Sunday Hill Farm, Wiltshire
A crisp, autumnal morning in the Vale of Malmesbury, 80 miles west of London. Watery skies, clay soil, and gentle hills quilted with the ancient pattern of cows and sheep, hedges and coppices, stone farmhouses and industrial barns. At Sunday Hill Farm in Brinkworth, the range was fired up early, and the kitchen is busy. Half a dozen apple pies are cooling on the table, a partially carved leg of cold lamb waits on the sideboard, and a dog dances under everyone’s feet. The annual Apple Festival begins in just over an hour’s time.
“It’s a rather strange event,” Sir Roger Scruton reflects. “Like all traditions, it’s an invented one. We at this farm have nothing to sell except me.” Leaving his muddy Wellingtons by the back door, Scruton drifts shoelessly through the busy kitchen and into his study, a converted barn with book-lined walls, two grand pianos, and a view over the fields.
Sunday Hill’s product is a global commodity. Journalist, lecturer, and author of some 40 books, Scruton is the best-known philosopher in the English-speaking world, and certainly the most influential. He is a prominent example of that rare growth, the philosopher who can talk with ordinary people about matters of common interest—not just philosophy, but also politics, architecture, music, wine, and the weather.
Scruton bought Sunday Hill Farm nearly 25 years ago. “I think of myself as a half-rootless person who’s lived his life in search of home, always settling somewhere only to move on,” he says, relaxing into a gently distressed armchair. “But here I made a big decision.” In his memoir of rustication, News from Somewhere (2004), Scruton describes how his love of horses and fox-hunting led to buying an old farm of 30 acres, and how that led to his meeting his wife, Sophie. They now have two children, and the farm, which he jokingly calls “Scrutopia,” has expanded to some 100 acres.
“I feel very strongly about the English countryside and what it means and its history, but also about the situation of our neighbors,” he says. Small farmers in Britain face the same problems as small farmers in the United States. Government subsidies and planning favor big agribusiness and the supermarket chains. The supermarkets have depressed the price of milk and meat so low as to render small farms uneconomical. A way of life is being slowly strangled, and the yeoman farmer, the founding type of Englishman, is becoming extinct. As in the United States, suicide is a leading cause of early death among British farmers.
“I’m lucky,” Scruton says. “I can earn money through the Internet.” His reputation and his newspaper columns about country life have brought the beautiful landscape and hard life of the Vale to the attention of the urbanites. They are the people who make laws and have money—and who drive out on weekend days like this to pick apples and feel connected to the land. Apple Festival is one way to “bring that money into the countryside and benefit people all around.” Today’s proceeds will be donated to the treatment of a local riding instructor, who is suffering from multiple sclerosis.
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A warm, wet wind is in the apple trees. An Atlantic system is blowing in, and the Monty Python fans at the Meteorological Office have named it Storm Brian. Still, people are arriving from all over southern England: a couple with matching Barbour jackets and a matched pair of red setters, local families paying a social call, a Romanian economist with a camera, and a group of philosophy postgraduates from Oxford, discussing the language question in anarcho-primitivism.
The people of Brinkworth, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, have decided to put on a show in the barn. They have loaded their trestles with freshly baked cakes and bread, vegetables of impressively monstrous dimensions, and arts and crafts. A local apple expert sits in an ancillary barn like a fortune teller at the fair, parsing the flavorful prospects of Howgate Wonders, Golden Nobles, and Egremont Russets. There are small-batch cheeses from all over Wiltshire, but the breads are exotic, with French and Italian loaves alongside the rye batches and Irish soda bread. There is also organic Italian olive oil. Not so long ago, this would have been sold at the pharmacist’s, as a treatment for earache or indigestion.
“A hundred years ago,” Scruton says, “people in this part of the world would eat turnips and carrots to get through the winter. Now, they have avocado pears and rocket salad and all the things that the luvvies in the suburbs of Boston can enjoy.” The world has come to the Vale; now the Vale, like rural areas in the United States, must formulate a modern economy if it is to survive as a society. “You can’t globalize the old rural economy,” Scruton warns. “By its very nature, it’s a local thing, and that’s what we’re trying to support with this little festival.”
David and Emma Lewis live on Fernhill Farm, half a mile down the road from Sunday Hill. They have always been dairy farmers, but in 2014, they bought five pigs and have branched out from there. Now they sell sausages, bacon, and lamb at local markets. They use a local slaughterhouse and make their sausages by hand. They specialize in traditional local recipes like pork and leek and pork and apple but have diversified into modern variations, like sweet chili and the extra-spicy Welsh dragon.
On Fernhill Farm’s Facebook page, you can buy lamb chops for £10 a kilo (or $6 a pound). This is a bargain. The Tesco supermarket in Swindon sells four chops of anonymous provenance for the equivalent of £11.82 a kilo, and two chops for the equivalent of £15 a kilo. I buy a kilo of Fernhill’s finest, strictly for research purposes. The eight chops have plenty of gamey dark meat and are much less fatty than the average supermarket chop.
