I recently visited an amazing enterprise called Farming 4 Life — a farm that is being used to provide a whole new kind of experience for youngsters who are facing one kind of difficulty or another in their school careers..
The story of Farming 4 Life has been covered in the Western Gazette — and rightly so. It is positively touching to hear how just a small number of visits to this traditional mixed small-holding can begin to give young people new hope and a new sense of responsibility.
As I went round this charming and inspiring project, I began to recall all the other examples I have come across of people finding solace from contact with animals.
There are the llamas at Mosterton that do so much to provide therapy for children who come into contact with them. There is the riding for the disabled on traditional horses and ponies in Burton Bradstock and other parts of West Dorset, which can transform lives by giving severely disabled young people their first ever experience of being responsible for another living being. And even domestic pets can be hugely therapeutic. Some years ago, I saw the astonishing increase of confidence and self-possession that was brought about for a young girl by the simple expedient of equipping her with a young dog to look after and love.
I think there is a wider point here about nature and the human spirit.
It is a commonplace that people in cities move faster and seem more agitated than people in the countryside. In part, of course, this is explained by the fact that many of the activities that go on in cities — commerce, government, finance and the like — involve heavy work-loads and intense pressure. But this can’t really be anything like a complete explanation, because similar activities go on in country towns too — and there are plenty of other pressures which are either shared between city and country (like the effects of recession) or specific to the countryside (like the extreme difficulties faced by our farmers).
So there has to be more than work-pressure to the difference in pace between urban and rural life.
Although I can’t prove this, I have a strong feeling that contact with nature is a large part of the answer. Just as animals can (provably) provide therapy, one has only to see what happens to people’s expressions and behaviour when they come to the country to know that living surrounded by trees and grass and hills is in itself a form of continuous therapy. Just do the thought-experiment of contrasting how you feel in a crowded tube train compared with how you feel when walking alone on Eggardon or Pilsdon, and you will see my point.
Is this just an interesting fact, which might influence individual choices of life-style but has no practical or policy implication?
On the contrary, if true, these points have huge implications — because they tell us a lot, both about how we should be designing our cities (creating parks or keeping gardens) and about the national significance of our countryside. The bodies that campaign to keep the countryside intact don’t tend to describe themselves as health-charities; but they should be classed as contributors to maintaining the mental stability of the nation.