UPLANDS AND THE RSPB

I have just read your article

Battle for the uplands [April issue] by Ian Coghill. It must be enormously frustrating for practical countrymen, such as the writer, to watch the destruction of once richly endowed moorland. I think most land managers and farmers know in their hearts that a working environment is far more productive in wildlife balance than the mythical wilderness. The latter supports a 10th of the former. You see this again and again here in the south. The New Forest and ancient chalk downland under public financed management simply hasn’t got the diversity you’d expect to see. Sadly, public access is responsible.

This emphasises another point that has become noticeable: the pursuit of single-issue ideals in the countryside. Locally, the

RSPB acquired a beautiful hazel woodland, formally worked by professional woodmen. We had access for fieldsports by negotiation with the owner. Now, of course, all that has gone and the wood has a massive deer fence surrounding it, to the detriment of a large number of local farms.

How can the wood be treated as an ‘island of excellence’ in the middle of the Cranborne Chase? Presumably, most of the society’s policy is driven by the membership and in the past 50 years its agenda has become grossly disfigured. Consequently, it has alienated itself from many country people.

Angus Mann Bowerchalke, Wiltshire

I read with my respect and applause increasing at every line of Ian Coghill’s article in your excellent magazine. Well argued, factually based and only too well acknowledged, I hope, by all your readers. But we are already converts. Could an electronic version be sent forthwith to all RSPB committee members to hasten their understanding, too ?

Oliver Swann, by email