Orban Wallace offers a sharp look at the debate on access and ownership over the English countryside in this engrossing documentary.
It’s very rare that you catch a sighting of the c-word in these august pages, but its usage is warranted in reference to one of the interviewees in Orban Wallace’s superb documentary Our Land, which examines the idea of the public’s right to roam on property owned by wealthy landowners. It’s a form of extreme invective that applies, probably prefixed by “complete”, “total” or even “ocean-going”, to one Francis Fulford, a ruddy-faced hatemonger dressed top-to-toe in vintage Barbour who not only has contempt for anyone who might want to experience the rural beauty of his land, but pretty much anyone who’s not a white, rich, ruddy-faced aristo.
The film takes great pains to give both sides of the debate an equal platform, but it’s clear what side is the one of rational common sense, empathy and creativity – and it ain’t Francis’s. As Right to Roam activists organise peaceful walks on private property, the rah-rahs yell at their hounds during men-only pheasant hunts while moaning about the bloody plebs not understanding the life of a country squire.
Everything, it transpires, is based on bad-faith readings of the extent to which normal people would treat the land were they to have access to it, and the film ends up delivering a rousing case for not only opening up the miniature borders that crisscross this sceptred isle, but in a way that would prove the most humiliating for the bastards with the keys to the padlocks.
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