Country Matters: Look back in anger - and joy

Assessing the past 12 months is generally an agreeable exercise; but I suspect that for many country folk 1998 was a year they would rather forget. Farmers saw prices fall below subsistence levels; landowners felt threatened by the proposed right to roam; and small communities everywhere were dismayed at the prospect of being buried under landslides of new housing estates.

Undoubtedly the most memorable day of the year was Sunday, 1 March, when nearly 300,000 people swarmed into London to walk from the Embankment to the Serpentine. It was a brave and brilliant morning, with a few high clouds sailing on the breeze, and the weather exactly matched the mood of the marchers, who were exhilarated to find that such huge numbers had turned out in defence of rural freedoms.

As at the Hyde Park rally of July 1997, the most striking feature of the country crowd was its good behaviour. The revolting peasants were clean, orderly, cheerful and civilised; and in the words of one Highland deer-stalker: "The extraordinary thing was that they all looked like human beings."

Yet their high spirits on the day concealed many deep worries. It is true that the spark that originally fired the mass protest was the attempt to ban fox hunting; but by last spring anxieties were building up on a much wider front, and in the nine months since the great march none of the worries has been allayed.

Indeed, one of the most depressing features of the debate on the future of the countryside is that facts appear to have had little impact.

While Michael Foster, the MP for Worcester, was campaigning for his Private Member's Bill to abolish hunting with hounds, every serious newspaper carried well-reasoned articles in favour of fox hunting, arguing that the activity was beneficial to conservation. Yet this surge of favourable publicity had absolutely no effect on the House of Commons, where the Bill won an enormous majority in favour - and it would have gone through, had it not been blocked by filibustering.

Similarly, when it comes to new houses, private research commissioned by numerous rural communities has shown that Government figures of alleged need are often grossly exaggerated. Yet few, if any, local councils pay the slightest heed to any accurate information brought to light. Instead, driven by the demands of developers and by the enormous prices that are paid for building land, they blunder on, burying more and more green land under bricks, mortar and concrete.

There is no doubt that a large majority of the population as a whole disapproves of hunting, and would not mind if it disappeared. This majority is a natural consequence of the fact that, compared with urban numbers, the rural population is tiny. However, the question now surely ought to be one of tolerance: why should townspeople, who have no understanding of - or feel for - the country, impose their views on the minority who live there?

Not only is the rural population small: the number of people working on the land continues to fall. And although newcomers are constantly moving to live in villages, or taking over redundant farmhouses and converted barns, they have no roots or involvement in the countryside.

In August, when I judged the best-kept small village in Gloucestershire to be Cherington, near Tetbury, I remarked in my report that I found it hard to imagine what the inhabitants did, so immaculate was the setting, with not a stone or lump of earth or blade of grass out of place among the parked Jaguars and BMWs.

Later, when we distributed the awards, a woman came up to me with a slightly self-righteous air and a whole list of professions which the village could boast - accountant, architect, solicitor and so on. Apart from a single farmer, not one of them had anything to do with the land.

Another stirring memory is of the beacon bonfire we lit to herald the London march. The fire - which I myself had built - burned furiously, and we were bolstered by the knowledge that we were joining in a nation wide demonstration - nearly 8,000 beacons flared up that evening.

Deeper feelings, however, were aroused by the fact that our site was on the rampart of an iron-age fort, and by the knowledge that more than 100 generations of our predecessors had used the place for their own purposes in times long gone. When dusky figures loomed up over the earthworks, as people climbed from the village to join the party, I sensed many a ghostly presence watching from the dark.

Among other cheerful developments, our three alpacas, shorn for the first time, produced a mountain of wool which my wife is spinning and knitting into the softest, lightest jerseys imaginable.

Meanwhile, Jemima - now 10 months old - has grown into a splendid-looking labrador, and has inherited her mother's penchant for trying to pick up two or three different toys simultaneously. Our new priest-in-charge has proved an immediate success, and our refurbished kitchen, though weeks behind schedule, is going to be a joy.

Best of all, the coppice merchant, Bodger White, continues to inhabit his camp in the high woods, in defiance of Stroud District Council's attempts to evict him, pouring scorn on professional conservationists and championing the merits of work on the woodland floor.

When I walked out to offer him a seasonal bottle on Boxing Day, wild storms were roaring in from the Bristol Channel, but his stove was glowing cherry-red, and I felt reassured that one pillar of rural tradition, at least, is still very much in place.

But I am still haunted by thoughts of the man who tried to commit suicide in the wood above the farm. His sister, who came to take his car away, promised to let me know how he was faring, but she never has. Did the huge overdose of pills damage his brain or liver? Is he alive? And if he is, does he resent the fact that I pulled him back from the brink?