A peregrine, a juvenile female with pale scalloped edges to her mahogany feathers, careened from the crag and drew with her a contrail of nervous jackdaws, their wings sawing the blue air of this brilliant morning. It might seem strange, but the moment reminded me of words published 30 years ago about this very column. To its readers, Melvyn Bragg suggested, the country diary is “one of their touchstones of sanity”. In turn, the peregrine was my reassuring shot of sanity in a world gone mad.
Beeston is a National Trust property inside a national park, yet even this place has been drained of wildlife diversity in the last few decades. Many of the most protected parts of Britain could be vastly better for nature. The ambition for a richer landscape thus became a Conservative pledge at the last election, built around an intention to devote a third of land to the billions of non-human residents that live here.
