The Farmer and the Breadwinner are just back from a tour of the south and west of England's green and pleasant land. It was a most frustrating experience.

As you know, the Farmer likes to drive through the countryside "farming". That means looking at each farm on the way. Like most serious farmers, he has developed a style of driving which is alarming but doesn't often result in accidents. He looks to one side for a couple of seconds and then glances at the road for a split second on the way to appraising the fields on the other side.

What the Farmer likes best is to pour scorn on what he sees. That is why he likes to go touring and farming in England. For there is usually so much there upon which scorn can be heaped with justification.

It is "lovely" country. Little grassy hills and romantic stone-built cottages smothered in flowers. No fences or dykes or even what we call hedges. "Hedges" which we would call "banks" define their fields. Those are largely for protecting the fields from erosion and were the biggest cause of the Farmer's discomfiture.

The banks can be eight feet high. If you want to see anything, you have to stop the car, get out and climb.

It would be grand touring in a double-decker bus, but from a hired Mondeo the Farmer could hardly see a thing.

My father described this part of England as being overwhelmed by its very fertility.

And that's how the Farmer felt driving along in his little car. He was hemmed in by these great banks - and that wasn't all. Elder bushes and oak trees added depth to the trap from which the Farmer could hardly see the sky, let alone the fields.

Sometimes, where there was a straight bit of road and it dipped, it was possible to see a bit. There, the Farmer was gratified by many fields of buttercups where the leisure classes had polluted the fields with their horses. He was delighted by field after field of very thin oilseed rape.

On the other hand, the Farmer was horrified to see some really heavy crops of wheat. And that may be the way forward for the west of England. It has traditionally been a bit too wet for grain but now the breadbasket in England's east side is suffering from lack of water, and the dairy industry upon which the west has always depended is in such a state of rapid decline, that wheat looks good.

So, for farming, our six-day visit to England was disappointing and took on the sort of itinerary any non-farming tourist might have to embrace. We were particularly touched by two contrasting historical attractions, which we happened to pass and at which we deliberately stopped.

The first was Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill.

The palace was conceived as a gift from Queen Anne to Lord Marlborough in thanks for his victory over the French, though in fact John Churchill had to acquire Blenheim at his own expense.

And it is no wonder that the monarch got fed up as the bills flooded in. It must have been 20 times the effort of the Scottish Parliament and 100 times that of the Millennium Dome. In its scale and with its parklands and lakes, Blenheim is far more impressive than Buckingham Palace.

The second of our memorable stops came from the other side of our political and social history. We stopped at Tolpuddle, where, in the 1830s, six farmworkers achieved immortality.

The farm workers of Dorset had seen their meagre wages cut from 10 bob a week to seven, and when a further cut to six shillings loomed they formed a trade union to refuse to work for less than 10 bob. They were brave men, for they were taking on mighty landlords like the Churchills. And the landlords reacted with predictable viciousness.

The men had broken no law in refusing to work so they got them on a technicality. They had promised to stick together. This was characterised in court as swearing secret oaths, which was illegal under a neglected law.

The six men were sentenced to be transported to a penal colony in Australia.

It would have been a totally shameful part of our history had it not been for the campaign which ensued to bring the men home and to pardon them. As was pointed out by campaigners, all they had done that was illegal was to administer oaths and what about the Freemasons? They included members of the Royal family and the judiciary. Should they have suffered the same fate?

The Tolpuddle Martyrs were pardoned eventually, though only one settled again in Tolpuddle.

The Farmer stopped at the Martyrs' monument and accepted the invitation to sit and contemplate the bravery of the men who took on the 19th century establishment rather than starve their families at six shillings a week.