that in England the public has access to only eight per cent of the countryside – clearly strikes Galbraith as a provocation (he calls it ‘simply untrue’ and ‘an obvious sham’). Galbraith’s position is that we do not, as a society, do what we should with the abundant access we have.

Galbraith is a phenomenon in modern English letters. He is a countryside writer, not a nature writer, and they don’t make so many of them nowadays. Those that they do make – admirable ruralists such as Nicola Chester and John Lewis-Stempel – tend to be lyrical homebodies, tied to their parishes. None that I know of matches Galbraith’s rangy, restless, itinerant curiosity about what’s over that fence, who lives here, what this or that fellow thinks about things. In this book, as in his last, In Search of One Last Song, he maintains a tireless focus on people; talking with people is Galbraith’s gift.

In 2023 it seems Galbraith got close to Right to Roam, and his chapter on the work of the campaign is hugely diverting (if something of a sideshow in the wider context of the book). Demonstrations against landowner Alexander Darwall and the ban on wild camping on his Dartmoor estate showcase the movement’s uneasy mix of anti-capitalist politics, reheated folklore (‘we’re going to summon up the spirit of Old Crockern’, writer Guy Shrubsole shouts into a megaphone), hands-on activism and crank radicalism (‘white hippy shit’, as one uncomfortable campaigner describes it to Galbraith). It’s something of a scoop when Galbraith finally pins down the elusive Darwall for a cup of tea and a chat, although Darwall winds up saying very little; in any case, the real hero of the chapter – for Galbraith, certainly – is ‘Snowy’, Darwall’s 76-year-old gamekeeper and shooting tenant. Snowy has no real beef with the right-to-roamers – ‘there wasn’t a bad person among them’, he says of the Dartmoor protesters, even though they ‘frightened the shit out of me’ – but is able, in his own words, to articulate some of the complexities of land, access and nature (‘Only place on Dartmoor where lapwings survive is Hanger Down,’ runs a typical observation. ‘Because it’s keepered hard. Anywhere else there’s fuck all.’)

Galbraith has the habit – widely regarded in some circles as unseemly, if not actually criminal – of observing closely what people say and do, then writing it down. As a result, Uncommon Ground is an oral history of immense value. Galbraith goes everywhere and talks to everyone, usually over tea and snacks. The fact that he is a shooter – a former editor of the Shooting Times – opens a few gates for him (even if it just as surely ensures that others are barred against him), but while there are hunters, land managers and gamekeepers here, Galbraith does far more than hobnob with the Countryside Alliance. Ezekiel is a black amateur boxer from New Cross who opens up about his experience of the countryside as an operative in ‘county lines’ drug rackets; DJ Fu is a big name in the ‘free party’ scene, where covertly planned raves are staged at rural sites (‘We don’t pay tax, we don’t live by the rules’).

Transgression and trespass are central themes. ‘All I want to do,’ says a young salmon poacher on the Hebridean island of Lewis, ‘is to be able to go fishing in places.’ A Romani man named Terry Doe is articulate and frank about the relationship between Gypsy communities and settled society (‘They don’t mind being feared. You can’t know it until you’ve lived it’). On Harris, the artist Steve Dilworth suggests to Galbraith that the problem is that we have become too keen to seek permission (‘Don’t ask,’ he tells me, as though not asking is a noble thing’). The problem, Galbraith finds, is that everyone thinks it’s the other lot making the rules – and nobody, from Right to Roam to Lewis poachers to nudist ramblers in the North Downs, likes being told what to do.

This is not exactly an emollient book but it does make the case that tribalism and toxic antagonism are as much of a threat to our relationship with the countryside as trespass and access law. And in refusing to shy away from complexity, it reminds us that these things are never really ‘us’ and ‘them’: it’s always ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘them’ and ‘them’ and ‘those guys over there’ and so on and on – multiple interests, multiple stakeholders, and vanishingly few easy wins to be had.

