Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape by Patrick Laurie

In these days of lockdown – with gardens at a premium and car journeys into the countryside increasingly frowned upon, while spring explodes around us – people in urban Britain are probably more conscious of their living relationship with the natural world than they have been for half a century or more. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone, so they say; and there’s certainly no better time than this strange spring to read Patrick Laurie’s Native, an account of how he and his wife took on a small farm in Galloway, and began to run it not according to the rules of modern commercial farming, but in the traditional way that was already disappearing when Laurie was a young boy there in the 1980s.

What makes Laurie’s book so remarkable, and so profoundly enjoyable to read, is that many of his decisions seem almost instinctive. He follows his heart, in choosing his patch of land, the breed of cattle he loves, and the presence of curlews as a measure of the health of the landscape.

The book sets down a vital marker in the 21st century debate about how we use and abuse the land. It reflects both the hardness and the joy of a life that nurtures the land for the long term, rather than simply raping it for profit; it warns us that even the best-intentioned policies, determined by faraway governments, can do great damage if they ignore the hard-won knowledge of past generations.

Laurie’s book is subtitled

Life In A Vanishing Landscape, but in truth its subject is much more complex than that. It’s more like a story of life in a changing landscape; of the unintended consequences of change and development, of the complexity of the task of restoration, and of the truth that no landscape inhabited by humans is ever untouched or unshaped by our hands.