Strix
A Poaching Laird
THE monsoon may have broken by the time these words appear in print, but meanwhile the Highlands of Scot- land, or at least the deer-forest where I am, are gripped by drought. The effect is odd. In most parts of England the water keeps—superficially—separate from the land, and when the streams and ponds dry up. the texture of the surrounding fields is not radically altered. A scorched pasture feels hard underfoot., but it does not feel unnatural. It does definitely feel unnatural to walk upon the floor of a peat hag, or across a patch of bog, as buoyantly as though one were treading the gross carpets with which the foyers of super-cinemas are lined; and upon normally spongey, burn-scarred hillsides it is a new thing altogether to have to take into account, when planning a day's shooting, the availability of water for men and dogs to drink.
Last week there was one night's rain; bath-water, to the children's disgust, flowed once more through the taps, and the electric light ceased to be turned off, after two admonitory winks, at 10.30. But there still seems nothing impractical about the Dali-esque juxtaposition of bush shirts with ptarmigan. and along the main road, where in many places the heather has been fired by itinerant Nature-lovers on bicycles or in cars, the peat still smoulders here and there even after its last week's dowsing. Despite the heat, the deer are lower down than is usual at this season; the sun has bleached the grazing on the tops, and on some of the hills the springs are dry. Of the sufferings of anglers it would be kinder not to speak.
In the Lowlands, on my way north, I came across a prob- lem which, though connected with water, has nothing to do with the drought. It is the sort of affair to which only Sir Compton Mackenzie could do full justice, but I will try and give some account of it, for it provides an interesting variation on that now familiar theme, the conflict between Planning and Private Enterprise.
Private Enterprise is sometimes the hero and sometimes the villain of these dramas; but in whichever role it appears, its begetter—the entrepreneur—is normally actuated to a large extent by selfish motives. His project may benefit the com- munity, but primarily he is out to do himself some good. in this particular case the facts were otherwise. There was nothing in it for the entrepreneur, except a small amount of expense and responsibility; his sole aim was to enrich, or at least to diversify, the lives of his neighbours and of passers-by.
He was, and indeed is, my friend K, a man of eminence in the great world and an hereditary land-owner in the Low- lands. Though he can hardly be called eccentric, K is a man of character and taste, who likes on occasion to express his testhetic beliefs in terms of what the eighteenth century would have called follies. He is, for instance, the only laird I know at the mouth of one of whose glens a tubular, man-sized abstract by Mr. Henry Moore stands sentry upon an enormous boulder; and on the hill behind his house several works of the avant garde, solidly sculpted and ingeniously sited, have lately joined a massive figure by Epstein. The setting becomes them well.
Near K's house lies one of the reservoirs which supply the town of D- with water. It was made by throwing a dantacross the mouth of a small valley and, save at the end where the dam is, resembles a natural loch. The fairly con- siderable area which it occupies was acquired by the D--- Town Council from K. who did not in the least wish to sell it but gave way with a good grace because no other suitable site was available. The reservoir, and a narrow strip of land round its verge, is surrounded by a high wire fence; a motor- able but very minor road runs along one side of it.
This summer K was offered, by a friend who is interested in such things, four miniature Australian deer, descendants of the Duke of Bedford's herd at Woburn. A whim seized him.
Why should not these tiny, rare and engaging animals be kept inside the reservoir fence, beside the road, to give pleasure to the not very numerous people who passed that way? He assured himself that the conditions—grazing, shelter and so on—would suit the deer, and then wrote to the Town Council. In his letter, which was of an extremely obliging character, he explained that the deer were very small, in height no greater and in bulk much less than the black-faced sheep which are sometimes allowed to graze' inside the reservoir boundary. He undertook to be responsible for all additional fencing, for winter feeding and for general supervision. He offered either to present the deer to the municipality or to pay an annual rent for grazing them on the Town Council's property. He was bent, it will be seen, on the creation of another small, agree- able folly.
The Town Council rejected his offer; it was not, they wrote, 'in accordance with modern practice to allow stock of any kind to graze adjacent to reservoirs for reasons of hygiene.' The theory that four whippet-sized graminivores living on the banks of a deep lake nearly a mile long could pollute its waters is scarcely a tenable one; if it is tenable, the water must be hopelessly contaminated already by the herons, gulls, duck and other fowl which in the ordinary course of business, and without reference to the Town Council, use the reservoir as a lavatory every day. Hygiene was merely one of those small, uninteresting trumps which officialdom uses to keep the lead in its own hand; officialdom's motive for taking the trick is possibly less uninteresting.
Here was a matter involving a laird, and involving deer. It is true that the laird was trying to bring the deer to the people, instead of trying to keep the neople from the deer; but the combination of laird and deer produced a sort of exhalation of privilege, strong enough to make municipal hackles rise. Worse still, the laird was poaching. He was trying, entirely off his own bat, to provide an 'amenity': and even if it had not been an unusual and fanciful kind of amenity, the provision of amenities is the Town Council's business. It is not surprising that Planning should have beaten Private Enterprise on ground of the latter's choosing; and nobody, for once, is even arguably the worse off.
The ratepayers have been denied nothing which they had a right to expect, or which they even knew existed. K has been saved a little money. The Town Council of D-- have—though not, to their credit, unanimously—masked the face of intolerance behind the gauze of municipal hygiene. And no doubt the four little deer will find a, home somewhere else. But I still feel that there was a human failure here. that K's folly might at least have been given an experimental year's probation, that the Planners did not really deserve their knock- out in the first round.
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