Right to Roam

'Specially people with Beards!'

My parents were the sort of people who might well have taken part in the Kinder Scout trespass. They were keen ramblers and cyclists and members of the Labour League of Youth and the surprisingly radical Cyclists Touring Club, and they were in the area, but I’m not able to ask them now why they weren’t part of the trespass. But when the anniversary of the Kinderscout Trespass came round I remembered them, partly because I’d had a week for trespassing myself.

As a child I walked all over the countryside and was rarely challenged, because people knew who I was - unless I went in the Big Wood where they kept the pheasants. Then as in the past the laws of trespass had much to do with preserving game. Later, while I lived in Sweden, I was able to walk everywhere, because there the law states that you can walk where you like so long as you don’t trample standing crops or enter people’s gardens.  You can pick mushrooms and berries too.

So the situation in England in particular is very irksome to me, knowing as I do that such a fierce defence of property as we have here does not happen everywhere, and knowing that the trespass laws were contemporary with the laws that hung sheep stealers. Whatever happened the aristocracy were determined to hang on to their exclusive enjoyment of their property, and not too much has changed since, except the life-expectancy of sheep stealers.

So in the week of the anniversary of the assertion of a right to roam on Kinderscout, I parked by the side of a road in the Wye Valley. I hadn’t been there very long when the farmer, who was cultivating a field alongside the road, stopped, got out, and after pretending to need to kick a few clods into the hedge, asked me what I was doing. I told him I was parked on the public highway and what was that to him? ‘Well, so long as you’re not snooping’, he said. It reminded me of being stopped on a walk once by a village bobby. We had a similar conversation, except that he had the last word, saying “We like to know who’s around the place … specially people with beards!”

Which highlights one of the advantages of the trespass laws for the farmer or landowner. If they can keep you off their land you are less likely to find evidence of illegal poisoning of raptors, or grubbing out of hedges. If there are footpaths you can have a little access, but often, as in my next-door parish, there are almost no footpaths whatever. The farmer to the east of me has not one single footpath on his land, and the story is that his dad packed the parish council meeting when the consultations on the footpath maps were being held, and everyone agreed with him that there had never been any footpaths on the farm, although they are clearly shown on earlier maps.

I happen to believe that we should all have access to the countryside, as of right. The right to economically exploit a piece of land should be enough, too much already, without also being able to keep everyone else off. There is a good case for the rest of us having some influence over how land is managed. After all, it is our planet too, and our children are going to need it to be looked after a bit better than the farmers have been doing. We are in the 10% of countries with the worst loss of biodiversity, and farmers have questions to answer.

Bob, my farmer neighbour to the east, has bought two large parcels of land to enlarge his farm in the last 20 years.

In the years from 2000 to 2009 he appears to have been regularly being paid huge sums of money in subsidies, with the sum of 753,423 euros recorded almost every year. He has probably had similar payments every year since too, because the subsidies are still being paid on the same basis.  I haven’t been able to trace them since 2009. I had to go on a German website to get information because on the UK sites it is almost impossible to find out about the income tax that you have passed on to your rich neighbours. This money – the European single payment scheme – paid landowners for owning land. The land had to be kept in farmable condition, but not necessarily farmed, and I sometimes wonder why they bothered to farm it when we paid them just for owning it. You could argue that the fact that you got paid for owning land might well have pushed the value up. You could also argue that having to keep it in ‘farmable condition’ led to many nature-rich patches of bushes being cleared. You could also argue – and frankly this whole business makes me feel argumentative - that the money my neighbour has been given by us, the taxpayers, has enabled him to buy that extra land, but this has not been accompanied by us being given any right to enjoy the farmland we have in effect given him. Note too that the more land he acquires the larger his subsidies become, providing more leverage with which to buy yet more land.

This same man came up to me the other day and said I was never ever to go on his land. My offence? Someone had spotted me on his land and reported it to him. His logic seemed to be that he would not have had to bar me, if I hadn’t had the cheek to walk on a track that he thought belonged to him. I might have been allowed to go on his land, he seemed to be saying, if I hadn’t blown it by …going on his land.

A couple of weeks ago I went walking in an area of deciduous forest, where there is a path through ancient woodland that loops back and runs across two long meadows or ‘launds’ with woodland on either side. Since I was last there someone with enough money and influence to build an ostentatious house where no house should be has also acquired those two fields, with the footpath running through the middle. To make sure that walkers stick to the path he (I guess it’s a he – a woman would be unlikely to be such a knob) has erected high fences closely along both sides of the path, to make sure no-one else steps on his meadows.

So it was a delight to be in the Forest of Dean at the weekend. When I was a boy I went to school with boys from the forest, which had the reputation of being a place where the locals had what you might, if you were being polite, call a ruggedly independent spirit. The forest had been an industrial area, with iron workings, steam mills and mines, and several of my mates had dads who worked in some of the six remaining coal mines. And yet, having been a royal forest once prized for its wild boar and its shipbuilding timber, it was still heavily wooded.  It covers an area of 110 square kilometres, with almost no farms and little sign of posh houses or estates, and hamlets of cottages tucked in among the forest.  There are no pheasants, and no signs telling you not to trespass, and as far as I can tell you can walk pretty much wherever you want, and it is as close to being public lands as you get in this country, in spite of the state Forestry Commission having been re-invented as Forest Enterprise. This re-invention did not go as well as Cameron’s government intended, as the public made it very clear that they cherished places like this and did not want them being sold off to private enterprise, and the situation now, in effect, is that Forest Enterprise looks after the forest as if it was a precious national forest dedicated to recreation and wildlife conservation. I guess they fell some trees now and then, just to keep their hands in, but It is in effect a huge informal nature reserve.

We walked through sunny woodlands of oak with scatterings of pine and birch and alder, and rich woodland vegetation. There were white dog roses, and several kinds of ferns I’ve never seen before, and a sparse cover of bracken where the early bluebells were subsiding.  And below us in the brook there were beavers. Admittedly there was a fence between us, which detracted a bit from any sense of wilderness. These beavers are on probation, tasked to show that they can stop the flooding of the village down the valley, by building dams that hold the rainwater and slow the floods. But they are there, and no one doubts that at some point they will be able to roam free and work their environmental wonders elsewhere in the forest. At least partly because there are no farmers, who tend to object. I realised that my raised spirit in these forests was caused partly by there being no fields. No land where some individual who had got his hands on the deeds was applying fertilisers and sprays, and for subsidies, making himself some money. (Yes, I know we need food, but we need forests too.)  This was land free from individual exploitation, land that was in some senses collective, public land, protected land. And it got better. As we circled the beaver enclosure there were steep paths coming down through the bushes and onto the track. These were not the delicate paths of high-stepping deer, they were made by wild boar, rushing down in wild piggy fashion, bashing down the bracken as they came.

Here were two animals that had been extinct in the UK for hundreds of years. And in the forest, quietly being covered by leaf mould and young birches, were sites where wagons were once loaded with coal and stone, and great ponds rich with waterfowl, that had been dammed to water the steam engines that drained Cannop Colliery. The Forest of Dean is quietly and undramatically rewilding itself, and no-one, apart from a few people royally pissed off if wild boar rootle in their lawns, seems to have a problem with it.