To know the countryside, you must live in the city. In his book Badgers, the naturalist Michael Clark describes surveying the animal back in the 1960s. Calling at a farm cottage, he asked an old country man whether he knew of any badgers living nearby. "What're badgers?" came the reply. "The country man", Clark writes, "genuinely did not know of the species. You can be a country man, it seems, and know little of the country. But traditionally, country folks are regarded as being in tune with the land. They live there, don't they? What can townees know of the way of nature? The assumption infects much of our culture. It predicates the existence of a clear division between town and country.