Wild abandon

Sir: As upsetting and pointless as is the National Trust’s cancelling of the fishing lease on the River Test at Mottisfont Abbey (Letters, 19 August), it is all of a piece with the way the National Trust is going. On the 13,000-acre Wallington Estate in Northumberland, the Trust has recently spent a small fortune elaborately fencing off 50 acres to release beavers on one of the two farms they have recently taken out of agricultural production. They trumpet their intention to create ‘Wild Wallington’ by abandoning it to nature and planting trees on as much of the estate’s farmland as they can. The farms at Wallington were wrested from bleak and barren heath and moorland in the 18th century by the vision and riches of Sir Walter Blackett, who bought vast areas and turned it into some of the most fertile farmland in England. At the same time as China announces its intention to bring more land into cultivation to be self-sufficient in food, the short-sighted NT are hellbent on famine. 

Philip Walling

Scots Gap, Northumberland

Nearest and dearest

Sir: For many years now I have supported Halesowen Town as they are the nearest team to me. I hardly ever miss a home game and try to get to as many away fixtures as I can (‘Leagues apart’, 19 August). The beauty of non-League football is to be able to sit or stand where you like and cheer for your own team without any ill will from opposition supporters. It’s very rare for any trouble to kick off, and there is the added bonus that you can have a drink and take it on the terraces with you. Being in close proximity to the pitch also means you can enjoy ‘banter’ with opposition players, match officials and the like. I would urge anyone who fancies watching a game of real football to find out when their nearest team is next playing and to get down there and enjoy it. 

John Wadman

Quinton, Birmingham

A hex on Wrexham?

Sir: In his otherwise astute defence of non-League football, Neil Clark states that since being taken over by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Wrexham FC ‘have not looked back’. Here in north Wales, this is not the view of all Wrexham supporters. The actors’ determination to make the club a global brand may have widened its fan base and helped secure promotion last season. However, in the process, the club has forfeited much of the homespun identity that Clark alludes to when explaining the appeal of lower League football. With so many new fans and with blocks of seats routinely put aside for the club’s international supporters, many lifelong fans from the Wrexham area now find it impossible to obtain match tickets. And while pre-season games once involved trips to places not too far away – Stoke, for example – today’s team jets off to the USA to play a Manchester United youth team.

Nor does celebrity backing guarantee success: back in the EFL, Wrexham have won just one of their first four matches while conceding 13 goals.

Richard Kelly

Nant Mawr, Flintshire

Bell’s restoration

Sir: It was with the assistance of repeated interventions from Charles Moore that the reputation of the great Bishop Bell was rescued from the terrible damage inflicted on it by Archbishop Welby and the current Bishop of Chichester, Martin Warner. As he says, the return of George Bell House ‘all but completes the formal restoration of Bell’s reputation’ (Notes, 5 August). In Chichester, its final and absolute completion should take the form of a service of rejoicing and thanksgiving in the cathedral on 3 October, the date of Bell’s death on which he is commemorated in the Anglican calendar.

One final task would then remain. When Bell was unjustly condemned in 2015, work stopped on the statue of him that is to be erected on the west front of Canterbury cathedral, where he served as dean from 1924 to 1929. The cathedral announced in 2019 that the statue would be completed. Archbishop Welby said he was ‘delighted’. Yet the resumption of this work in his own cathedral is still awaited.

Alistair Lexden

House of Lords, London SW1A

Anti sociology

Sir: Rod Liddle’s excoriation of the dominant strands of sociology (‘The great sociology con’, 19 August) was spot on. But he missed the dissidents. There is a minority of sociologists who teach that knowledge is achieved by reliable evidence, not ideology or identity. They tend to believe that biological sex is real, that meritocracy has widened opportunity, that the legacy of the British Empire is complex rather than straightforwardly evil, and that the welfare states have, on the whole, transformed capitalist markets to serve human needs. They also tend to the view that the best evidence comes from good-quality social statistics, analysed in mathematically rigorous ways. These views are heretical in sociology. But they provide society with the potential to understand itself wisely.

Lindsay Paterson

Emeritus Professor of Education Policy, School of Social and Political Science, Edinburgh University

Accounted for

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer (Any other business, 19 August) says ‘no one ever erects monuments to accountants’. I recall on a visit to the Normandy beaches, specifically Omaha Beach, seeing a small war memorial to US Army accountants. I have tried, without success, to find a reference online. I wonder if any of your readers have any recollection of it?

Mike Barrett

Wiltshire