What, I ask as I tuck my chops under my arm, is it like having a world-famous philosopher in the village?
“Lovely,” Emma says. “Roger and Sophie are very nice people. When they did the Apple Festival last year, they came down and invited us along.”
David waves his tongs over the sizzling sausages on his grill. “This is a new thing for us, we’ve never done the barbecuing thing before.”
Shaun and Alison Hunt of Rouselands Farm are newcomers to the Vale. In 2015, they started selling boxes of lamb, beef, and vegetables. Their farm now includes a 10-pitch campsite, with a bell tent and shepherd’s hut. There are recipes on the farm’s website for Provençal braised lamb with lentils, and lamb with harissa. I buy a sandwich, a fluffy bun stuffed with freshly grilled meat from their lean, grass-fed Zwartbles sheep and topped with a generous squirt of barbecue sauce. It is excellent, tender and smoky. I buy another.
Back in the barn, I throw back a chunk of lemon drizzle cake, about the size of a house brick and still warm from the oven. I wash it down with a tall glass of crisp Sunday Hill apple cider, pressed from Roger and Sophie’s apples and sold by Roger and Sophie’s teenage daughter. Still strangely hungry, I reach for a thick wedge of fruitcake. This candied Victorian classic is moist with the scents of the Orient and as weighty as a lump of tropical hardwood. I am in ecstasy, so I have another glass of cider.
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At Sunday Hill, Scruton is making a stand for the Burkean principles in which he believes: the continuity of custom and place, the bonds of friendship and family, and the recruitment of the “little platoons” that assemble into society and nation. He is also taking a stand against some of the political alliances that conservatives have made, notably those with agribusiness, suburban sprawl, and the global supply chain, all of which threaten local networks and local economies.
“The global economy,” he says, “depends on heavily subsidized things like roads, and planning exemptions for warehouses in the middle of nowhere, and all the things the supermarkets use, like packaging. The global economy packages everything, and as we know, most of the packaging ends up in the Pacific. So it’s completely unsustainable. Something will have to be done.”
Scruton’s Green Philosophy (2012), published in the United States as How to Think Seriously About the Planet (2012), marked an intellectual watershed. Since the sixties, environmental politics has increasingly become the property of the left. Scruton argues that the roots of environmentalism are also those of conservatism. Like the organic, local virtues of Edmund Burke’s politics, they are Romantic, emotional, and pre-political.
“The form of environmentalism which emerged in the 19th century, both in this country and in America, is not really an ‘ism.’ It’s not a system of belief at all,” he says. “It’s a yearning towards the old way of doing things and the old connection to the natural world, and a desire to integrate and to develop in a harmonious way. People like Ruskin in Britain and John Muir in America didn’t necessarily want the same thing, but they did want to get back to a more natural connection with the world. That has endured, and it’s not especially political, though of course it has political implications, and it’s not a form of millenarian belief.”
In the late 20th century, however, environmentalism became a wholly owned subsidiary of the statist left. “The green movement has taken over this natural way of thinking and made it into an ‘ism,’ something that you join. It took over from Marxism and socialism at the moment when they were thought to be lost causes, and recruited the same kind of people—people who felt they were ill at ease in the world and wanted some comprehensive plan for remaking it.”
“They come with massive, worldwide plans for a new form of government that will control our souls and will replace the old, inadequate ways of compromise. It’s essentially the same mindset as imposed communism on the Russians and the Eastern Europeans and the Chinese. To me, that involves a complete misunderstanding of what our relation to the natural world really is and should be, because it’s a desire to control rather than to adapt.”
The parties of the right, Scruton writes in Green Philosophy, have let this happen. As they have tended to see modern politics as a “simple dichotomy” between “individual freedom” and “state control,” they have thrown the baby of environmentalism out with the bathwater of left-wing regulation. Yet the deep roots of environmentalism coincide with those of conservatism. The political stewardship of conservatism seeks “the maintenance of the social ecology.” The environmental stewardship of conservation seeks “ecological equilibrium” and to “maintain and enhance the order of which we are the temporary trustees.”
In his new essay collection, the aptly titled Confessions of a Heretic, Scruton characterizes libertarianism as a “false” member of the conservative family of ideas. “It is a plausible conservative response,” he writes in Green Conservatism, “not to advocate economic freedom at all costs, but to recognize the costs of economic freedom, and to take all steps to reduce them.”
“Something will have to be done,” Scruton says at Sunday Hill. “There will be a reverse process, where the food economy becomes partly localized. And the process will be very hard, initially.”
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In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, the hero Julien Sorel travels to England. Sorel, Scruton recounts in News from Somewhere, is “appalled by the barbarous manners” and “gross diet” of the city dwellers, but “astonished by the one redeeming feature of their country, which is the indescribable sweetness of the landscape.”
