Country Mouse: The rich man's in his castle. I'm the poor man at this gate writes Giles Wood
Fraser Harrison argued in a compelling book, Strange Land (1982), that we are all strangers now in the strange land of the countryside. Even the indigeni feel like tourists or outsiders, he says: ‘The landscape is rapidly becoming unknown as the agricultural areas are stripped of all the features which made the classic English countryside so distinctive and precious.’ There has been some restoration of hedges and tree-planting since 1982, but I have never felt particularly at home in my terraced cottage at the end of our village. Perhaps it takes two or three generations to feel at home in an adopted county – ie one that isn’t your birthplace. As outsiders, we don’t fit particularly well into the essentially still-feudal character of the village. There are two principal classes – ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. Then there are people like us, independents, who live on the ‘landing’, so to speak, albeit...
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