May every cage be open

Two years ago, I renewed my acquaintance with Norway, the land of my mother’s mother (see right), and one of the many things I loved about that beautiful land was its wildness. And not just wildness: I discovered that the whole of the mountainous, wooded, laked interior is common land, where you are free to roam, camp, ski, picnic, swim.
 
Britain used to be like that too, until the thirteenth century when powerful people began to appropriate the countryside for themselves, ‘enclosing’ and fencing it and excluding everyone else. And the process continues, in ways both big (like roads and housing estates) and small.
 
When we first came to live in our current house over forty years ago, two farmers owned most of the land around and – with amazing kindness - let me wander where I liked. Now the land is broken up, with hedges fenced (instead of patched with old bedsteads, pallets and cattle feeders that I could climb over) and gates padlocked and the areas where I can walk reducing every day. What’s more, I get shouted at for walking on the road.
 
The poet John Clare went mad when the Northamptonshire countryside where he was born and brought up was cleared for intensive farming and shut off to the common people. George Monbiot in a superb article (in the Guardian in 2012) likens this process to the way indigenous peoples are torn from their land and culture, and their souls destroyed.
 
I feel the same sometimes and, before I get into one of my rants, I thought I’d share with you my collection of pictures on the subject. At the end of which, I will try to produce a happy ending. Promise. 

My current hope for the future is rewilding – allowing large areas of land to revert to their natural state, bringing back flora and fauna once extinct in this country like beavers and storks, removing fences, letting rivers take their own course, letting drained marshlands flood again. Returning the countryside to a richness and diversity we can hardly imagine now. And then joining up these areas, so that richness and diversity are the norm.

I can only hope that we humans are allowed back too to these wild lands.

And here to finish is a picture of a van I saw in Glastonbury - that bastion of human diversity.

It's worth following the link to mobiusloop.co.uk. Is this their van? The small print (bottom right) reads 'Mortimer Sparrow' and 'the vanishing green art'. It's worth following this as well. As far as I can gather, Mortimer is a 'vegan tattoo artist' who also paints pictures. She has a facebook page, I think (but I don't, so I couldn't check properly).