Wild Camping on Dartmoor

We sat on the wooden bench in the morning freshness putting on our hiking boots. They were made of leather; our rucksacks of canvas with leather straps, and our anoraks of faded cotton. The smell of leather and dubbin and rain-washed cotton and I’m there again, sixteen, maybe seventeen, with my friend Mac again on the bench outside Dunsford Youth Hostel. We had hitch-hiked down the A38 and spent the night in the hostel, with high hopes of Dartmoor adventure. We had not been there before except in our imaginations, fuelled with images of the bottomless Grimsmire and the Hound of the Baskervilles yowling in the fog. Now we were ramming our packed lunches in the side pockets of our rucksacks and heading off to the valley of the River Teign, never questioning our right to walk and camp in this National Park.

Maybe more by luck than careful planning, we had devised a route that would take us in the shade of ancient woodlands along a pristine river that would lead us to its source high on Dartmoor. From Dunsford to Gidleigh we passed Bridford Wood and Cod Wood, Boyland, Westacombe and Clifford Barton, Wooston Castle, Castle Drogo, Rushford Barton and Piddledown Common. We saw them on the map of the land high above us, wondering if such place-names could be anywhere but in Devon. The path beside the river crossed it now and then on foot bridges and stepping stones, and for maybe twenty miles we walked in the flickering shade of the ancient woodland trees growing on the steep sides of this river valley, way below the villages and out of sight. Wild garlic grew anywhere a freshet damped the bankside. Bluebells and sorrel and maybe saxifrages, a matrix of plants interlocked to create an ecosystem over the ages, jostling to share some of the green spring light filtered through the leaves. We saw dippers, wagtails and spotted flycatchers and we heard buzzards mewing overhead in a clear sky. Around us those Devon villages sat among their fields high above our valley, but as we walked gradually higher, mesmerised by the chuckling of the river water and the flittering of the light, the fields were giving way to the moors, and we emerged from our green tunnel to stay in a longhouse in a moorland village, part hostel and part byre, where a cow calving kept us awake half the night.

The path continued past the hostel in Gidleigh in the same wooded valley, and as the young Teign ran down off the moor we emerged into that ancient Dartmoor landscape where the map marked hut circles and cairns, prehistoric settlements and field systems. Now we had to navigate over empty moorland using our map and compass and our slightly hesitant mountain skills, to find a spot in the centre of the moor where we could pitch a tent, light a fire, cook sausages and watch the stars roll past. The feeling of freedom was only slightly tempered by nervousness of finding some mythological bottomless bog, getting lost  in the famous Dartmoor fog or being pinned down by a lashing rainstorm, sheltering behind some tor as the water soaked our anoraks. But the day was fine, sunny, breezy and there were other people out there hiking, enjoying the freedom of a new spring and the space and the delight of a body that will carry you all day among the larks and pipits, and the shaggy moorland sheep and Dartmoor ponies. Here was freedom for everyone who sought it, and fingerposts sometimes that tacitly acknowledged the right of access of all the people who might need a little help to enjoy it safely without getting lost.

My father used to tell us of similar adventures an exact generation before. One night he and some friends, little older that Mac and I, cadged a lift on a tramp steamer to Aberdeen to spend a week walking in the Cairngorms. They lay in their sleeping bags on the open deck, looking at the stars and wondering about the ineffability of life and the awesomeness of everything, as you do, when the stars began perceptibly to swivel. Even the moon was making a slow circle in the sky. The entire heavens were rotating above them. Or rather, the ship was turning in a great circle, carrying out a routine safety procedure known as ‘boxing the compass’. Somehow this experience set the tone for a great adventure for a few hard-up lads from a northern industrial city where the sun shone red through the air pollution even at the height of summer. It was life changing for all of them. They went on to become part of that generation of working class kids who poured out of industrial cities in the 1930s by bus or bike or on foot to claim their right to walk in the mountains and moorlands of the North of England and of Scotland. They joined the YHA and the CTC, and met future husbands and wives in the Labour League of Youth. They sang ‘I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday’. They would cycle all night after work on Saturday to get to the moors on Sunday morning, because they only had one day off. This was the generation that declared their right to the wide open spaces by defying the Duke of Devonshire’s keepers and trespassing on his grouse moors on Kinderscout. One of them went to Spain to fight Franco, another founded the Lyke Wake Walk that evokes a mythological journey to the afterlife over the ancient sacred landscape of the North York Moors.  Another became mayor of Cleveland. That we have some rights to footpaths and access to open spaces must be largely due to those of this generation of youngsters who survived being drafted into WW2 and came back when briefly we had a government dedicated to the welfare of the many, not the few, and a post war people demanding just a little more equality. After the war  the  Labour Party proposed the establishment of national parks as part of the post-war reconstruction of the UK, along with the building of affordable ‘homes for heroes’, a free national health service and nationalisation of planning gain, which paid for the new towns built after the war.

Mac and I, the beneficiaries of my father’s generation of fell walkers, found a sheltered spot to camp and to cook a meal, frying sausages and balancing a pan of water on the fire long enough to make some tea. We kept the fire going as long as we could find enough dead gorse, and then sat around the embers looking at the stars. We were in the centre of a huge open space with not a light to be seen. The wind blew through the grasses and the heather, and all around were the stone alignments and hut circles of people who had lived thousands of years before us, sitting round their fires too, listening maybe to wolves howling. Something happens when you are under the stars in wild places, whether out at sea on a tramp steamer or in the moorland, and suddenly you are struck with the extraordinary realisation that you are alive and that this night will never return, flying off behind you to join all those nights when Iron Age farmers sat around wondering if building a stone circle might express their sense of the ineffability of being alive. Whatever you call this, you are more likely by a country mile to feel it and be moved by it and to reassess your life in the light of it when you are wild camping on Dartmoor than on those expeditions when you nip out for a kebab or drive to Milton Keynes.