That landscape testifies to centuries of struggle between the land and its farmers and, more recently, to the ever-rising pressure of the cities upon the country. To Scruton, the United States embodies the worst of the damage, but it has also pioneered some effective remedies.
“In Britain and America, the countryside is constantly under threat from the flight from the cities, and that flight doesn’t do anything to produce a sustainable agriculture either. In particular,” he believes, “the suburbanization around the cities has led to the complete collapse of the center of many American cities. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco have kept some of their Victorian identity, but many cities have lost their civilized center.”
That said, Americans have led the way in reviving city life. “The New Urbanism movement has got further in America than it has got in Britain. I think that’s the most important environmental movement that we have: a movement to bring back people into the city. Make the cities into proper settlements, and then the countryside is much more protected.”
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The wind is rising, the sky darkening in the west. About 50 of us shelter in a second barn-cum-library for a lecture, “A Living Landscape,” on how the local environment connects to the national economy and the international system of European law. Much of what Scruton says applies as much to suburban America as to rural England.
“Our country is under great environmental pressure, particularly with regard to biodiversity. The roads and the people are driving out the small species. The countryside must be capable of sustaining a local food economy.”
The traditional family farm, Scruton notes, is “essentially a closed economy.” Selling lamb rolls and pieces of cake to tourists will not suffice. If there are to be agricultural subsidies—and small farmers cannot survive without them—then let them “tip the balance in the favor of the small farmer, against big agribusiness.” It will also be necessary to “think seriously about how to create a new rural economy, into which small businesses can be integrated.”
Scruton sees Brexit as “an opportunity” to reverse the centralization of food and planning policies and the overregulation of small farmers. Brexit has created a community of interest between “middle-class suburbanites” and the rural population that they previously had dismissed as “crude, indigenous badger-baiting people.” It forces the British to devise “a new way of dealing with the outside world” and to redefine their political community and economic customs. That offers hope for the countryside, the “place that has been brought to order as a shared and cultivated home.”
When Scruton moved to his “rustic redoubt,” he knew that his arrival would be seen as a harbinger of the end of life as the Vale knew it. “I was announcing the imminent triumph of town over country, of the romantic love of appearance over the healthy use of things. I was there to etherealize my neighbors and to write their epitaph.” Instead, he has built a “little network” in the image of his principles. The Apple Festival is a small example of practical politics, a lived philosophy where conservatism meets conservation. “So far,” he says, “it’s been a wonderful experiment, living in the modern world while subsidizing the ancient one.”
In creating a modern environmentalism for conservatives, Roger Scruton has plowed a lonely furrow. Ask anyone under 50, and you will hear that the environment is a bipartisan issue. Ask anyone under 30, and you will hear it is one of the most important issues, especially among educated young people—the people who will be the committed voters and donors of tomorrow. Scruton is no longer a prophet in the wilderness.
I leave Sunday Hill as a country & western band arrives and the first drops of rain fall. David and Emma Lewis are still grilling. “I’m just thinking how lucky we are to live out around here,” Dave says. “I think Roger feels the same. We’re very lucky.”
Back in London, I eat Dave and Emma Lewis’s chops for Sunday lunch, with a glass of globalized Chilean red. The chops are excellent, tender and tasting of real meat. Their quality and price are a strong argument for the support of small farmers.
Two weeks after the Apple Festival, I see Scruton again in Washington, D.C., where he is beginning a short lecture tour. Afterwards, I walk past the think tanks and the buildings owned by every lobbying group imaginable and remember what Scruton had said in his study at Sunday Hill. We had been discussing the leftist uniformity of the American university, and he had praised the creation of a counter-infrastructure of conservative think tanks and magazines. “The natural American response to these things,” he said, “is to start something else.”
A few days after that, the Guardian examines the case of Britain’s new environment secretary, Michael Gove. One of the architects of Brexit and a staunch defender of traditional education, Gove has previously called himself a “shy green.” And even the habitually antagonistic Guardian finds Gove policies of which it must approve, like banning pesticides that are harmful to bees and moving away from single-use plastic bottles. Gove, a friend said, is now a “full-throated environmentalist.”
The “natural American response” to the centrality of the environment to the politics of the near future is to “start something else”: to follow Scruton’s lead in claiming environmental politics as conservative politics, to start building a counter-infrastructure of green institutions, and to begin making up for political ground needlessly lost.
If this is not a matter of conviction for some conservatives, let it be a practical necessity. The process may be hard initially, but the alternative is to surrender the politics of the earth and its stewardship to the collectivists of the left, with their terrifying euphemisms about “reducing the population” and centralizing economic choices. As the leftists might say, you may not be interested in the environmental dialectic, but the environmental dialectic is interested in you.
Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