One lesson to draw from Uncommon Ground is that rules may ultimately be less important than responsibility. Responsible access, responsible landowning. Galbraith – who of course has an argument to make – gathers examples from across the UK of how increased access can work against conservation and sustainable land management. Not everyone, it seems, comes to the countryside nobly to imbibe the goodness of grass and sky and wood – some come to drink heavily and cause bother (a section on daytrippers at Lochearnhead put me in in mind of David Matless’s writing on ‘anti-citizenship’ in the countryside, and his idea that ‘the encouragement of meaningful access to the countryside assumes an unbridgeable divide whereby if one enjoyed, for example, loud music and saucy seaside humour, one could not and would not want to connect spiritually to a hill’); even those who do take care can cause countless inadvertent harms. On these busy islands it is difficult to tread carefully and leave no trace, even if people want to. Galbraith puts it bluntly: the desire ‘to be able to walk uncontested across the land’ brings with it fire, and disease, and ‘endangered species becoming even more endangered’.

There’s a sort of humility in this that is at odds with the entitlement that characterises the right to roam movement (you could call it legitimate entitlement, to fundamental rights, although Galbraith’s examination here of the history of land access demonstrates at least that this has always been contested ground).

Galbraith’s powerful chapter on human intrusion on coastal habitats made me think of the 19th-century naturalist Philip Gosse. A marine biologist, Gosse played a huge role in popularising the study of rock-pool life – as a result, his son Edmund recalled, ‘an army of collectors’ descended on England’s coastlines, and in no time at all the natural beauty that Gosse had known and loved so well was ‘over, and done with’. Engaging with nature is a precarious business – like Lennie in Of Mice And Men, we want to stroke the mouse, but as often as not the mouse ends up dead.

A warden for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) once told me that the society’s public reserves, the ones you can visit, are a sort of ‘thank you’ for funding the Society’s other reserves, the ones you’re not allowed to visit – the ones where the real conservation work is done. Many people would bridle at this, and consider it enervating, or infantilising: are we children, to be rewarded for obedience, and entertained in creches or playgrounds while behind the fences the grown-ups get things done? To which I suppose the counter-argument is: well, can we be trusted? It’s an open question.

One of the most interesting tensions in Uncommon Ground relates to maturity and immaturity. For Galbraith, it’s clear who the adults in the room are, and it isn’t the people hoisting a papier-mache puppet of Old Crockern up on Stall Moor (and it certainly isn’t Guy Shrubsole gleefully smashing up crow traps, for which he is given both barrels here). Galbraith is riled by exaggeration, sentimentality, waffle, rhetoric; he is drawn to people he considers authentic, frank, honest, and mature. At times this gives the book a slight slant that it could do without, as well-briefed, middle-aged conservative men in offices who talk patiently about complexity and compromise are framed against activists playing ukeleles and saying things like ‘we have to understand the borders within us’. On the other hand, Galbraith doesn’t hold back with regard to ‘pusillanimous and detached’ landowners, who answer to no-one and have become ‘useless’ as a consequence.

Mostly, though, the sentiment feeds into a rather touching admiration for people like Nicola Williamson, a deer manager in north-west Scotland, who takes him deer stalking in Glen Affric. A working-class woman from suburban Fife, Williamson argues that ‘it all comes back in a roundabout way to people, no matter who they are, having agency over the land around them’. ‘In another context it might feel idealistic,’ Galbraith notes, ‘but coming from an ecologist with windburned cheeks, a gralloching knife on her belt and a .270 rifle by the door, it makes a lot of sense.’

In Galbraith’s final chapter, a torrent of practical recommendations breaks loose, centred on an urgent need for hands-on engagement with the countryside and conservation. Where he differs from Right to Roam is that his focus is on practicality, know-how, hard-won understanding, rather than emotional connection or quasi-spritual kinship; where he is in agreement, though, is in seeing that whatever must be done must be done collectively – we must do it together.

What Uncommon Ground also shows us, by its excellent example, is that this is hard work. Coming together is hard work. Bridge-building is hard work. Galbraith never plays up the legwork he’s putting in (only once joking, to a young man enthusing about Kerouac, ‘I’m keen to get off the road’), but having these conversations – making them happen – is work that may be beyond most of us. Easier by far to hang out and listen to speeches by people we already agree with.

It was clear from his first book that Galbraith is an uncommon talent; in Uncommon Ground – a book that manages to be profound and entertaining, deeply serious and mordantly funny, impassioned and proportionate, wide-ranging and crisply focused – we see what he can do when he is on a mission, and it’s formidable. ‘Country life’ (a moribund theme, not long ago) finally has, in Galbraith, the observer, interpreter and amanuensis it deserves.