I’ve been reading the 15 February copy of Country Life. It’s a publication I look at a few times a year just to keep in touch with what’s really going on in the countryside.
It took me a while to decide whether I preferred the £19m (guide offer) c7-acre pad in Jersey or the 26.59 acre (that 0.01 acre either way is clearly much more crucial in North Wales than Jersey) £2.5m (guide price) Jacobean mansion in Mold. The place in North Wales sounds like a snip to me but someone has probably snapped it up by now.
Once one has assessed a few more second home opportunities, and passed the photograph of Ms Sue Hepburn (who wants to fly in a Spitfire to celebrate her 70th in June), one comes to the editorial which praises David Attenborough and faintly damns Autumnwatch etc . I don’t mind the ‘watches’ being slimmed down, except that I know quite a few of the presenters, as I never watch them anyway (well, hardly ever). I can’t quite understand how Countryfile has escaped cuts (maybe it hasn’t) but I’d have thought that it could easily be halved in length, although if one cut it down to the good bits it could be cut by 90% and only keep some of Charlotte Smith’s pieces. If only there were live cricket on the BBC like in the olden days when there were sparrows, buntings and finches in the countryside!
Agromenes is always worth a read, but less so this week when he argues that local village bobbies are what we need to maintain rural policing. Well, maybe, but what we really need is more cricket on village greens so that the raptor killers and burglars and coppers can be in the same team and forge a bond of kinship that means that each will appreciate the point of view of the others and compromise rather than be in conflict.
There’s a very fine photograph of an Aberdeen Angus bull with a stern expression on his face. I wonder whether he’ll end up as pin up on some byre wall – he is very striking.
But then I got to the bit that I really wanted to read, and which was trailed on the cover as ‘Red kite: friend or foe?’. Only yesterday I had been watching Red Kites displaying above the rural town in North Northants (which until recently was East Northants) in which I live not knowing that the splendid birds above my head might be foes. I had been enjoying them and feeling glad about them. Was I wrong?
Eleanor Doughty’s piece was mostly harmless but she’s worried about whether the Red Kite is about to become a victim of its own success in some peculiar way. There are sensible things said by Natural England, the Bowsers at Argaty, the Hawk Conservancy, BTO and Roy Dennis. Then, presumably for balance, we move on to some landowners. Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland has ‘an awful lot of them’ on his Milton estate down the road from me towards Peterborough, where they’ve been for about a decade, he says (I think Sir Philip might have missed them for the first decade they were present locally – big birds, forked orange tail, can’t miss them) and on his Nantclwyd estate in North Wales. Blimey, that’s close to Mold – you might get an awful lot of Red Kites for your £2.5m – no wonder it’s so cheap! Sir Philip is the model of tolerance when he says ‘I don’t mind them’, that’s nice of him, but puts the cart before the horse when he says that ‘I slightly view them as a symptom of people interfering with populations’. Errr, weren’t Red Kite populations interfered with by landowners far less tolerant than Sir Philip appears to be and the return of the kite is a sign of far less interference in populations now? Yes, I think so.
Turning to another landowner, Harry Legge-Bourke, we read that he has ‘hundreds of pairs’ of Red Kites on his Glan Usk estate in Powys. Hundreds of pairs? Wow! He’s clearly doing a great job looking after raptors on his land but maybe, just maybe, he might be exaggerating a little on the numbers. Hang on, he says ‘It’s like the Serengeti here’. Not quite Harry, you haven’t got a legge to stand on if you go on like that and sound a bit of a berk too. Legge-Bourke? Glan Usk? Ah yes – I knew there was a connection with raptors, it’s like the Serengeti there you know – click here. It’s good to see the landowners getting their say in the house magazine, Country Life.
I went off and played Country Life by Show of Hands – click here – it’s one of my favourites.
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I understood that you could not purchase a copy of Country Life unless you were listed in Burke’s Peerage. Is there something that you are not telling us, Mark?
My only previous experience of this journal is from sneaking a peek at dog-eared copies in the waiting room of my golfing and shooting dentist. This was, for a comprehensive schoolboy in the 70s, like stepping into a parallel universe. Other than the language and the currency, there was nothing familiar about it. Nor was there anything threatening. They were not worried about reds under the bed, creeping socialism or radical feminism. Insulated from the modern world, the white heat of technology and aspiring, better educated youth by centuries of trust funds and hundreds of acres, there could be nuclear Armageddon just down the road but the old estate, it’s ‘big hoose‘ and attendant serfs would trundle on as if nothing ever happens. You don’t need to shout when you have old money a network of political access to help maintain the status quo.
Nothing much seems to have changed in the 50 years since I last read a copy.
I am disappointed that the Beeb has decided to end Autumnwatch, not that I watch everyone but they are entertaining and informative and we really need a population more educated on wildlife. The more they know the more invested they will be and yes it will help them see what a pile of tosh most of Countryfile is apart from as you say the majority of the stuff from Charlotte Smith, because otherwise it seems to me to be the countryside vision of the NFU ( naturally ******* useless), the Countryside Areliars and the leisure “industry”.
As to Red Kites they are simply a marvel and joy to watch , even everyday and the shooting long-tailed chickens brigade who seem to own far too much of our countryside (according to Countrylife) should just get used to it and all their other raptor relatives, they have after all been protected now for near enough 70 years.
‘I slightly view them as a symptom of people interfering with populations’.
In contrast, say, to tipping tens of millions of non-native pheasants into the countryside every autumn…
I’m reminded of the time many years ago I bought a pile of a monthly periodical called ‘The Countryman’ from a second hand book shop. They had originally been published in the seventies, but somehow felt as if they could have been from the Edwardian era. What stuck in my mind most and has lodged there ever since is that it carried an advertisement for a charity called ‘The Retired Gentlefolks Association’. It’s purpose was to ensure that certain people shouldn’t have to spend their twilight years amongst others of a background they were not accustomed to due to straitened circumstances. Yes that’s right the upper classes needed financial assistance to be kept from mixing with the lower orders – one of these things you find near impossible to believe is real rather than satire. A different world existing alongside ours indeed.