I was out walking with my new gun dogs, Bessy and Katie. Bessy is a springer and never still, she’ll be excellent for a bit of rough shooting working her way down a hedge, but far too impatient for grouse or pheasant on a formal shoot. Katie on the other hand is a retriever and as solid as a rock, but today we’re just out for the exercise and to get used to each other. Both were calm because there was no gun, so they knew they weren’t working. Alan their previous owner was a friend of mine and his widow kept the dogs for me because he said before he died that’s what he wanted. I haven’t seen them since they were pups, but they seem to regard me as an old friend. Probably the smell of gun oil on my jacket helps.

We stopped for a bite and after I gave the dogs a ham sandwich each, I’d made two just for them, I used the binoculars. I could see a track laying back actor machine on the moorland on the other side of the valley which seemed to be installing anti rain run offs to raise the water table and reinstate the wetland, they’re doing that on Skidaw in Cumbria as well as all over the Highlands of Scotland.

There are grouse in the distance. They probably don’t realise the grouse will disappear as the sphagnum swells and holds more water. They probably think they can have the best of all worlds, or they don’t think at all.

The raptor over head is not a peregrine, probably a goshawk from the flight pattern. Gossies are like sparrow hawks with an attitude problem on steroids, but I love them. I hunt with peregrines at home. There are too many raptors here in the UK. To have a top of the food chain predator dominating the landscape is unsustainable. Raptors are everywhere now in Britain due to the legislation protecting them and the well intentioned idiots feeding them. They will have to continue feeding them or thousands will die as the land is now carrying far more than it will support. Breeding sites are at such a premium now that the competition for them is becoming deadly, so unfortunately thousands of raptors will die even if they do keep feeding them.

At home such matters are controlled by us, the landowners, and we understand the differences between conservation and preservation. Put in a nutshell, if you’ll pardon the irresistible phrase, conservationists maintain a healthy population of squirrels, their food supply and their predators. Preservationist would save every last squirrel till they all starved to death because their food supply was exhausted. Juan says they’d preserve them in olive oil in jars.

That’s what happens when you give a city kid a degree in conservation, and then the authority to control a landscape, a kid whose only experience of wildlife is the ducks in the local park. A friend told me in her letter a few months ago that the newly appointed local small mammal officer for the national park she lives in had admitted to her that he’d never laid eyes on a pygmy shrew. She told him her cats bought in half a dozen a week. These bits of kids with the ink still wet on their qualifications just don’t understand death is part of a bigger picture and letting all the weaklings breed is doing neither their species nor any other any favours.

In my book the principle should be applied to people too. There are all too few like me. When I was pregnant with my first, the test shewed I was carrying a Downs syndrome. I wanted a termination, but the quack said it was too late to abort, I’d have to have it. By the time I discovered he was wrong it was too late. 'Fine, I’ll put it up for adoption,' I told them. When asked why I think my reasoning shocked them. I told them, ‘You are the ones who won’t let me get rid of it so you arrange for it to be looked after, housed and kept, or let someone else put themself into penury for something that will never contribute to society, because I’m damned if you’re forcing me into any of those things, and I wouldn’t consider it if I lived with a man either.’ They expected me to make provision for its care. Folly. I’d had it with the NHS, so I was delivered at home by a obstetrician paid by me, and there was an incubator and an ambulance ready to take it away. I never laid eyes on it. I’d inherited the family home and estate, and the government had forced me to sell the lot as a result of death duties. I wasn’t poverty stricken, and I’d no intention of becoming so. Twenty-two million the government had taken, surely to god they can take care of the matter with that?

Two weeks after giving birth I moved to Patagonia. All had been ready for months, all that I wanted to take with me including all my financial assets had been transferred weeks before. I met Juan at a shoot not long after moving, and we were married six weeks later. Between us we bought what would be half a county in England, and we look after it. We built a huge property, sixty-two suits of rooms beside the family wing and the estate workers' rooms, and the shoots pay for all. It functions like a hotel, but looks and feels like a private country mansion. It’s so popular that folk come to shoot from all over the world, and we need more room, but Juan thinks to extend the property would detract from its appeal, so we are building another property half as big again thirty miles away, but it’s still on the estate. The farm land is in excellent heart, getting better every year, and every year it provides more employment than the last.

My old home has fallen into disrepair, and is shortly to be demolished. The land is no longer looked after properly. Half the topsoil has disappeared, blown away as dust, and the rest will be gone soon. The tree huggers stopped the raising of game which was what paid for the estate maintenance and provided work for thirty odd full time staff and hundreds of part timers. No one works there now. Where once the dung and bedding straw from the dairy herds nourished the land, now only artificial fertilisers are applied by huge tractors operated by contractors. The cows are gone, apparently they didn’t provide enough dividends for the shareholders. The humus has gone from the soil, and every year more artificial fertiliser has to be applied to get a lesser crop than the year before. But what do I know? My family had only been at it eight hundred years.

I’m only back to pick up Bessie and Katie and a couple of good Clumber pups. We’re all flying back tonight before anyone realises I’ve been here. Juan and four beautiful healthy children are awaiting me back home. Brutal? Maybe, but that’s the reality I live with. Just at the moment I’m three months pregnant with a healthy daughter. But if there had been anything wrong with it I'd have terminated the pregnancy and tried again. Juan and I are shooting for six and next time will be just the same. I’m not telling anyone else how to live, but I’ll be damned before I let anyone tell me how to live either.

After this trip I can’t see me ever returning. It’s too depressing, and anyway we’ve got enough quality dogs to breed our own now. The best way to improve your stock is line breeding from the best, but of course that concentrates poor traits as well as good ones. No problem. You just have to cull any inferior stock. The best thing I ever did was get the hell out of Britain. Like I said, There are too many raptors. They’re dominating the landscape and the political landscape too. They're running the bloody country too, right down into the ground, and they all need regular handouts to survive too, but they’ve already had more than their pound of flesh from me.