BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: The Lie of the Land
By Guy Shrubsole
Published by Penguin Books, 2025, rrp £10.99, Bookbuster price £9.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Guy Shrubsole is the author of the bestselling The Lost Rainforests of Britain. His latest book, out now in paperback, includes some of the remnants of our temperate rainforest, along with 92% of English land – land we have no right to roam upon. Indeed, much of the 8% left over upon which we may walk is privately owned. The recent farce over camping on Dartmoor highlights this for us, and Guy, who himself lives in Devon, covers the court case over access here. The book went to print before the victory was won against the landowners last month – judges unanimously dismissed an appeal by Alexander and Diana Darwall against a 2023 ruling upholding Dartmoor Commons Act.
Lewis Winks of protest group Right to Roam, in an article in the Exeter Observer, said “Dartmoor remains the only place in England and Wales where the public has a right to wild camp and can lawfully experience the magic of sleeping under the stars. And the fact that one wealthy landowner, Alexander Darwall, was able to temporarily remove a right that belonged to everyone, demonstrates how England’s system of access is utterly broken.” ‘He added: “The Labour Government must now pass a new Right to Roam Act to defend and extend the public’s rights to access nature in England. Ministers must urgently change the law not only to protect the right to wild camp on Dartmoor from future challenges, but to expand the public’s right of responsible access to the wider countryside.”
‘AN END TO FEUDALISM’
Shrubsole’s hardback edition The Lie of the Land was subtitled ‘Who really cares for the countryside’. The paperback is more combative, with the new subtitle ‘How a tiny group of landowners wrecked the countryside, and how the public can restore it’. The book takes a look at who owns the countryside, how many landowners propagandise about what a great job they do as stewards and suggest the ‘townies’ will just treat the countryside as a garbage dump. Shrubsole gives this elitist claim short shrift. He gives us many examples of how these self-professed ‘guardians of the land’ in fact cause great damage. This ranges from agricultural run-off, through destructive alteration of the course of rivers and degradation of wetland including SSSIs, to the effect rape of the land has in the name of grouse and pheasant hunting for toffs. The latter alone causes immense destruction of our native flora and fauna for a sport which accounts for per annum CO2 emissions of half a billion tons. At the same time, he acknowledges and praises those landowners that do in fact care for their land.
All this makes for a fascinating read, and I recommend it. And I could fill this review with the dastardly behaviour of our elites – but in fact, the best thing about the book is its sections dealing with the second half of its new subtitle, how we can address stewardship and ownership issues. As Shrubsole notes, currently ‘in a country where 1 per cent of the population owns half of all England, such decisions are made by a tiny elite’. One clear change required to begin to solve pressing issues around degradation of our natural environment, and urgently enhancing the sustainability of our native food supply, is a widening of involvement in decision-making. It is an uphill struggle, landowners are rich, influential, and often angry – in 1983 effigies of conservationists on the Somerset Levels were hung by the neck by farmers opposed to plans to rewet drained wetlands.
The focus on England is tempered by reference to the various successes in protecting land, beyond the right to roam, in Scotland. Shrubsole gives over a fair few pages to the public acquisition of vast swathes of the former Buccleuch Estate, and what the Scottish government fairly describe as ‘an end to feudalism’, focussing on community ownership as well as the right to access. Centuries after the eviction of Highlanders from the land they lived on and farmed by arrogant lairds who could be richer with sheep than tenants, the ancestors of the victims of the clearances in Sutherland now have the right to buy the land. A Heritage Trust now owns the Isle of Eigg… Needless to say, in England we remain quite definitely ‘feudal’, with a disproportionate amount of land still owned by earls, barons, and lords granted vast acreage after the Norman Conquest. Globally, more and more land is owned by venture capitalists, and even Utah’s Mormon Church. And changes of governance under Thatcher ‘closed down debate about the public ownership of land for a generation’.
‘THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM’ LAND OWNERSHIP
So, read this excellent book all the way through! But, here I will round off this review with a quick potted rundown of Shrubsole’s main recommendations for action. He says that reform must be a democratic process, a million miles from where we are now. There must be stricter prioritisation, as much land is deemed ‘multi-use’ that in fact has quite narrow requirements if it is to be protected, such as our vanishing wetlands. One might mention the disconnect between those who think we can address the decimation of our forests through massive monoculture plantations, and those who see that different biomes should be seeded with appropriate native trees and flora in order to recover. And none of this means diddle-squat without addressing ‘the elephant in the room’, land ownership. To do this requires agriculture and forestry be bought into the planning system, as, unbelievably, they are not!
He finishes on a ten-point programme, beginning with protecting our greatest carbon sinks, moorland and the fens, and banning moorland burning and grouse-shooting. King Charles, our supposedly ‘green’ royal wouldn’t like that. Second, institute a community right to buy in England. Third, use public money to ‘buy land for nature’. Fourth, levy a carbon land tax on polluting landowners. Fifth, stop letting landowners unleash hundreds of thousands of imported pheasants on the land in shooting season (indeed, why not ban shooting?). Sixth, create a ‘right of responsible access’ giving the public rights to become whistleblowers when finding nefarious land practices on yer lordship’s manor. Seventh, let national parks serve the interests of nature, especially important now rare-metal rich uplands such as Dartmoor are now technically within the new ‘enterprise zones’. Eighth, ‘put in place a land use framework for England and open up data on land’. Ninth, ‘require landowners to give an account of their stewardship’, Shrubsole’s ‘Ecological Domesday Book’, and, tenth, not a policy suggestion, ‘but a plea to everyone reading this book’ – ‘Join campaigns to hold landowners to account and change the laws of the land’.
We cannot go back to ‘subsistence rights on the common land’, as once granted under the Carta de Foresta, not with a UK population of 70 million people, but we can and must be activists for change. Scotland is proving it works. Solidarity is the way.
The Lie of the Land is available at a specially reduced price from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road
TN34 1RE
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