A short selection of comments about my books: The Theft of the Countryside review by John Hillaby, published in New Scientist, 4 December 1980 Dedicated as I am to the cause of conservation and uncommon sense, there are times, I must confess, that when I see a new book entitled The Theft of the Countryside, I want to crawl under the bed. One can envisage it all: this demi-paradise, this other Eden threatened by the truly colossal disappearance of hedgerows, upland, downland, woodland, copse and spinney with their once abundant wildlife. And now what? The prospect of naught but prairie farms on our rich shires and, at the publication of a book such as this, of the pious reactions of John Maddox, the Forestry Commission and the farming pressure groups with their platitudes of stale reasoning. But after turning over all that (psycho-grammatically), I started to read the book, and read and read with enthusiasm growing at such a rate that I now commend it unreservedly to our Latter Day Saints and their uncertain followers of action and reaction alike, certain at least that her adversaries will be hard-pressed to refute Marion Shoard’s arguments. After working first for the Agricultural Research Council, then for the Council for the Protection of Rural England, and, at the same time, studying town and country planning, she took time off to marshal facts and launch this swingeing attack against contemporary farming practices, their proponents and the bizarre subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy which have resulted in Europe's expensive mountains of surplus produce and a dreary countryside. But, ahem, you will murmur, haven’t we read much of, if not all of this before? I think not. Her book is not only a compendious work of reference; it uncovers a major national scandal: the fact that farmers, like the Forestry Commission, are outside laws that control the rest of us from doing more or less what we like to the land. Farming was exempted from planning in 1947 because it hardly occurred to anybody to include it. At the time, planners and conservationists saw agriculture as something that needed to be protected rather than what it is today, a highly destructive force. Shoard backs this up with authoritative and highly quotable references and tells us clearly what still can and should be done. This is a most important book.” This Land is Our Land Review by Fraser Harrison, published in New Statesman 22 May 1987 In her first book Marion Shoard unleashed a ferocious attack on farmers, charging them with a long list of crimes against the environment which she summed up under her provocative, though wholly justified, title: the Theft of the Countryside. Now she is on the warpath again, but this time her enemy is the whole class -- or regime, to use her phrase -- of rural landowners, whose activities she condemns as an ‘unmitigated tyranny’ and whose crimes are against us, the landless public, and what we fondly think of as our civil rights. A certain pastoral delicacy has tended to inhibit writers on this side of the countryside controversy, and so it is refreshing, exhilarating even, to line up behind someone with a style of polemic which is shamelessly pugnacious. Her new book, published by Paladin as an original and bearing another forthright title, This Land is Our Land, is long, perhaps too long, but extremely thorough. Wielding a blunder weapon than the one she uses to fight contemporary issues, she begins by examining the history of land ownership in Britain. This yields few surprises, though it is always surprising to discover that our countryside today is owned, by and large, by those who have always owned it, the royal family, the aristocracy, the upper ranks of the gentry. In a nutshell, no less than 80 percent of rural Britain (itself about 80 per cent of the total surface) is owned by individuals, the majority of whom are the latest descendants in long lines of ownership. These latterday barons are not merely surviving, but flourishing, and are, if anything, extending the size of their holdings. Contrary to popular myth, neither democracy nor taxes on inheritance have, it seems, done anything to pauperise them or diminish their influence. And what does it mean for the rest of us that the land is in the possession of a privileged handful? The answer lies in the owner's attitude to their property - and this, Shoard bitingly explains, is determined by a three-sided obsession, with wealth, power and, less predictably, with privacy. She has many illuminating things to say about the landed wealthy and how they contrive to stay that way; though, despite strenuous efforts, she is unable completely to pierce the cloak of secrecy and mystification with which they protect their affairs. Her task would have been made far easier had the Thatcher government not abolished the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth within three months of taking office. Even so, the Commission had already disclosed that the richest one per cent of the population owned more than 52 percent of all personally owned land, which was no doubt the kind of research that hastened its end. But one fact shines quite clearly through the fog of obfuscation: owning large stretches of rural land, especially