THE Ministry of Defence military lands include many of our best and most intact wild places.

Now hold on! I’m no friend of the armed forces. Let me illustrate.

It’s near midsummer, and dusk is far advanced. I clamber over the gate and make my way along the forest track, accompanied by the soft descending song of willow warblers and the faint calling of a cuckoo from across the wooded valley.

I find my spot, with a high, open view and the wood edge close by. The bird song quietens and a couple of pipistrelle bats start circling next to the trees.

I hear the soft grunting of the “roding” woodcock first, then see it as it sculls above the trees tops and away across the valley, against the apricot sunset.

Over the next hour four more patrolling woodcock pass over. These are now-rare breeding woodcock, not the more frequent birds down from the frozen north, that we find in wet winter woods.

After 90 minutes the darkness is complete and I make my way back along the track. A glow worm glints in the grass, and close-by a nightjar breaks into loud churring, like an engine starting.

I've been on army land the whole time.  

That scene of delightful naturalness only shows half the picture. Next to the wonderful  stretches of military heathland in Surrey — Woolmer Forest, Bramshott and Hankley Commons, Eelmoor, Pirbright, Cleygate — are the sprawling semi-military conurbations of Bordon, Aldershot, Farnborough and Sandhurst.

And next to the stretching wildness of Salisbury Plain are the ever-expanding “camps” of Larkhill, Bulford, Tidworth and Boscombe.

Where the military are concerned, naturalness sits alongside mess, damage, fences, toxic wastes, warning signs and built-up sprawl.

Yet the naturalness is very real.

It is a hot, still day in early August as I trudge down the rough track that transects Salisbury Plain’s high plateau. Grassland and low scrub fill my view in every direction. It feels completely out of time to be here. Like being back on Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath. I scan the horizon for groups of great bustard, the mega-fauna of this Plain, now returned after an absence of nearly 200 years. They're not on this part today, but no matter.

In an old army hut I find a swallow’s nest with five warm eggs. A grasshopper warbler reels away in the tall grass and bramble, and amongst the knapweed flowers are species of bumble bees that are almost lost from my own countryside.

The wildflowers here are in such splendour, compared to the tatty morsels that survive on my own Downs — great swarms of blue viper's bugloss, mauve saw wort, white wild carrot and egg-yellow dyer's greenweed, with little harebells at my feet.

I stop on the Black Heath, and watch an agitated whinchat — “yeo, tick, tick” — that plainly has a nest nearby. As I turn back I see a dust column on the horizon that moves slowly towards me, resolving itself into a giant whirling cloud of flying ants all around me in their multi-millions.

Such plenty!!!

Yet beyond the skirts of the MoD estate the rest of Salisbury Plain is dominated by vast cereal fields and loose gridded modern shelter belts. Wildlife has no place there.

Why are there such black and white contrasts between the biodiverse military training lands and the farmed landscape? The answer is simple. The MoD estate is free from the imperatives of commercial exploitation. It lies outside the immediate purlieu of the capitalist economy, which treats all land as a “factory floor,” to be simplified and modified to maximise returns.

If the plains and heaths and moors of the MoD lands had been subject to commercial imperatives as most of our countryside has, they would have lost their wildness many years ago.

Instead the estate operates according to the political imperatives of our bourgeois state. On those training lands troops tested their munitions, machines and tactics for cold war confrontation and imperialist wars in the poor world.

In the post-war period woods were planted on Salisbury Plain to better mimic the landscapes of the “iron curtain” in central Europe. With the end of the cold war some of those woods have gone. Mock-up housing estates were built to train troops in door to door fighting, such as they inflicted on Derry and Belfast, and later Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nature survives on the MoD estate not because of any primary intention of our ruling class, but because the military lands are needed to serve the political imperatives of imperialism. Nature survives because capitalism doesn’t need to destroy it there — yet.

It survives outside the gaze of us ordinary folk, in the interstices of capitalist Britain. Twenty-five years ago a large team of plant ecologists completed a 15-year task of describing the multitude of vegetation communities in Britain. The result was called the National Vegetation Classification (NVC).

The descriptions of grassland covered many categories and sub-categories. Yet when the ecologists later had the opportunity to study the Salisbury Plain grasslands they didn’t fit any of their published categories.

The secrecy of the MoD had made the ecologists miss a whole vegetation community — indeed a vegetation type which survived at a landscape scale, found nowhere else in Britain.

Overall the MoD own, lease or use some 1.1 million acres of land in the UK. They own 505,000 acres of that, of which about 78 per cent is in England.

The Ministry of Defence, however, use a lot more than they own. Huge areas of Kielder Forest, Thetford Forest (both Forestry Commission) and Dartmoor (Duchy of Cornwall) are used by the military. And the MoD has huge training lands abroad, as in Belize, where it trains on nearly a million acres.

Currently the MoD is committed to sell off 10 per cent of its sites by 2040, though the Ukraine war may alter that.

Wild nature on the MoD estate is no more secure than it is anywhere else under capitalism. Its preservation is not the priority for its military managers.

We must fear for the bustards and whinchat, the harebells and bumblebees.

Dave Bangs is an eco-socialist who migrated to King’s Cross, then back to Brighton 26 years later. He has trespassed all his life. His first direct action was aged 11 when he nicked some bags of sugar and put them in the tank of a bulldozer on some precious Downland being built on. He’s won some battles against council housing “stock transfer” (privatisation) and the privatisation of council Downland. He’s lost loads more. Notes from a Free Walker is a new monthly column, to appear on the second weekend of the month. Keep an eye out for the next one on September 9.