There is a particular irony in the reeds along the Thames in South Oxfordshire. A century or so ago, Sir Charles Rose roared through the lanes near his Hardwick estate in a Rolls-Royce, scattering chickens and startling neighbours, and in doing so gave Kenneth Grahame the model for Mr Toad, the reckless aristocrat of The Wind in the Willows whose vanity nearly costs him his grand home. In the book, Toad Hall is seized by weasels and stoats before being heroically restored to its rightful owner. In real life, something closer to the opposite is now happening.

Nick Hayes, a writer and artist who co-founded the Right to Roam campaign and lives on a wide-beamed barge moored nearby, was invited to become the Hardwick estate's artist-in-residence. What he found there surprised him: the Rose family's heirs are, by stages, converting their inheritance into a charitable trust, to be run jointly by tenants and the loose community of growers, artists and walkers who have settled on its edges. It is a story he tells in his new book, The Medicine Tree, which asks why England, almost alone among nations, seems to have no living tradition of sacred or storied connection to its own soil. Hayes draws on examples from far beyond Oxfordshire to make his case, pointing to New Zealand's Whanganui River, which was granted legal personhood in 2017 after generations of Māori advocacy, as proof that other cultures have found ways to bind people and land through law, myth and ritual.

England, he argues, lost this inheritance slowly: Christianity displaced older animist beliefs, enclosure fenced off common ground, and industrial farming finished the job of severing communities from the fields around them. Sitting below deck as swallows skimmed the water outside, Hayes suggested that one in six species in Britain now faces extinction, a fact he reads less as an ecological footnote than as evidence of a deeper, centuries-old estrangement.