Stylish, funny, and some shocking proof reading
Timothy O'Grady finds Patrick Galbraith's Uncommon Ground to be a fascinating adventure around Britain — as well as having many typos
This is a book about the land of Britain and the people who move over it, or wish to move over more of it, and the vegetation and creatures which struggle with varying degrees of success to share space with them. It’s about fences, rights, law and citizens’ relative ignorance or knowledge about nature. It’s about the delusions of righteousness and the rancour and bewilderment and hurt that ensue from ideological battles. You will meet people in it you otherwise likely wouldn’t. It’s stylish and funny and serious.
If you are a regular reader of Boundless you will know the book’s author, Patrick Galbraith, for he is its editor. This makes him my employer during the writing of this review. I will try to make the independence of my judgement credible.
He appears to have been provoked into this book by a natural curiosity and by the Right to Roam movement, which conducted the largest land access campaign in Britain in nearly a hundred years on Dartmoor in 2023. He knows from his personal and journalistic experience that some of Right to Roam’s assertions about common land, big estates, conservation and amount of access are false, and decides to set forth around the country to investigate as much about the relation of land (and water) to people as can fit within a book.
It opens with an exquisite and telling image of the brothers Paul and Dave Upton: “When Paul and Dave left school they got jobs in the shipyards and, like many working men on the east coast, they spent all the time they had out on the mud, in the half light, shooting geese for the pot….Paul and I hunkered in the mud beneath a rowan tree. Somewhere, out in the estuary, a redshank cried, ducks whistled high in the darkness, and to the west you could hear the low rumble of the Humber Bridge.” It could almost be a song.
The image is telling because while some urban access campaigners might deplore anyone who shoots a bird, the Wildfowlers’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1908 by a railway worker named Stanley Duncan who feared wealthy landowners’ wish to drain estuaries and create farmland at the expense of bird habitats. Right to Roam puts forward a picture of aristocrats and their gamekeepers denying ordinary people the right to experience nature, but the more Patrick Galbraith moves around the country and talks to people on all sides of this debate the more complex the picture becomes. The campaign declares that only eight per cent of British land is available to the people, but in fact 225,000 kilometres of right of way land in England and Wales would, if placed end to end, circle the globe six times.
In his roam around the island Galbraith is intrepid, tenacious and very entertaining. Seeming contradictions are thrown up. Landowners, gamekeepers and hunters often show themselves to be more concerned with and knowledgeable about conservation than the state or access campaigners. Dog walkers and wild campers wanting to experience nature often destroy the nests of birds on the brink of extinction. He brings you into the company of a remarkable range of people: poachers, poets of the land, activists, academics, an ex-drug dealer, a Kenyan Home Counties farmer, Gypsies, hunt saboteurs and a collection of ritualists, ravers, magic mushroom harvesters and nudists looking for a primeval connection to the land. Keith, a member of the British Naturist Ramblers, has been organizing naked walks on RSPB land. “But they apparently don’t really like the idea of twitchers having to share footpaths with men in nothing but their boots.”
When I looked years ago at Josef Koudelka’s photographs of Gypsies I thought they showed not only their subjects and their ways of life but also the trust Koudelka had to have earned to get access to them. The trust was part of the photographs. This book has something similar. All of the people in it wish to be understood and Galbraith offers understanding to them. He’s curious, attentive, he goes out of the way. They bring him in and then he shows them to us. There’s a sober fairness to his attention. You can get to the end of this book about a politically explosive issue and have no idea how he might vote.
There are a few things I thought might have made the going smoother. I missed being offered a description of his personal motivation. I thought he might have been better off saving summary judgements, particularly on Right to Roam, until the end, rather than scattering them throughout, making them feel repetitive. And not every single passage was clear, at least to me. These are minor things, but what was really shocking and incomprehensible was the quality of the copyediting and proofreading. A book of mine is to be published by Unbound in June. Though they were going through now publicly known hazardous times the book had four different editors and proofreaders and I doubt there’s a comma out of place. Uncommon Ground’s publisher, William Collins, I imagine has sufficient means to provide these editorial services, but the book is strewn with random commas, capitalisations and quotation marks, as well as repetitions and missing verbs.
But reading this book remains a significant experience. It contributes valuable ideas. It motivates you to learn about and then experience and help look after the natural world. It broadens you through the people it introduces you to. And the process it involves you in transcends the specific issue it addresses. Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind talks about how morality can bind and blind, how political and religious groupings can unite around grievance and victimhood and become righteous to the point of solipsism. You see it in cults and campaigns and even in school parents’ WhatsApp groups. Uncommon Ground is in fact about the possibility for common ground, through patience, looking, learning, talking and listening.
Patrick Galbraith’s Uncommon Ground is out now with William Collins. He was discussing advocating for nature this morning on Start the Week with Robert Macfarlane and Monica Feria-Tinta
Timothy O’Grady is currently having a last look over Monaghan, his much-anticipated new novel, which will be published in 19 June