Patrick Galbraith

Camberwell

Editor at @unbounders | In Search of One Last Song @wmcollinsbooks | Columnist for @countrylifemag and @thecriticmag

Articles

Stop scapegoating Britain’s landed classes

3 weeks ago | yahoo.com | Patrick Galbraith

An essential tenet of today’s land access movement is that landowners are villainous and the larger their holdings, the worse they are. It’s an attractive idea but it doesn’t withstand all that much scrutiny. Last year, the Right to Roam campaign published a collection of curious essays titled Wild Service. The premise is that farmers and landowners have ruined English and the public need to make the countryside great again.
Stop scapegoating Britain's landed classes

3 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Patrick Galbraith
Why an English 'right to roam' is a bad idea

3 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Rupert Cabbell-Manners |Patrick Galbraith

Patrick Galbraith spent three years investigating the truth about rural Britain and how we treat it. Uncommon Ground is the brilliant resultMy brother has trouble with magic mushrooms. They grow on the fields he farms near Norwich, to which people come each summer, armed with carrier bags. In the 1970s, our grandfather sprayed the mycelium with fungicides so toxic they're now prohibited across Europe; but the mushrooms have since returned, and with them, the hippies.
How to hunt properly

1 month ago | thecritic.co.uk | Patrick Galbraith

A shooting career should start without a gun This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. I was quite sure I was going to die out there. We had set off in the smaller of my pal’s two boats and as we left the harbour at Morston, on the North Norfolk coast, heading towards Blakeney Point, we’d run aground.
Farmers defended our green and pleasant land. Now Labour is felling them

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Patrick Galbraith

About a year ago, I did something I’d been hoping to do for quite a while. I identified a cottage in a fairly tranquil spot and wrote to the local landowner to ask if I could possibly rent it. It hadn’t been lived in for some time and the garden needed work – it had been a small farmhouse once, when small farms were still possible. He showed me around and said that yes, if I committed to involving myself in village life he’d be more than happy to rent it to me.
Farmers defended our green and pleasant land. Now Labour is felling them

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Patrick Galbraith
Mexico, Miss Argentina and north Norfolk: How padel is taking over the world

1 month ago | countrylife.co.uk | Patrick Galbraith

I like to think that I’m pretty good at seeing new trends coming down the line. In 2015, I was the first mid-twenty-something-year-old in my neighbourhood to throw away all my skinny jeans and I’ve long been saying that Catholicism has been due ‘a moment’ with millennials. Just head over to Instagram, if you don’t believe me — Popish frippery is back. But as for a new racket game, sweeping the nation, I’ve been caught (so to speak) with my pants down.
20 years on the Hunting Act remains an attack on the rural working class

2 months ago | telegraph.co.uk | Patrick Galbraith

When I was young there was a gas meter reader who lived at the end of the lane. Her husband was disabled and what little she had she spent on her horse. When I think of foxhunting I think of her. She wasn’t some sort of oddity among a group of rich, titled people, she was exactly the sort of person you might come across at a hunt meet anywhere in Britain, a member of the rural working class with a passion for hounds, a passion for horses, and a love of open country.
Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith

2 months ago | waterstones.com | Patrick Galbraith

Receive 25% off the RRP of this title when you enter the code PREORDER25 during checkout between 22nd-24th February. More titles available, visit our offer page from the home screen ‘An adventurous, intelligent, bold, empathetic, provocative, curious and argumentative exploration of the English countryside and its various human landscapes’ Richard Smyth'This then is Britain.
A game plan | Patrick Galbraith | The Critic Magazine

2 months ago | thecritic.co.uk | Patrick Galbraith

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. The text message was from a number I didn’t recognise. “Got your name from John,” it read. “He said you could supply us with venison.” I read it twice and was none the wiser. I couldn’t remember meeting anybody called John or telling any such person that I was a meat man. I sat on it for a couple of days and then replied.