The village where I live is circled by farmland: fields of sheep, cattle, rapeseed and wheat. In the evening you hear the lowing of cows; in the morning sheep grazing by our garden gate sounds like children munching on cornflakes.

Borders farms in our area do a booming trade. Some of the tractors that squeeze past our car are more space-age than Piers Ploughman. Shepherds work by quad bike rather than foot, whizzing around their flocks with a sheepdog yelping from the back.

If you were to ignore the high-tech vehicles, in many respects the landscape looks much as it did a century ago. In some parts, small stone-walled fields have given way to rolling acres of wheat and oats, stored in metal barns as sprawling as a supermarket. There’s enough open space hereabouts to mimic the vast American plains. Just over the border, however, lies the Lake District, where the field pattern is not so much patchwork as pointilliste. This is the domain of the shepherd James Rebanks, a third-generation farmer who is becoming an increasingly prominent spokesperson for a farming revolution.

Rebanks’s latest book, English Pastoral, is a cri de coeur for a more sustainable - what he calls “high-welfare” - way of working the land. He, and others, want to turn back the clock from the intensive agriculture and chemical dependency of previous decades, which all but ruined the land. Instead, the idea is to promote regeneration and soil renewal, which produces healthier crops and animals, while also benefitting nature.

The problem is, it is not profitable. Government hand-outs are essential to make this new model economically viable. And, in order to be eligible for grants, farmers have to meet stringent eco-targets, to improve the natural habitat.

In Scotland, meanwhile, to help combat climate change environmentalists are keen to oust sheep from the hills and replace them with trees to capture carbon. Echoes of the 19th-century Highland Clearances are hard to avoid. Back then, crofters were evicted from their plots to make way for large-scale sheep rearing. Now the wheel is turning in another direction. While only a few would deny the need urgently to tackle global warming, this particular initiative has upset experts who say that the new plantations – serried ranks of Sitka spruce that throw a dark blanket over hillsides and destroy views - are the wrong sort of trees. A mixed landscape of native species such as oak, alder, birch and pine is what’s required to nurture a diversity of wildlife.

While that argument gradually comes to a boil, tensions are rising in other quarters. Today’s Battle of Britain, it seems, is for the very soul of the countryside. On one side is ranged the farming community, struggling to adapt to a more eco-friendly and tech-savvy way of doing things. As if this were not stressful enough, Scottish beef and lamb producers are braced for disaster after the latest round of Brexit trade talks, with Australia, threatens their livelihood.

Facing them across the battlefield is an assortment of environmentalists fighting a rear-guard action to reclaim ground that was lost years if not centuries ago. Among their latest targets is the peat industry, whose industrial-scale extraction of this carbon-capturing resource (primarily for garden compost), is completely unsustainable. Peat, however, is an important source of income for parts of the Highlands and Islands, which perhaps explains why, unlike Westminster, the Scottish government has not yet named a date when it will be banned from garden centres. The management of sporting estates is also under the microscope, on ecological but also political grounds. Among other issues, the old practice of burning heather on lucrative grouse-moors is widely condemned, as is the killing of predators that prey on game birds, thereby significantly diminishing the ecosystem.

Other voices add to the clamor around the rural world, not least a feisty platoon of rewilders. Their aim is to return extinct indigenous species of birds and mammals to the wilds, thereby restoring an ancient balance. Already there have been successful reintroductions such as sea eagles and beavers, although some farmers claim the eagles, whose wingspan is up to 8 feet, snatch lambs, and the beavers’ dams lead to flooding.

More controversial is the prospect of returning wolves and lynx to Highland forests, which would keep down the deer population and allow vegetation to thrive. Farmers are concerned about the impact on livestock, while some hillwalkers are nervous at the thought of a close encounter with White Fang as they tramp the glens.

Equally disturbing, to my mind, is the fear that should any landowners be granted the right to rear alpha predators, they might feel entitled to fence off large areas of their estate, allegedly for public safety. Since there is no law of trespass in Scotland, thereby allowing us to roam freely so long as we do not damage crops or property, this might provide a legal loophole around legislation that many estate owners resent.

As if there were not already enough competitors on the scene, there are hundreds of thousands of people like me who are simply ramblers, cyclists, mountaineers or birdwatchers. Before the pandemic, pressure on the most scenic locations was getting to the point where an island like Skye was plagued by traffic jams more appropriate to Picadilly Circus than Portree. This past year, footfall on the most popular hill tracks and rural paths has further intensified, degrading trails, overwhelming amenities, and leading to over-use and abuse of the land.

Some years ago, a piano was found abandoned on the slopes of Ben Nevis, our highest mountain. It was a harbinger of things to come. Now, our fields, forests, peaks, rivers and shores are being pulled in all directions. Many of the initiatives designed to protect the natural and cultivated landscape are long overdue. Yet with the ever-growing allure of green space, too many of us want a piece of it and have an opinion on how it should be managed. In such a small country, there’s only so much to go around before something, or someone, snaps.

(Rosemary Goring is a journalist, writer and editor. Her books include Scotland: The Autobiography, Scotland: Her Story and the novels After Flodden and Dacre’s War. She is currently writing a book about Mary, Queen of Scots, and lives in the Scottish Borders, closer to England than Edinburgh.)

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