Landlines

[...] We left Cornwall at a time when the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was passing through parliament, a bill which will criminalize trespass in England and Wales. If the bill becomes law and trespass is criminalized then the wording ‘unauthorized encampments’ will allow wild camping to fall under the Act of Parliament and become illegal. Overnight an ancient way of using the land will be lost. Only time will tell how this plays out, but at a moment when the need to reconnect people to nature is one of the greatest challenges we face, England is actually moving in the opposite direction. How are we to teach our children, not just about the beauty of the land they inhabit, or of the need to preserve the wildlife and habitats they share it with, but of its existential importance for our own future existence, if they can’t access it? How can any of us understand that we’re just a small part of a vast, living, breathing ecosystem if the closest we come to that is the local park? As the night fades into darkness and the lights on the mountain become brighter, I think about the young people on the summit, safe in a landscape where they belong, and how they compare to the youths in the bus shelter, acting as they choose in a land they believe belongs to them.

Empty and neglected houses line the path as we get closer to Garrigill, a tiny village where the pub has closed down and the local shop has only a scattering of items on the shelves. I pick two cakes from the counter, the only food in the shop that doesn’t need more cooking than we have gas for. The woman behind the counter serves me hurriedly and locks the door as I leave. We’re eating the cakes on a bench under a tree when an old lady sits down next to us with her dog. We talk about the weather, how dry it is, how it hasn’t rained here for weeks. But I have a burning question so have to ask it.

‘Why are there so many empty houses around here?’ She doesn’t want to answer and fusses in her bag for a dog treat, but I press for an answer anyway.

‘It’s the incomers. They’ve bought up the village, pushed the prices so high no locals can afford to live here any more. Then Covid came and no one could travel to their second homes any more, so there’s no money coming into the village to keep the pub or the shop going. Everything’s shutting down, putting people out of work. And now there’s nothing here any more the second-home owners are all saying “It’s not the same as it was” and trying to sell their houses for the same price they paid for them before they ruined the place.’

She stops and takes a deep breath, but as she gets up to leave my thoughts are drawn back to Cornwall and how dark the villages are in the winter, how few houses have their lights on. We walk away up a stony track and I’m beginning to realize that there are villages like Garrigill all over Britain, where second-home ownership has pushed house prices out of the reach of locals, turning thriving local economies into little more than unsustainable leisure facilities. By the time we put the tent up I’m beginning to think we could possibly go a long way towards solving the housing crisis in this country if we first resolve what has evidently become a second-home crisis.

‘Get away from the bees. They’re my bees. Don’t you dare damage my beehives. Look, you’re making them angry.’ The walkers turn around to head back the way they came, but the old woman stops them. ‘Don’t you dare go back through my garden, trampling on my plants.’ The family stand by the beehives, trapped in the woman’s enclave, as the child starts waving bees away and inevitably gets stung. I limp away. It seems whatever side of the border we’re on, obsessive defence of our boundaries is the human condition. Does nationalism, separatism, devolution, or even the invasion of sovereign countries all come down to the same thing? We all live in the same garden, but rather than revel in that and share the beauty of it, all we can do is argue over who owns the bees.