THERE is a particular species of academic for whom the English countryside exists only as a theoretical inconvenience. They view it through the steamed-up window of a train carriage hurtling from one metropolitan seminar to another, or perhaps through the carefully curated lens of a BBC costume drama they once dissected in a journal article. It is a landscape of the mind, you see. A social construction. A text to be deconstructed.
One such specimen, a Dr Stuart Cartland of the University of Sussex, has recently bestowed upon the world his considered verdict in Tribune Magazine: the English countryside does not exist. Or rather, it exists only as a ‘right-wing ideological construct’, an ‘exclusionary haven’, a space ‘ethnically cleansed of the demographic reality of modern England’. This is, one assumes, the sort of thing that passes for radical thought when you have tenure and have never had to unblock a slurry tank at 6 o’clock on a February morning.
Let us, from this point forth, refer to Dr Cartland as ‘Barbara’ – for he is clearly more comfortable in the realm of fiction than any reality the rest of us inhabit.
Also, let us pause here and consider the sheer, breathtaking arrogance of telling several million people that the place where they live, work, farm, fish, raise children, bury parents, and yes, occasionally drive Land Rovers, is not, in fact, real. That it is merely a projection of conservative fantasy. That their daily existence is, to borrow the preferred vernacular of our academic betters, ‘problematic’.
I have spent my life in and around the English countryside. I have fished the River Yealm, watched dawn break over Dartmoor, stood in freezing coverts on shoot days, and drunk warm beer in pubs where the landlord knows your name and your father’s name before it. I have buried friends from those communities and welcomed their children into them. And I have learnt that the one thing rural people will not tolerate is some creatively haired city academic arriving with a clipboard and a theory to explain why their lives are a moral embarrassment.
Barbara’s central thesis, as far as one can discern it through the thicket of academic jargon, is that the English countryside is ‘constructed’ to exclude people who are not white, middle-class, and conservative. The evidence? Some people wear Barbour jackets. Nigel Farage once felt awkward on a train. The aristocracy owns land. A man in period costume appeared at a Jane Austen fair. (I confess I had to read that last one twice. Apparently, historical re-enactment is now proof of fascism. Someone alert the Sealed Knot.)
Now, I do not doubt that Barbara has encountered these horrors. He has probably seen a copy of the Daily Telegraph in a village shop and had to sit down with a strong cup of Fairtrade coffee to recover. But here is the problem with constructing your entire argument around vibes and anecdote: the real world has a habit of getting in the way.
The suggestion that the countryside is an ‘ethnically cleansed’ space is not merely offensive: it is historically illiterate. Barbara, in a rare concession to actual evidence, cites the fascinating discovery of seventh-century burials with West African genetic links. He presents this as a ‘counter-example’ to right-wing fantasies of homogeneity. But he seems entirely to miss the point: these individuals were not outsiders, not slaves, not anomalies. They were buried as valued members of their communities. They were, in the only terms that matter, local.
England has always absorbed and integrated. That is what England does. It does not require a university seminar to validate it.
What Dr Cartland cannot see, because it does not feature in his theoretical framework, is that the countryside is first and foremost a place of work. It is not a museum piece, not a theme park for the metropolitan imagination, not a blank screen on to which academics can project their anxieties about privilege and exclusion. It is where food comes from. It is where rivers are managed, walls are built, stock is tended, and yes, where people go about their lives with considerably less interest in identity politics than Dear Barbara might wish.
The idea that this constitutes some sort of right-wing conspiracy would be hilarious if it were not so patronising. The countryside, like any community, has its fair share of conservatives. It also has its liberals, its radicals, its don’t-bother-me types, and its just-trying-to-get-through-the-harvest types. It has LGBTQ+ farmers, immigrant farmworkers, and ethnic-minority families who have been part of rural life for generations. It has, in other words, the same glorious, messy diversity as anywhere else. The difference is that rural people tend not to wear their identities on their sleeves or demand recognition for them. They just get on with it.
I have written before about the tendency of urban activists to view the countryside as a problem to be solved rather than a place to be understood. The antis, as we call them, are always convinced that they know better. They know better than the farmer who has worked the same land for 40 years. They know better than the gamekeeper who understands predator-prey dynamics better than any textbook. They know better than the communities who have managed these landscapes for centuries.
Barbara is cut from exactly the same townie cloth. He does not wish to understand the countryside; he wishes to instruct it. He wishes to tell the people who live there that their existence is illegitimate, their traditions exclusionary, their very presence a form of violence. And he does so from the safety of a university office, with a guaranteed pension and zero risk of ever having to test his theories against the reality of a wet November morning on the hill.
Here is the truth that Barbs and his ilk cannot grasp: the English countryside does not need their permission to exist. It does not need to be deconstructed, theorised, or rendered acceptable to the sensibilities of Brighton seminar rooms. It simply is. It is the land beneath our feet, the water in our rivers, the food on our tables. It is the reason this island has sustained human life for millennia. And it will be here, long after the latest academic fad has been forgotten and the author of ‘The English Countryside Doesn’t Exist’ has moved on to deconstructing something else.
The people who live in the countryside – all of them, of every background and persuasion – do not require Barbara’s approval. They do not require his permission to feel that they belong. They belong because they are there. Because they work the land, tend the stock, maintain the walls, and keep the pubs open. Because they are part of a living, breathing, working community that has more important things to do than worry about whether their existence meets the approval of an assistant professor from Sussex.
Dr Stuart Cartland may not believe the English countryside exists. That is his privilege. The rest of us will continue to live in it, work in it, and yes, occasionally drive our Land Rovers through it, secure in the knowledge that reality has a stubborn habit of persisting whether or not it has been granted theoretical legitimacy. And, yes, we’ll continue to defend it.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on March 17, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
