It's that time of year for people to be wishing other people the best of the season. I should have written this as a poem, an ‘epistolary’ one but this is what I believe, without rhyme.
Dear Estate Owner
The division of class took our schooling to other places, but we were pupils of the same era.
We brushed shoulders but there was no leaping across that divide. Jaguar motor cars to Ford Prefects are an example of it. That's the way it was then. I have moved on and moved away and you will remember me although you have not replied to my letters. So, here I go again
I know your position as landlord and your perception that you have fiefdom to rule.
I write not in despair but to inform you of my continued intention to correct centuries of wrong.
It's nationalistic to sing ‘your land is my land’, but that tells of one side of the story and that is your side only.
My land is our land or so it should be. It is not what the evidence will show.
England, my land, has had the capability to historically absorb the invader. That's really brilliant when one can consider that we speak the same language, but the truth is that the invader absorbed my land. Took possession of it by force and the powers that went with it.
Your ‘country estates’ have become a shooting parlour for money. You do nothing for the rural communities. You don't drink in their pubs or shop in the remaining shops. You take and we have nothing in return to show for the misuse of my land.
You farm grouse and pheasant and even import them and sustain them with drugs in an attempt to keep them healthy. Moors are burnt systematically to promote fresh heather growth and in doing so you kill the inhabitants, the invertebrates and small mammals. You are killers.
To prevent natural deaths to your birds your keepers trap and poison indiscriminately our indigenous wildlife from Pine Martens to Hen Harriers, and beautiful Mountain Hares.
You throw the dead and dying into Stink Pits adding the unwanted grouse and pheasant carcasses too. Then you add the flavour of banned poisons to kill the hungry mammals that have escaped your keepers. Are you not aware of vicarious liability?
Crimes against wildlife have to stop. The mindset is changing. Common folk are moving against you. Crowd funding allows monies for legal actions and for legislative change.
You, the Estate Owner, land owner by gift, birthright and power can change before you are forced to. I know that the selfishness and arrogance of your class can only be removed slowly. Our game is a slow game too; to keep our land with beauty that you have continued over centuries to reduce and more currently to obliterate.
I am as the small seed that has lain dormant and in time gains strength to break the surface and grow. It is your choice now to change.
Your choice
A man of the land
European, British, born English and choosing to remain and will continue to redress the balance.
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