Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 127

In 1970 the land around Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire became the first estate in England to open as a Country Park. Yet, for more than a decade now, its future has been in doubt, as the cash-strapped County Council explores options for its sale to a private buyer, whilst the Friends of Elvaston Castle campaign to keep it open to the public, and search for the funding necessary to restore both house and grounds. The uncertainty surrounding Elvaston’s survival as a public amenity illustrates some of the travails identified in Ian Rotherham’s book, addressing a neglected topic in the history of the modern countryside.

Country Parks were one element in the new era of ‘countryside management’ ushered in by the creation of Countryside Commissions for England and Wales and for Scotland in 1968. That very notion of ‘countryside management’ was a novelty: Rotherham cites an official definition of it as ‘the process by which objectives of conservation, recreation and access are secured for public benefit in the management of both public and privately-owned land’ (p. 27). It assumed that public funding should support the provision of access to open spaces, often on the urban fringe, and take responsibility for both maintaining and restoring landscapes, cleaning up contaminated and post-industrial land (including dealing with derelict structures left over from the Second World War, which Rotherham notes would now be valued as being of archaeological interest). Countryside rangers engaged in education work and helped the public to take advantage of outdoor activities. With official encouragement, a new profession developed during the 1970s and 1980s – that of countryside manager.

Rotherham’s story is about what these professionals achieved, and what he believes is now under threat in an era of cuts and reassessments of the role of public bodies and funding. Between 2004 and 2014 membership of the Countryside Management Association fell by 36 per cent. A large part of the countryside manager’s role was always about finding numbers of people to do the work on the ground: recruiting and managing volunteers, and deploying labour from employment schemes like the youth opportunity project. Now the emphasis has swung more firmly towards the voluntary sector, whilst employment opportunities for wardens and rangers are increasingly likely to arise in private tourist attractions and landscapes managed by charities. Rotherham points out that these charities have less obvious accountability to the communities within which they operate and may not address the same range of priorities that featured in management plans developed under council auspices. He also sees young people’s fascination with the virtual world and ‘passive experience’ as a major challenge to any public commitment to maintaining countryside recreation. But he argues that countryside management can continue to make a strong case for its existence, contributing to the control of invasive species, ensuring sustainability, supporting tourism, addressing social problems and enhancing health and well-being.

The book is shaped by the author’s active involvement in the processes he describes, while the region in which he is based furnishes many of the practical examples of countryside management in action, drawn from South Yorkshire and the East Midlands, and notably exploring case studies of the country parks and nature reserves around Sheffield. Its central sources are surveys conducted by the author and his students into local authority provision and the management of particular areas of the country. But despite frequent reference to case studies, it is disappointing that so little detail is given to flesh these out, with the emphasis throughout on quantitative rather than qualitative assessments. The result is a rather dry account, establishing the parameters of the topic but without much broader historical contextualization, other than a whistle-stop overview of the history of rural recreation and access. A number of black-and-white photographs are included, but with little direct link to the text. Tables provide data on activities, staffing and regional variation, and set out the stages by which government continued to revise its approach to how the countryside should be managed, as the Countryside Commission morphed into an Agency, later to be repackaged – following Welsh and Scottish devolution – as Natural England. In essence this furnishes the main theme of the book: tracking the mechanisms by which the state has taken responsibility for managing landscapes, and the future for that provision of access and amenity as those arrangements have been revised, outsourced, and placed in the hands of the Big Society.

The book reads rather like a report, with many subheadings, setting out the parameters of the topic and providing extracts from sources, including prospectus descriptions for various degree courses in countryside management. Yet Rotherham seems to have intended a more argumentative intervention: a comment, and a warning, on the impact of austerity in putting a legacy at risk. His book celebrates a profession that has only really existed since the 1970s and never accounted for much in terms of the numbers of people employed, yet which made (he argues) a significant intervention and became ‘a beacon’ in the field internationally (p. 330). The history of the late twentieth-century countryside of recreation, country parks, nature reserves and the urban fringe, is only now beginning to be written, and the story of the countryside managers clearly deserves further exploration within that research.