7 OCTOBER 1949, Page 18

Rural Editors More and more rural papers are imitating the

Countryman in making country villages their headquarters. The closest imitator is perhaps the Country Journal, a very excellent quarterly, issued at Denmead, in Hamp- shire. Its latest number gives some grim details of the substitution of farm by camp. No less than one-seventh of Wiltshire, that pioneer county in agriculture, is occupied by the army. The tank has expelled the sheep from the sweet grass of the Downs.