Country Mouse I’m retired and moving house? Fake news!

Giles Wood

‘Gogglebox Duo could be on the Move.’

That was the headline of the story on page 30 of our local newspaper.

Chinese whispers were to blame for the erroneous report. Mary, in our new book about life in the country, speculated that non-drivers, like herself, would do better to move to London for their declining years.

This was on the grounds that most Britons would be more incentivised to visit an old friend who could offer a spare bedroom in London than to trek to see them in a remote village without transport infrastructure.

But the rumour escalated. Now everyone local is asking, ‘Are you really moving out of the grottage?’

I wasn’t particularly keen on the second misunderstanding that appeared in the local paper: ‘Unlike Mary, who has worked as a busy journalist for decades, Giles, a painter, retired at the age of just 21.’

I could have done without this calumny – it will not please my mother. But I will not be contacting my solicitor for a full-page correction and apology. It’s all grist to the publicity mill.

The rumours also spread into the next county. Later that day, we were walking with the Bertrobes, hobby farmers of many years’ acquaintance.

‘But you can’t move to London, Giles,’ posed Mr Bertrobe. ‘Mary, yes – but you love the countryside.’

Countryside? Bertrobe was standing, as he spoke, on a piece of steep agricultural land that any fool could see should not be used for growing corn.

The bare chalk was thicker than the corn, which was struggling, owing to unusual rain patterns and despite massive applications of bag nitrogen, to gain a foothold.

To give him credit, Bertrobe, like many hobby farmers now being pressured by moralising Gen Z children, has started to attend conservation study days, with modules on subjects such as farmland birds.

‘It is all a question of getting the balance right, as the late Duke of Edinburgh used to say,’ he intoned. ‘The balance between generating food production and preserving the natural landscape and its wildlife.’

He’s right – but who determines this red line in the sand? Sand would be an apt word for what used to be soil but has not been manured for 30 years.

‘The bits of countryside I’m interested in,’ I answered, ‘are the rough lands, where there’s a bit of cover for birds like the whinchat, or the grey partridge, now both rare in Wiltshire, once an abundant species.’

I then teased him: ‘I understand your whole valley is to be turned over to half a dozen free-ranging, hardy, rare-breed cattle for rewilding. But I expect there might be a grant in it for you!’

Bertrobe chuckled nervously, unsure of his facts.

Meanwhile a Turnerian vortex of further rain was towering over a vast enclosure of oilseed rape. A clap of thunder sent us scurrying home – but not before I got a whiff of the characteristic deodorised nappy-sack odour of the crop, which will mature, later in the summer, into the stench of boiled cabbages.

The colour of the crop could have come straight from a Winsor & Newton tube of cadmium-yellow paint.

Closer to home for this ‘former landscape artist’, as Mary calls me, there has recently been the rare chance to employ the shade of rose madder. As a child, I made drawings of kestrels and now I am seeing them hovering each day over a field I have come to call the Docklands.

The purple stems of the docks – a classic rank weed species – have been left unmolested and stand proud against bleached tall grasses. They allow the eye to behold some much-needed variation in the otherwise monochromatic palette of the croplands – or ‘Green concrete’, as the environmentalists have dubbed it.

When Constable painted Suffolk landscapes, he used a tiny brush loaded with gamboge to paint a distant sliver of a field of agricultural mustard. Back then, wildflowers such as poppies, convolvulus, corn marigolds and corncockle would grow, intertwined with the corn. Those days would have suited an artist better.

To traditional farmers, the Docklands are an emblem of abandonment. But it is a wildlife success story and has cost the landowner nothing.

Next afternoon, Mary urged me to come inside, to listen to a live radio broadcast she had stumbled on. ‘It’s so exciting – they’re talking about a country where everything has been fixed and the oceans are teeming again and the birds are singing and there are seagrass meadows on the coastlines. Which country could it be?’

Poor Mary. Rather like those who were taken in by Orson Welles’s 1938 The War of the Worlds thought experiment and believed Martians were invading, Mary thought this paradise under discussion actually existed.

It was an Inside Science production on Radio 4. The thought experiment envisaged what our country could be like if the ‘30 by 30’ ambition, to protect 30 per cent of our land and sea for nature by 2030, were realised.

The broadcast paints an exhilarating picture of 2030 and holds no fear –except for landowners who may find their helicopter landing strips subject to compulsory purchase orders.

Compulsory not for development, but for nature.

Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs (Ebury Spotlight, £17.99) by Giles Wood and Mary Killen is out now