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Access to
the countryside
The centuries-long
battle waged by Britons for the right to roam over the hills and vales of their
island by Marion Shoard
One way in
which our new millennium looks like being different from the last is that our
countryside - or at least a large part of it - may be opened to everyone. For
much of the last thousand years we have been shut out of most of our own land.
North of the Border, the Scottish Executive is shortly to publish a Bill to create
a right of public access in principle to all land and water. South of the Border,
the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill seeks to introduce a 'right to roam' over
moorland and other kinds of open country in England and Wales, although this may
be shelved for the time being through pressure of parliamentary time. Both measures
provide for exemptions to safeguard privacy, wildlife and to reduce conflict with
land management operations.
Supporters like to present these reforms as
a revolutionary transformation of the balance of power between landowners and
landless. So indeed they are, but they certainly have not come out of the blue.
Far from being dreamt up overnight by some New Labour spin doctor in response
to novel pressures, they are the product of a long and complex struggle which
has been simmering quietly in our countryside for nigh on a thousand years.
Excluding
the Public- From The Normans to the 21st CenturyIt was Britain's most dramatic
ever act of land reform - the Norman Conquest in 1066 - which paved the way for
the laws of trespass which were to restrain the movement of people in the countryside.
William the Conqueror, unlike the Romans, expropriated the indigenous population,
and handed land as property to his barons. The barons and the king began the process
of exclusion by shutting people out of new deer parks which they opened to indulge
their passion for hunting and to provide venison. Soon nearly 2,000 of these parks,
ranging in size from fifty to several thousand acres, existed in England and Wales.
Vast areas elsewhere were made into royal hunting forests and private hunting
chases devoted exclusively to hunting by the privileged. Denying access to the
whole of these was not practicable, but severe restrictions were imposed on activities
such as tree-felling, the gathering of underwood, the cultivation of rough land
and, of course, poaching.
Then, from the mid-fifteenth century, farmland
started to be shut off, through the process of enclosure or the abolition of communal
arrangements over land. Before this happened, people used to be able to move freely
along grassy areas between strips in the open fields, along streams, in woods
and over uncultivated, rough land. But as new barriers went up in the countryside,
ordinary people found themselves increasingly restricted to certain roads and
paths. Woodland also came to be enclosed as energetically as fields. The reason
was the same in each case - profit. Landowners benefiting from enclosure wanted
to ensure they kept both wild and cultivated produce for themselves, without local
people taking a share. At the time much woodland was subjected to coppicing, that
is, the trees were cut back to the stumps so that many evenly sized poles would
grow up from them; these poles could be easily harvested and put to many different
lucrative uses. Hemming in woods with barriers helped prevent theft from the piles
of easily removable poles and kept out browsing domestic animals which might have
prevented new growth by nibbling the stumps. The process of enclosure enabled
landowners to turn land from which all had benefited into private fiefdoms, enforced
by physical obstructions. Banks, ditches, hedges and palisades sprang up around
countless fields and woods. An old tradition that anybody could walk freely in
many woods to gather mushrooms, nuts and firewood went by the board.
In
the nineteenth century, the market for home timber products collapsed, but landowners
found a new reason for keeping people out of their woods. They turned them from
timber factories to preserves for pheasant shooting. Preventing poaching and creating
privacy for indulgence in an exclusive activity now became their reasons for excluding
their fellow citizens. New game laws restricted shooting to wealthy landowners
or prosperous townsmen who could find money for a game certificate. Fences and
hedges were backed up with more ingenious devices like alarm guns and man traps.
Meanwhile, a similar fate to that of the pheasant woods of lowland Britain
was befalling vast areas of open country in the uplands. Already enclosure for
sheep rearing had transformed vast stretches, but in the 1880s lamb from Australasia
had begun to slash profits from sheep, and landowners turned instead to sport
for profit and for pleasure. In the drier uplands of the eastern Highlands and
the Pennines grouse shooting became established, while in the western Highlands
and the Scottish Islands deer stalking came to acquire enormous cachet after Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert bestowed their approval on the sport by purchasing
Balmoral. Anxious to ensure that the deer stalking, grouse shooting or game fishing
they offered was as exclusive as possible, as well as to prevent poaching, landowners
excluded ordinary people from vast tracts of what had now become rich men's playgrounds,
and policed their holdings with numerous estate workers.