farm land, is still the surest way in our industrialised and fiscally repressive country to remain rich and to become richer. What outrages Shoard more than anything else, however, is the British landowner’s conviction that to own is to exclude. It turns out that our land, at least as far as the law is concerned, is in fact their land, for no right of access exists in the countryside unless indicated. On the Continent the presumption runs the other way and, in Sweden, there is a customary right of Allemansratt authorising anybody to walk over anybody else's land providing no damage or disturbance is caused. One of the many admirable objectives of this book is to have such a principle instituted in our own laws. Under the heading ‘The Broken Contract’ Shoard argues most eloquently and convincingly for the ordinary citizen’s right to walk the countryside and have a decisive say in the development of farming and forestry. Since the war this right has not been respected; indeed its existence has barely been acknowledged. At our expense, the farming landowner has grown exceedingly rich and added to already gratuitous privileges, but without honouring the bargain. While reducing much of the environment -- our countryside -- to ruins, this farming landowner has also shut the farm gate on us, blocked off our footpaths and snatched our common land, reducing us to a nation of trespassers. To put it more formally, as Shoard does herself, the heart of the problem is that, for historical and other reasons, rural landowners tend to regard their ownership as absolute, whereas the public, defending a variety of interests, is beginning to campaign for a radical revision of the idea of ownership, involving the recovery of ancient rights and the creation of some new ones. Shawl makes her own proposals, notably a new rural land tax, as well as changes in the laws of trespass and changes in the planning regulations, to bring farmers under the same public control as urban property developers. However, it would be unfair to judge this valuable book simply by the immediate feasibility of its proposals, which, to be frank, stand no chance of being realised in law without the support of a greatly strengthened Labour Party. No, Shoard’s foremost achievement, apart from providing a mass of important information, is to make clear that The Struggle for Britain's Countryside (her subtitle) has hardly started and will not be won without a proper understanding of land and the politics of ownership. Hers is the best book I have read on that subject. A Right to Roam Review by Oliver Tickell, published in Country Life, 18 March, 1999 The timing of this book is impeccable. Not only does it mark the 50th anniversary of the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, but it also coincides with the government's announcement that it will create a legal right to roam on mountain, moor, heath, down and common, thereby pre-empting Gordon Prentice’s private member’s bill on the right to roam. Marion Shoard’s passionate, scholarly book -- a well-argued call for a public right of access to the countryside of the UK - does much to inform the public debate. It deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in the countryside for its penetrating historical analysis and its practical advice on how this right could best be introduced. The argument goes like this: once upon a time, Britain's rural communities had no concept of individual land ownership, but enjoyed freedom of access to the land around them for a variety of purposes. Then came the Norman Conquest, which saw both land and people parcelled up into private estates and handed over to William’s newly ennobled brigands. So began a historical process which saw ordinary people's access to land curtailed over the centuries as landowners consolidated their wealth and power through draconian laws and the enclosure of commons. But not without challenge: whether the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Diggers’ occupation of St George's Hill in 1649, or thousands of acts of resistance to the enclosures that proceeded during the 18th and 19th centuries. Disputes over land continued in the 20th century, but in a new form. Access to land was no longer a matter of survival, but rather was necessary for exercise, recreation and spiritual solace amid the natural beauty of moors and mountaintops. This was the reason for the Kinder Scout rebellion of 1932 and, as soldiers returned victorious from the Second World War, believing that the country they had fought for was theirs by right to enjoy, this was the vision that guided the 1949 Act. Fifty years on, the Act’s access provisions - based on local authorities enter into entering into voluntary agreements with landowners - are a standing failure. Hence the pre-election promises of the Labour Party to enact a legal right to roam. Many were surprised when the Government announced, last week, that it would stick to those promises. But not the author. ‘Full victory is only a matter of time’, she wrote. ‘ Already every landowner who puts up a “Trespassers will be prosecuted” sign offends against the as yet unlegislated but unarguable spirit of the age … sooner or later, those signs will be coming down for ever.’ Return to top