 We were of course on private land. The part of the moor that is the actual Forest of Dartmoor is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which really ought to mean it belongs to us. Water companies own some of greater Dartmoor – which meant then that it belonged to us, though it has been since sold off and privatised. The Ministry of Defence owns 14% of the National Park, which again means, or ought to mean, that it belongs to us, since even the Tories have not yet got around to privatising the army. The Forestry Commission owns some, which should also mean it belongs to us. In 2010 the Cameron government tried to privatise the Commission and was so shocked by the public response that it backed off. The National Trust also owns some, as does the national park authority. More than a third of Dartmoor is also common land, which means that those who own it have limited rights because local farmers have ancient grazing and other common rights that go back, almost certainly, to prehistoric times. This is owned land but it has been owned with the lightest of hands, effectively open to the public.

Until recently, when a hedge-fund oligarch bought 4,000 acres or so of land in the National Park. Landowners always seek to monetize* their land, and this oligarch, made rich by monetizing the wealth funds of the ultra-rich, was keen to make more money by charging for pheasant shooting, deer hunting, and enjoying the outdoors – if you were prepared to pay to stay in his lodges or his pods or glamping or whatever he was flogging. Historically it has been hard for landowners to monetize the uplands because of the grazing rights of the local farmers, and no one had minded the likes of me and Mac camping on the moor and coming up against the sheer ineffability of life. Those hikers of the 30s had been fighting for just those possibilities and the welfare state visionaries had hopes that such freedoms and spiritual experiences might be available to a whole generation of people hoping to be a little more than wage slaves. And suddenly the hedge-fund man is trying to ban wild camping on the moors, so that people are more likely to pay for his facilities. You are not to be completely banned from having a life-changing spiritual experience under the ineffable eternal starlight out on the moor, but he wants you to have it, if that is possible, in one of his glamping pods, and to pay him for the privilege.

And so Dartmoor is suddenly at the centre of a controversy that encapsulates many of the issues that divide the seemingly quiet countryside of the UK. Two hundred years after a previous generation of landowners organised the enclosures and claimed exclusive rights to monetize the common land from which they had legislated to exclude the peasants, the process was being repeated on Dartmoor. Previous landowners hadn’t bothered because the land wasn’t worth much and they couldn’t see how to monetize it. But now a new generation was becoming interested in these wild places. Some wanted to let the moor rewild, to encourage nature in a neglected corner of a nature depleted country. Some thought that it could be monetized through carbon storage, through woodland creation, or by being paid for using it to compensate for damage to biodiversity caused by developers. Some wanted to let it be, as a historic landscape of heath and moor created by the Neolithic farmers who had destroyed the forests and the sheep farmers who had prevented the forests regenerating. Some wanted the return of the Atlantic Rainforest, of which a couple of scraps remain on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, or, if you are a hopeful republican, owned by us.

This is a complex business, and the hedge-fund man may not be equipped to deal with it. After all, to be a hedge-fund man and grow rich managing the funds of the obscenely rich is probably no more complex than being asked to look after someone’s wine cellar and drinking half the wine. So he has gone after the softest target, a few people wild camping on the moor. Not easy to monetize that extraordinary experience of confronting under the stars just how exhilaratingly terrifying it is to be, briefly, alive.  The first step was to get the wild camping banned so that he could charge for the experience. Wild camping had been assumed to be allowed under the Dartmoor Commons Act of 1985, making Dartmoor the only place in England where such an activity was allowed without requiring permission from a landowner. The landowner’s lawyers’ argument was that sleeping in a tent was not an activity, but rather a lack of activity and as such not allowed; an extraordinary argument, which might imply that it was a legal activity to pitch the tent and get into your sleeping bag, but illegal because not an activity as soon as you fell asleep. The judge agreed with this strange argument, but the National Park Authority had that decision reversed by a higher court. Now the landowner is going to the Supreme Court, so keen is he that there shall be nowhere left in England or Wales where you can camp without the permission of a landowner. It is to be hoped that he will lose, and lose expensively, but it says a lot about the UK that we are still, nearly a hundred years after the Kinderscout Trespass, having this shred of freedom attacked by a grasping landowner, and that none of the other National Parks ever followed the example of the Dartmoor Commons Act .

In 2023 the campaign group The Stars Are For Everyone said: “The loss of our rights on Dartmoor ignited a passionate movement for greater land rights in England”.

Two hundred years earlier the poet John Clare, lamenting the ‘enclosure’ of the open fields and commons in his native village by another grasping landowner, wrote:

“These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall

Is laid upon them and destroyed them all

Each little tyrant with his little sign

Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine

But paths to freedom and to childhood dear

A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here”

* A reader suggested I had used the word ‘monetize’ a bit too often and should edit it a little, but I left it as it was in order to leave you in no doubt that I believe that one of the ills of our culture is the way we grant the powerful the absolute right to own the landscape in order to make money out of it. Or rather, we have allowed them to award themselves that right. As a colonialist power the English have spread this doctrine to parts of the world where the indigenous peoples no more thought of owning the land than of owning the wind.