England by John Lewis-Stempel: How to save the countryside … help farmers, don’t

ENGLAND: A NATURAL HISTORY by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday £25, 464pp)

England is available now 

The countryside of England is the greatest work of art in the world. Quite a claim! What, greater than Chartres Cathedral, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the City of Venice?

Yet when such a claim is made by our very finest nature writer, John Lewis-Stempel, it commands your attention. 

In his latest book he explores, in chapter after chapter of richly poetic but beadily precise prose, the extraordinary variety of some of our most iconic and precious landscapes. By the end of this marvellous series of portraits, you may very likely be convinced.

At the heart of the author’s love of our countryside is his perception that it is a human creation, a cultural artefact, ‘agri-culture’, as he reminds us. It was made by farmers and farming, their crops and livestock, their hedging and ditching, cutting and shaping, over all those long centuries.

At a time when some overzealous rewilders seem to regard farmers – otherwise known as ‘the people who keep us fed’ – as the enemy, Lewis-Stempel’s book is also a passionate defence of this beleaguered and under-appreciated species.

He speaks as a farmer himself, adoring cows, ‘those walking muck-spreaders,’ and even that classic sound of the working countryside, the clatter of an Ifor Williams trailer.

With long experience of sheep farming on the Welsh borders, he’s indignant at eco-zealots labelling his much-loved beasts as ‘woolly maggots’, doing nothing but damage. The real problem is overgrazing, not sheep per se: demanding too much of the land or the soil (or the sea).

In his wonderful chapter on chalk downland, he cogently explains how the springy, close-cropped, sheep-nibbled turf of our majestic whaleback downs are a haven for nectar-rich wildflowers such as vetch and wild marjoram and scabious, which in turn feed countless bees and butterflies.

There is much that is hopeful here; a strong belief in our rural heritage and farming in the older, gentler way where possible, although some intensive farming is also inevitable given our growing population. But there is deep sadness too at the never-ending blight of urbanisation: ‘They are building over England!’ he cries in despair.

Pollen Peddlars: Sheep grazed grass is a haven for nectar-rich wildflowers like vetch and marjoram

Worth a shot: Managed moorland for grouse shooting is rife ground for growing golden plover

He reminds us that the last time the English countryside was really intact and flourishing was the 1970s. Anyone under 50 has never experienced the birdsong-filled, butterfly-clouded landscapes of the ‘real England.’

I’m 58 myself, and can clearly remember the Somerset countryside of the early 1970s as a boy of six or seven, when it was all farmers in flat caps driving small red tractors, cows going for milking, swallows and hedgehogs, frogs and toads.

The abundance was spectacular, with no rewilding or nature reserves in sight. Just old, slow, cow-rich dairy farms in the vale, sheep up in the hills. Today, much of our landscape doesn’t feel like countryside so much as an eerily silent agri-zone.

But there’s still much to celebrate and protect. He makes an unforgettable nighttime ascent of Mount Caburn in Sussex, with its surrounding Bible Bottom and Oxteddle Bottom, and the air ‘as heavy as honey and the shadows in the ditches of the fort as dense as tar’.

But downland is distinctly short of rabbits, battered by myxomatosis and more recently by the horrible viral haemorrhagic disease.

Rabbit used to be a cheap dinner for rural families (my mother baked a mean rabbit pie) but today they are scarce. Stempel thinks that instead of worrying about ‘expensive reintroductions of charismatic animals from the wildwood of primordial time’ – wolves, lynx etc – let’s get rabbits back.

He loves the richness of grasslands, and perhaps we are too fixated nowadays on planting trees. Traditional grazed, sun-warmed, well-dunged grasslands are rich habitats – think of Africa’s Serengeti – and skylarks, Stempel reckons, are positively ‘tree-phobic,’ since trees are ideal perches for predators like sparrowhawks. ‘I have never known a skylark nest within 50 metres of a tree.’

With his great appreciation of the man-made rural scene, he also has chapters on The Field and The Village – in particular, Helpston in Cambridgeshire, home of the brilliant peasant-poet John Clare, ‘the one true voice of nature from the English countryside.’

He visits that most beautiful of English/Welsh rivers, the Wye, from its ‘fast-flowing turbulent childhood’ in the Welsh uplands, to old age when it ‘meanders senescently across a flat plain.’

Another kind of waterland altogether is the Norfolk Broads, and some magical word-painting here. ‘The saltings are waking up. A blade of light appears in the east, and the brightness grows over the sea… the tide is coming in; silver slinks along the creak bottom, and makes small frissons up the spine…’

And then there’s the Moor, a paradoxical ‘man-made wilderness,’ desolate, bleak and spooky, or wild, thrilling and free, depending on your taste. The moor appears again and again in our literature, from King Lear on the heath, to Emily Bronte on Haworth Moor and, of course, in Conan Doyle’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

Lewis-Stempel focuses on Spaunton Moor in North Yorkshire, a managed grouse moor where predators are culled and heather is burned, and gives a sterling defence of shooting, puncturing ‘the flameproof certainties of the anti-shooting lobby’ with some steely facts.

Our gorgeous golden plover, for instance, is found on 50 per cent of grouse moors, thanks to human management, but only 20 per cent of non-grouse moors.

Lewis-Stempel writes at the opening of the book, ‘This is my swansong . . . My last full-size book on Nature.’

A sad thing to hear, but then all the more reason to be grateful for this late pastoral symphony, a masterpiece, and a very English love letter.