The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan

This last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would continue on my way to Devon, passing through other places waking up in the middle of the worst agricultural nightmare in seventy years. My boots are without guilt, but in all the walking here and there, in the asking and listening, I came to feel that British farming was already dying, that the new epidemic was but an unexpected acceleration of a certain decline.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

From the LRB letters page: [ 19 April 2001 ] Christopher Small.

Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, many of which were first published in the London Review, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize award for fiction.

The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan

From the archive