The cliched narrative is that ramblers are principled and well behaved and that all landowners are bloated, undeserving plutocrats (“Everyone has a right to the countryside”, Letters, and “Forgive us our trespasses”, the New Review).
You need to see past the stereotypes and wake up to the ugly realities of rambling in 2020. Not all farmers are landed gentry with manorial piles and thousands of acres. Certainly in Northern Ireland, holding sizes are extremely modest. Nick Hayes’ “right to roam” will hit impoverished hill farmers just as much as dukes with vast estates. His website also states that “the litterers and the vandals are the outliers. By far the majority of people who come to the countryside treat it with respect.”
Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. It may once have been true, but that is not the case today. Social media has fuelled an explosion in destructive and intimidatory trespassing. This new breed of ramblers don’t, and won’t, care about nature, largely because they’re not ramblers. Half have been banned from local bars and nightclubs, and farm tracks and sheds are cheap and surveillance-free places for these gangs to have parties.
Quite apart from littering and vandalism, pyromaniac trespassers are an annual feature, destroying heather and wild birds’ nests and burning fences. I know of elderly hill farmers who are plagued with aggressive, illegal shooters, thieving gangs and regular antisocial behaviour. The effect is that old folk and children in isolated areas do not feel safe on their own land.
Seán mac Cann
Trillick, Co Tyrone
It’s not as bad as all that
I have been reading the Observer since 1965. Last week’s editorial must rank as the most unrelentingly negative one I have come across (“A Middle East ‘breakthrough’ that is anything but historic”, Comment). While the odds against breaking the deadlock of this enduring conflict are formidable, dismissing the normalisation of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel as little short of a catastrophe is to take doctrinaire pessimism a shade too far.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln
Hope amid the despair
The public articulation of a fight against the consignments of motor neurone disease and the abandonment of sufferers of this disease to the vagaries of their bodies in the Observer Magazine (“I choose to thrive”) opened up in me something I cannot name – perhaps happy, hopeful anger?
When my mother was diagnosed with MND in April, her neurologist told her to go home, drink a bottle of whisky and write a bucket list. The experience for my family and me felt a little like being dropped at sea in a sinking rowboat, all of us desperately hauling out water from between the leaking planks.
Yet, we are lucky. My mother is (was) a consultant paediatrician, and, having worked in the NHS for her entire career, is well versed in its bureaucratic intricacies. Lucky, because she knows how to lobby reticent neurologists into mobilising for her case. Lucky to have the ability to access information and support. It is maddening that there are few who will have the means to fight against their slow abandonment to the dead weight of their body.
The sad truth is that degenerative illnesses will touch many of the people you love. The more we understand and live with these reminders of our fragile mortality, the greater the prospects for innovation and research. An increase in knowledge of extreme disability can only be a way to offer hope to so many people consigned to the darkened boundaries of society.
Ilona Phillips
London SE4
Earth’s fate is in our hands
The Earth is our planetary test tube (“We’ve got to start thinking beyond our own life spans if we’re going to avoid extinction”, Comment). Over recent millennia we have been conducting a massive experiment on the life systems of the planet and its occupants but we now have enough knowledge to understand the resultant dangers.
If we do not react appropriately, the Anthropocene will be the time of the fifth extinction, a unique event in planetary history, since it will have been triggered by sentient beings with the capability to influence their fate. Otherwise, we create a planet-sized archaeological site, leave a haze of electromagnetic radiation fading out beyond 100 light years, a scatter of discarded electronic devices within the solar system – and two Voyager probes beyond.
Christopher Sparey-Green
London SE1
Sonia Sodha is right to challenge the traditional short-term response to saving our common humanity. Her reference to “cathedral thinking” chimes very well with a Greek proverb I recently came across: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.”
Kieran O’Sullivan
Rathgar, Dublin
A bully, a menace, a coward
I commend you on your bold appraisal of Turkey’s spate of foreign policy decisions which range across the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (“Erdoğan is both a bully and a menace. Europe ignores him at its peril”, Foreign Affairs Commentary).
While engaged in a confrontation with two Nato allies over a flagrant disregard of maritime law, intervening in Libya’s and Syria’s civil wars, and dismissing the legitimacy of both Cypriot statehood and Kurdish autonomy, Turkey has also seen found the time to intervene in the South Caucasus.
During a surge in violence along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, Turkey was alone in inflaming the skirmishes. Not only did its government accuse Armenia of belligerence, it also vowed to militarily support Azerbaijan in any such conflict before proceeding to undertake joint military drills with the Azerbaijani military. More sensible countries appealed for calm. However, Erdoğan is quiet in his condemnation of the fate of China’s Uighur community, another Turkic people facing oppression. Perhaps to the list of “bully” and “menace” you might add “coward”.
Ara Iskanderian
Brentford, Middlesex
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
It’s a pity your article on the reissuing of Middlemarch under its author’s real name was illustrated with a famously sentimental portrait (“It’s Mary Ann Evans in her own write”, Comment). The real Mary Ann Evans was thought very plain: another reason why she was not valued by Victorian society.
Leila Roberts
Mickley, Ripon,
North Yorkshire