During the twentieth
century, the landowners' right to exclude remained, though their ability to uphold
it by employing staff on the ground declined and they had to tolerate trespass
in many areas. More accessible land came into existence as local authorities created
country parks and the National Trust and some public owners like the Forestry
Commission invited the public in to more and more of their properties. On the
other hand, however, new restrictions on informal access resulted from the continuing
intensification and expansion of agriculture, more pheasant shooting and the sale
of some state-owned access land with the privatisations of the Thatcher era. Some
landowners also decided to try to profit from their right to exclude by charging
others to set foot on land through 'turnstiles on the trails'. In lowland Britain
in particular much land is still very private - perhaps most of all the often
expansive country parklands which successful landowners established in the eighteenth
century to enhance their status and to create a pastoral sanctuary from the cares
of the world usually behind high encircling walls. These parklands were thus essentially
private spaces, to be enjoyed by the privileged in the confidence that their enjoyment
would be exclusive. In the main they still are. Only seven of the fifty-nine country
parklands of Hampshire, for instance, are open to the public, and of those that
are, many are open only for limited periods on payment of a fee.
Resisting
ExclusionThe exclusion of the people of Britain from most of their countryside
was, however, never simply accepted. From the beginning people resisted the idea
that the land itself and the bounty of the earth including wild creatures should
be treated as property to be used according to the whim of its owner, without
the rest of the population having any say.
Two popular movements which
failed to overthrow the regime of the day nonetheless bequeathed thinking about
land which persisted underground for centuries. Both the leaders of the Peasants'
Revolt of 1381 and the Diggers' movement of the mid-seventeenth century were inspired
by the Christian doctrine of the equality of people in the sight of God. The peasants'
demands for land reform were actually quite modest: the replacement of feudal
dues with a money rent and a fundamental change in the law on wild animals so
that everyone would be entitled to take all fish and game. The Diggers went further.
In the mid-1660s vast stretches of land were being devoted to game rearing while
the landless went hungry. To make matters even worse, landowners turned over land
which they were prepared to farm not to corn, which could have ensured a low price
for a basic foodstuff, but to more profitable activities like sheep rearing. The
Diggers believed that the private appropriation of land lay at the root of the
problem and refused to recognise any moral right on the part of landowners to
manage the land according to their own preference or indeed to own absolutely
land at all, holding that, since the land had been seized by force by the Normans,
what landowners were 'owning' was essentially stolen property. Their leader Gerrard
Winstanley declared, 'The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to the
land as the richest man'. He believed God had vouchsafed that 'The earth shall
be made a common treasury to whole mankind, without respect of persons'.
Two
centuries later a very different form of public preoccupation with the countryside
was beginning to emerge. When William Wordsworth bid his sister Dorothy, 'And
bring no book: for this one day / We'll give to idleness', he was proposing something
which would have seemed bizarre to earlier generations - the idea of going for
a walk in the countryside simply to relax yourself and to commune with your Maker.
But this idea was catching on as the countryside was coming to be seen as a romantic
haven from the pressures of the Industrial Revolution. The growing middle and
working classes of Britain's burgeoning towns and cities became increasingly eager
to spend their free time in countryside. Round the cities, however, such open
land as existed was disappearing rapidly as landowners made fortunes from selling
it for building. A few major commons which had survived around London became increasingly
important for recreation - Epping Forest, Hampstead Heath and Wimbledon and Putney
Commons in particular. As the owners of these spaces tried to develop them, lawyers
and other middle-class people fought them in the courts. Their campaigning succeeded
and eventually resulted in an Act of Parliament in 1925 which gave all citizens
the right to walk over all remaining stretches of common land in urban and metropolitan
areas.
