People and the countryside [antikvár]

PrefaceThe theme of this book is the place of the coimtryside in the lives of ordinary people in the 1970s. It is not original but was, indeed, the theme of the Countryside in 1970 Conferences inspired and presided over by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, with which I have been closely associated since one of my earlier books. Industry and the Countryside, was distributed to participants of the first conference as a 'set book'. I thank His Royal Highness for graciously writing the Foreword to this book. I hope I have been able to bring out in the following pages the urgency of the need for action which he has stressed on numerous occasions.The Countryside in 1970 Conferences held in 1963 and 1965 showed up clearly a need for more readily accessible, systematically arranged knowledge of many aspects of country living. As members of study groups we found that a great deal had been written about the land, trees, plants and animals of Britain's countryside but perhaps rather less about people and their relation with, and impact on, country areas. Admittedly, specialists had been at work for decadesbotanists, biologists, foresters, geographers, geologists, water engineers, marine researchers and so onbut each group had tended to work independently of the others and the results of deliberations and research were mostly hidden away ia the journals of their own disciplines. One of the most valuable results of the 1970 Conferences, and especially of its groups, was that they broke down some of this self-containedness and brought together people with many diverse specialities to their mutual benefit.A great deal of material relevant to the future of the countryside was assembled and published in the individual group reports of the Second 1970 Conference, which in preparing this volume I have used to enlighten my ignorance on a great many matters. But I have found, in practice, that they are imsuitable as general source books for students and others for a number of reasons : they are not readily accessible in that they are not usually stocked by libraries and only summaries of group findings and recommendations were published in the proceedings of the conference; the facts contained in them are pertinent to countryside problems but some are undigested, some observations occasionally not as objective as they