Pastoralism and national identity

Pastoralism and national identity in the book are not simply a love of rural scenery: they form a historically charged response to crisis, in which walking, falconry, and imagined continuity with the past promise refuge and cultural recovery. Through T. H. White’s walks with Gos, the book traces how a private search for solitude belongs to a wider 1930s movement that sought an older, supposedly more secure England. Its account of falconry and hunting also complicates that ideal, showing that access to countryside and the status assigned to people and birds are shaped by social hierarchy.

The Countryside as Refuge

White’s turn towards rural life develops amid mounting fear of war. He interpreted the coming conflict as a product of powerful people driving others into suffering, and his existing nightmares about bombs, gas, tunnels, and escape routes deepened his distrust of modern civilisation. After reading Gilbert Blaine’s account of a goshawk that returned to a feral state, White found in the hawk a figure for escape from his own constrained life. He took a small farm-labourer’s cottage and ordered a goshawk from Germany. The choice connected his personal desire for a different existence to an imagined past in which a person might live closer to land, animal, and subsistence.

White’s solitary walks with Gos were part of a broader fashion, not an eccentric pursuit without social context. In the 1930s, rambling clubs published full-moon calendars, and railway companies organised excursions to rural destinations. A Southern Railway moonlit walk on the South Downs, planned for about forty participants, drew fifteen hundred. Walkers were not chiefly seeking to conquer terrain or test their stamina; the account presents them as seeking communion with the land and a return, in imagination, to a pre-industrial England. Their attraction to the countryside answered the trauma of World War I and the fear of another war. The past offered a form of solace precisely because the present seemed politically and economically unstable.

Walking, Memory, and National Salvage

The book places White’s walks within a conservative, antiquarian current that treated national identity as something lost but imaginatively recoverable. Economic disaster, a contracting empire, and threats from totalitarian regimes helped intensify interest in ancient sites, folk traditions, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Druids, and Arthurian legend. This was a cultural salvage project: the belief that recovering the past, even through the imagination, could restore something essential to the nation. The countryside became more than a setting. It served as a landscape on which hopes about national continuity could be projected.

White’s daily experience gives that broad movement a particular form. Walking roads, grassy tracks, and fields in Buckinghamshire, he entered the landscape through repeated journeys rather than through a single symbolic encounter. At night, the emptiness of The Ridings made the countryside seem connected to an older world. In his writing, the land gathered ghosts, stars, and humanly imagined lines of history. At the ruined chapel at Chapel Green, he pictured past inhabitants as still present beneath the ground and imagined their familiarity with a goshawk. The bird allowed him to feel a connection across historical time: a creature recognised by earlier rural people seemed to make the vanished past legible in the present. That feeling is powerful, but it rests on imaginative identification rather than proof that the past can be restored unchanged.

Falconry, Land, and Social Rank

The pastoral ideal is also structured by unequal access to land. The book contrasts the practical demands of flying falcons with those of flying goshawks. Goshawks can hunt in a quick dash from the fist at close range, making them usable in more places. Falconry with falcons, by contrast, requires broad open ground such as grouse moors, partridge estates, or extensive farmland—resources more readily available to wealthy or well-connected people. Historical falconry writing made that distinction explicit by associating possession of the supposedly noble falcons with aristocratic privilege.

The status of the austringer, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks, was correspondingly diminished in parts of the tradition. Writers mocked austringers as unsociable and physically ridiculous, while later accounts described goshawks as difficult and disagreeable. The parallel between the disparaged trainer and the disparaged bird reveals how ideas of refinement and social standing could shape judgements about both. A bird’s reputation was not merely a neutral account of its behaviour; it was entangled with the hierarchy of the people who flew different kinds of raptors and the kinds of land they could reach. The book’s account therefore unsettles any pastoral picture that treats rural life as equally available to everyone.

Gender, Observation, and the Limits of the Ideal

Falconry books also show how human assumptions enter descriptions of animals. Helen Macdonald finds that later accounts cast female goshawks as moody or troublesome, whereas seventeenth-century writers such as Simon Latham describe birds that are wary of harsh handling but responsive to kindness. Edmund Bert presents the keeper as responsible for attending to the hawk’s needs and describes their relationship as friendship and play. These accounts do not establish that earlier falconers were free of their own assumptions; they do show that a bird’s apparent disposition can be described in ways that either assign blame to the animal or consider the handler’s conduct.

Macdonald’s observations of Mabel further resist reducing the goshawk to an emblem of wildness or national memory. Training requires close attention to posture and small changes in expression, and that sustained watching alters the observer’s own responsiveness. When Mabel plays with a strip of paper, a paper tube, and other improvised toys, her behaviour exceeds the fixed image of the grim, unplayful bird that Macdonald had encountered in books. The scene makes the relationship reciprocal: the human learns from the hawk’s responses, rather than simply imposing a ready-made meaning upon her. Mabel’s play does not erase the historical associations of falconry, but it makes those associations less complete.

A comparison with Maine sharpens the social dimension of the pastoral. The account describes local pride in a hunting tradition where common law allows hunting across land, contrasting it with Britain’s history of exclusive estates and restricted access. A 1942 article in Outdoor Life used this difference to distinguish American hunting from systems associated with estate owners and elites in fascist Italy and Germany, while acknowledging that Britain shared the problem. The comparison presents access to land as a matter of national self-image as well as rural practice. Taken together, White’s walks, falconry’s class history, changing descriptions of goshawks, and the Maine example show pastoralism as both a longing for belonging and a contested account of who can belong to the land.