Fighting For The Right To RoamScotland was the first part
of Britain to see calls for a legal right to roam more generally. The MP for Tower
Hamlets, James Bryce, a polymathic lawyer, politician, mountaineer, botanist and
historian, had participated in the campaigns to provide for the outdoor recreation
needs of his London constituents, but, revisiting his native Scotland, he was
appalled by the way in which ordinary people were excluded from vast deer forests,
fishing beats and grouse moors. He decided that radical action was needed and
advanced a private member's bill first in 1884 and then many times afterwards
which would have overturned the law of trespass on uncultivated upland in Scotland
and replaced it with a new legal right for any person to be present. Bryce worked
out many of the details of how such a right to roam could operate on the ground,
which are reflected in the legislation being enacted today. But neither he nor
his brother Annan, who took up the fight in the Commons on Bryce's appointment
as ambassador to the United States, succeeded in getting anything on to the statute
book.
So the struggle became physical. The Peak District moorland between
Sheffield and Manchester was once freely accessible but by the 1920s it had been
closed off for public access in the interests of grouse shooting and water gathering.
Working people in the nearby industrial towns eager to go walking eyed it enviously,
but public paths over these remote and rugged areas were few and far between.
In 1932 members of a group called the Workers' Sports Federation led a mass trespass
over the sides of a wild, gritstone plateau called Kinder Scout. It led to pitched
battles between ramblers and gamekeepers resulting in injuries. Six of the ringleaders
went to prison for terms of up to six months. Rallies and annual demonstrations
followed, both in the Peak District and elsewhere, and the government felt obliged
to do something, passing legislation on access to the countryside in 1939 and
again in 1949.
However, the new measures proved woefully inadequate. Access
agreements, for example, introduced in the 1949 Act, now cover less than half
of one per cent of the land surface. And by the 1980s the world had changed in
ways which made continuing exclusion of the people from the countryside no longer
acceptable. Rising prosperity coupled with renewed interest in the environment
had made visiting the countryside for recreation an ever more widespread passion.
In particular, the idea of rights, which had overtaken other areas of policy,
infected thinking on the countryside. Eight hundred years earlier the landowning
barons who spearheaded Magna Carta had seen the creation of rights as the obvious
means of eroding the power of the king. When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the idea of rights for ordinary people gained currency, the idea of a right of
access to the countryside, as would have been embodied in Bryce's legislation,
seemed as natural as any. H.G. Wells, writing in The Times in 1939 on the subject
'The Rights of Man', declared,
'Every man, without distinction of race
or colour, is entitled to nourishment, housing, covering, medical care and attention,
employment and … the right to roam over any kind of country, moorland, mountain,
farm, great garden or what not, where his presence will not be destructive of
its special use, nor dangerous to himself nor seriously inconvenient to his fellow
citizens.'
Scotland's Model FreedomBy the late twentieth century
a right to roam was being widely urged. The Ramblers' Association insisted that
more land needed to be opened up to cater for walkers' needs. This organisation
was formed in the north of England and its great strength has always lain there.
As a result the group focused its efforts on securing access to moors like those
of Lancashire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and the Bill creating access to the countryside
of England and Wales reflects this, providing access only to mountain, moor, heath,
down and common land. This might have satisfied James Bryce but it would not have
satisfied the Diggers, who questioned the very idea that landowners' powers over
their holdings should be absolute. H.G. Wells too would probably prefer the arrangements
now planned for Scotland, where there is much more awareness of past struggles
over land than there is south of the Border. Abroad, Germany, Switzerland and
Norway all passed new laws in the twentieth century extending rights of access
to the countryside more widely than is now proposed for England and Wales.
For many Scots, a right to roam involves taking back rights claimed by usurping
landowners during the Clearances, to which Scots believe these landowners were
never really entitled. The right to be on the hills is deep-rooted in Scottish
tradition. Although some Scottish landowners keep others off their land, many
ordinary Scots challenge both the morality and the legality of such action. The
Scottish Parliament intends to provide everybody with the right to walk anywhere
that their presence will do no harm. The history of this topic will perhaps only
be complete when England and Wales move on from the proposals of the Countryside
and Rights of Way Bill which, if enacted, would affect ten per cent of that land
surface, to match the universalist right to roam which seems set to take root
in Scotland.
Marion Shoard is the author of This
Land is Our Land (Gaia Books, 1997) and A
Right to Roam (Oxford University Press,1999). ©
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