Land, and Writing about Land

Abstract

There is no doubt that between 1671 and 1831 the landed classes wished to derive maximum benefit from forests, commons and their own estates. Like crops and timber, game animals might be regarded as merely so much plenty to be harvested. It has thus seemed highly unlikely to previous surveyors of this field that a conservationist sensibility might be found among landowners or fanciers of field sports. But the seeking of recreational pleasure as well as profit from the land has a long, if neglected, history, and the perpetuation of field sports could be said to have countered the drive for agricultural improvement in some respects. Pursuing the ‘Countrey Contentments’ of hunting, coursing and shooting, landlords produced a landscape less single-mindedly devoted to intensive agricultural production than it would otherwise have been. Preserving deer, foxes, hares, pheasants and their habitats was a form of conservation, of environmental management not devoted to maximum extraction. Hunting a country, in all its scents and stinks, its blood and other effluvia, meant taking an interest in and intervening in the ecological balance of a piece of country on behalf of what would today be called its leisure amenities. And what were the pleasures of hunting, precisely? Might they not have included a knowledge of and sensitivity to local topography, flora and fauna, even an obsession with their preservation, that modern conservationists would approve of, if not envy?

My love of the country’s abidin’,

And Nature I’m always salutin’,

For when I’m not shootin’ or ridin’

I’m huntin’ or fishin’ or shootin’.

Charles, Viscount Harkaway, in A.P. Herbert, Tantivy Towers: A Light Opera in Three Acts (1931)