Donate
At one point in Uncommon Ground, Patrick Galbraith spots Robert Macfarlane on the fringes of a countryside access demonstration. Macfarlane – probably the highest profile British writer on Nature in recent decades – tells him that he doesn’t like to be called a “Nature writer”. Galbraith suggests that he “start writing about fox hunting” if he wants to shake off the label – and his legions of fans. It’s a characteristically subversive moment. But it prompts the question of whether Galbraith himself is a Nature writer. He certainly writes about Nature, but Uncommon Ground is really about people and their conflicting emotional and ideological perspectives on access to the natural world.
The book is both a passionate call for a more meaningful engagement with Nature and a corrective to the sometimes misleading message of the current Right to Roam campaign. Galbraith asserts that the popular claim that public access is limited to just 8% of England is “the most obvious sham”. (The figure, he writes, is based only on access land and takes no account of other areas with de facto open access or of the 225,000 kilometres of public footpaths.) Such misinformation, Galbraith argues, may actually deter people from engaging with the countryside.
To capture a snapshot of these complex debates, Galbraith travels widely and talks to a remarkable array of people: the Right to Roam campaigners themselves and the aristocratic landowners they oppose, as well as gamekeepers, conservationists, poachers, farmers and many more besides. A brisk chapter on the history of land access provides vital nuance, especially to the muchromanticised ideal of the commons, which were actually highly exclusive spaces. “An anachronistic picnic on your local common in 1550, with an off-the-lead labradoodle sniffing around the villagers’ pigs,” Galbraith notes, “would have probably resulted in a horsewhipping.”
A central issue is the tension between a desire for increased countryside access and the need to allow undisturbed space for regeneration. A warden at a spoonbill nesting site in Norfolk asks the author, “Why can’t we give Nature one little bit of space?” This specific debate – by which Galbraith is much preoccupied – does risk taking the basic Right to Roam proposition as a given: that blanket access really would result in more people at large in the countryside, and they could potentially trample sensitive habitats. Given that many sections of the existing footpath network are evidently little used, and much existing access land appears seldom visited (and, indeed, is often physically difficult to ‘roam’ across away from the paths), this seems unlikely. But it does draw attention to our strange “love of moving into other habitats”. Seals, writes Galbraith, “are very unlikely to haul themselves up on our beds but it’s pretty common that a human traipses across theirs”.
Galbraith is an active shooter of wild game himself, and he makes a convincing argument that working-class wildfowlers, shooting over the same hard-won patch of marsh for decades, have a far deeper connection with Nature than a passing paddleboarder. But he is occasionally insufficiently critical of the commercial shooting industry. (Not all shot pheasants really end up with game-dealers.) He also takes his own advice to Macfarlane and writes about a provincial fox hunt, unashamedly engaged in a practice illegal for two decades. It’s an excellent piece of reportage, but Galbraith’s argument that we should see parallels between fox hunters and participants in illegal raves is unlikely to convince those who instinctively find hunting abhorrent. Thus his more interesting point may be missed: that hunters, shooters and fishers may have their own rival struggles for countryside access.
Ultimately, Uncommon Ground is a hugely engaging and insightful work and a very welcome intervention in what is often a crudely binary debate. Galbraith’s own prescription for more meaningful and inclusive engagement with Nature is a broad mix, from enabling scout troops to participate in deer management to tying conservation grants to access provision. But the book’s most important point is simple: our apparent disconnect with Nature in Britain, counterintuitively, may not be “because of a lack of access but often in spite of it”.
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking our Relationship with the Countryside by Patrick Galbraith. William Collins, 2025. ISBN: 9780008644406
