In the 1870s, the Manchester Corporation Waterworks made plans to buy two small Cumbrian lakes, Wythburn Water and Leathes Water, and the land surrounding them. They wanted to build a reservoir. The city desperately needed access to clean water for its burgeoning industrial population. But the plan met with virulent opposition. Octavia Hill, later co-founder of the National Trust, set up the Thirlmere Defence Association. John Ruskin went so far as to say he thought Manchester itself ‘should be put at the bottom of the Lake of Thirlmere’.

The city won and Thirlmere Reservoir was built. But the controversy, Rebecca Smith writes in Rural, was ‘the first example of people mobilising against the threat of industrialisation to the natural world’. More than that, it illuminates the questions at the centre of her book, a thoughtful new study of working-class rural life. Who is the countryside for? What do we mean when we talk about ownership of land? Who gets to decide what is best for the land and those whose livings are tied up in it? For whose benefit is the landscape worked?

Behind the landscapes that we see lies the hidden labour that has gone into their making. Smith is alert to the fact that when we aestheticise the countryside we mistake natural beauty for something that has been largely shaped by human labour, and, because we define that beauty as