Right to roam would be the end of the British countryside
Kate Humble has broken ranks. Usually BBC presenters can be expected to take a woke stance on any subject, but speaking at the Hay Festival she has dared to come out against the right to roam. This is inflammatory stuff.
Since the mass trespass movement of the 1930s, the idea that the world at large should have unfettered access to the land, whoever owns it, has been a key tenet of socialist ideology. Given that the predicted Starmer government won’t have much to spend because of the dire state of the public finances, this is just the sort of legislation he might be tempted to enact. But Humble’s right. However attractive it might sound in principle, we don’t need it and – as experience already shows in Scotland – it doesn’t work.
Conditions are different from the legendary Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932. Then, hundreds of young men and women, “in picturesque rambling gear” and “shorts of every length and colour”, according to its organiser Ben Rothman, stormed the Duke of Devonshire’s grousemoor at Kinder Scout, in Derbyshire. They came from the surrounding industrial centres like Manchester and Sheffield, incensed that so much inviting open space on their own doorstep should be owned by one man and used for an exclusive sport. There were clashes with the police and half a dozen arrests. Since 1951, however, Kinder Scout has been part of the Peak District National Park, and free to visit as, in tourist board jargon, “a walker’s paradise”.
There are now 15 National Parks in the UK, with 3,300km of public rights of way in the most recent of them, the South Downs National Park, created in 2010. They are one of the glories of Britain. Admittedly, success can bring its problems, with too many people being attracted to some famous sites and footpaths becoming worn; as ever, in these crowded islands, the landscape must be managed so that it retains the beauty that people come to enjoy in the first place.
But for more adventurous spirits, who want to get further form the beaten track, there is the extraordinary network of footpaths, bridleways and byways, all giving unlimited access to walkers across England and Wales. The Ramblers Association fights tooth and nail for every inch of them, and rightly so: the poet Geoffrey Grison called them humanity’s “oldest inscriptions upon the landscape” – the result of the protection given by common law to paths that are constantly in use.
True, the route taken by a shepherd or milkmaid going to and from the farm may not always be the most convenient for recreational use today and it might be sensible if some were rationalised, but I can understand the romance. Landowners tend to maintain footpaths and ensure themselves against accidents from falling boughs or wonky stiles, regardless of the general absence of financial return.
But the spirit of Kinder Scout lives on, and particularly in Scotland, where the evils of the landowning class are part of national mythology. You can walk on nearly all land north of the border. And although Scotland is sparsely populated, the result has been a nightmare for people many of the people wanting to protect the natural environment. Rare wetland birds, nesting on the fringes of a loch, are driven away by walkers who insist on tramping past them, often with dogs. Farmers find it hard enough to make a living without sheep being chased and cattle stampeded. One person’s beauty spot is someone else’s workplace.
Despite the fashion for rewilding, nothing in Britain is truly wild; it needs to be carefully tended if it is to retain the biodiversity and joy that people love. If we want to preserve special habitats and encourage wildlife to flourish, some places have to be out of bounds. It’s all a question of balance between competing needs and interests: rampant ideology doesn’t help.
