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Do we need far more access to the English countryside? According to Orban Wallace’s cogent and committed, if sometimes frustrating documentary, the answer is a resounding ‘obviously’. A mind-blowing 92 percent of our rural areas are off limits to the general public, either owned by landowners, farmers and utility companies. But how that happens, and what it means for rural areas, is more elusive in this film.
The countryside of Our Land is a beautiful and serene but also forbidding, exclusive place. Barbed wire abounds, forests are off-limits and people of colour feel unwelcome. In a reminder of the social segregation enforced by the landed gentry, pheasant hunts see the landowners do the shooting and the proles doing the leg work. Pheasant husbandry, meanwhile, degrades local wildlife, undermining landowners’ claims to be nature’s anointed custodians. Once upon a time, the countryside belonged to everyone as common land. Nowadays? You need a Land Rover and a pair of 12-gauges.
Wallace finds the perfect avatar for the most snobbish aspects of the land-owning classes
Advocates of the Right to Roam movement make all these points with passion and clarity. There’s organised trespassing by activists dressed in pagan finery, but Our Land doesn’t give us clashes with the people on whose land they’re roaming (this is not ‘Gerroff My Land!’: The Movie). Disappointingly for anyone after tweed-versus-trespasser dust-ups, the two sides remain at a distance. Director Orban Wallace is the go-between, trying to strike a balance but pulling some punches in his line of questioning. He uses the Louis Theroux method of allowing his posh interviewees to damn themselves with their own mad utterances, and in the huffing, spluttering Francis Fulford – a veteran TV rent-a-gob and a terrible advocate for literally anything – he’s found the perfect avatar for the most snobbish, feudal aspects of the land-owning classes.
But the likes of Fulford are only one part of the story, and I couldn’t help feeling that some nuance is sacrificed by zeroing in on the buffoon. The unfairness of inherited property – many of these country estates have been passed down since Norman times, or built from imperial or slave-trade wealth – is the film’s stealth debating topic. Is Right to Roam truly about getting access to more of the countryside or are the activists (who at one point get their guitars out for an annoying singalong) motivated by the perceived injustice of property ownership? Are they ramblers or revolutionaries? I’m none the wiser.
In UK and Ireland cinemas now.