This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
In the pretty town of Stamford there is a pub halfway up a hill called the Bull and Swan. It is quite unremarkable in many ways — of all the pubs in the town it might be the least interesting, but nailed to the wall behind greasy glass there is a letter that I think about often.
It is dated March 1908, and it was sent by the then publican to Lord Cecil, whose descendants still own Burghley House, about a mile south of the town. “My Lord,” the letter runs, “may I take the pleasure of fishing in your lake this Sunday? I should most earnestly like the occasion.”
I was told once, by a local land agent, that there used to be a reply, stuck up underneath, written by Cecil himself that simply said, “Not at present.” But when I asked the young barmaid if she’d ever seen said response, she told me, “No”; she had in fact never actually noticed the letter at all.
Yet, the letter illustrates a reasonably obvious but important point. The opportunity to do things like fish or shoot rabbits or even forage for mushrooms has, for a long time, generally been gatekept by the few.
Sure, there are more kilometres of footpath in this country than a person could ever possibly walk in their lifetime. In fact, if you placed every designated footpath in England and Wales end-to-end, it would wrap around the globe six times, but can people really engage with the countryside and nature, and what does that even really mean?
Some months ago, I was on the Isle of Harris and I met a particularly despondent gamekeeper who had just come off the hill after a tricky day. He’d had paying clients out, and all morning the deer had been behaving strangely.
As soon as they got in sight of them, the beasts scattered across the scree. The stalking party realised after some hours that they weren’t alone on the hill. Two ramblers with a dog were some way beyond them, heading in the same direction.
It’s not easy, the stalker told me, whilst he stood outside the larder. Those people, he accepted, were on the hill for much the same reason they were — “it’s a fucking belter of a view” — and yet the estate had cull numbers to hit and stalkers like him have a job to do.
As things stand in Britain, we have more deer than we’ve ever had. It’s thought that in total, from diminutive muntjac deer right up to red deer (the biggest of our five species), we have a population of well over two million.
Ecologists will tell you that they are decimating woodland and are destroying what remains of England’s hedgerows. There are parts of the country where public footfall makes deer management difficult — muntjac, for instance, do well in relatively suburban Hertfordshire — but I also often think that the public, with obvious caveats, could be part of the solution rather than a hindrance.
At least once a month, I meet a person of a similar age to me who would like to get into recreational deer management. Getting a rifle, I tell them, isn’t easy. The police will make sure of that, but one of the greatest challenges is finding land to stalk over.
Sure, I recognise that farmers don’t want just anybody on the ground with a gun, but at the same time, it wouldn’t take much for them to identify sensible local people with enthusiasm for it. We’ve got to a point now where the deer population is so large that managing them properly over farms simply isn’t a one- or two-man job.
There is a wider point here, and that the letter on the wall of the Bull and Swan illustrates it very well. Because of their assets, landowners and farmers can give people (be they publican or local school children) the opportunity to fish, forage and even — local adults anyway — the opportunity to harvest sustainable meat for the table.
That need, for all sorts of reasons, is greater today than ever. The ancestors of little children in Stamford dug that lake over the course of three years. Surely that gives them a claim to fish for those big pike that live there?
Whenever I hear, and I often do, landowners and farmers saying that the public don’t understand the countryside, I tend to agree. But I also ask them what they’ve done to change that. Engagement and understanding doesn’t simply come from being able to wander down footpaths.
