The future of Right to Roam
How land access could change in England and Wales
It’s a sticky afternoon in early June. I step out of my car and into the hot city air of Bristol. I’m running late to meet Sophie Brown, a rambler who has explored most of southwest England. Rounding the corner to our meeting point outside Café Kino, I hear a thick Bristolian accent. “You alright love?” says Brown, grinning at me in a pink sports top and large sunglasses as I approach her table. “I thought you looked a bit lost standing over there,” she laughs.
Despite only forming Bristol Steppin Sistas during lockdown, the walking group for women of colour already has over 1,500 members. "I've been walking from the age of eight,” says Brown, “I grew up in the country near Chippenham and I've always used walking as a coping mechanism.”
Increasing the amount of land that you can access will make the countryside more accessible for women of colour says Brown. “People are going to be more aware that they will see women of colour in their villages or places where they chill out. We’re not a movement making trouble, we’re not protesting, we’re just a group of black women walking. They’re going to have to get used to us.”
The Steppin Sistas is the first walking group of its kind in Bristol’s history, and Brown has led walks in Somerset, the Mendip Hills, Exmoor, Glastonbury and further afield. “During the lockdown we were all in survival more, but nature is like a healing ground for me,” she says. “You just can’t beat it. Everything’s there; you can survive in nature, there’s medicine.”
"I've always used walking as a coping mechanism"
- Sophie Brown
"We’re just a group of black women walking. They’re going to have to get used to us.”
- Sophie Brown
When Dartmoor landowner Alexander Darwall brought a case to the High Court earlier this year to ban wild camping on his land, he could not have predicted that he would become the unlikely hero of the land justice movement. The ruling on 13 January drew national media attention to the ‘Right to Roam’ campaign, created by authors Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes, doubling their followers on Instagram, and sparking large scale protests on Dartmoor with over 3,500 attendees. The campaign attracted the support of environmental activist George Monbiot, nature writer Robert McFarlane and Deadly 60 presenter Steve Backshall.
Within two weeks, shadow environment secretary Jim McMahon declared that Labour would not only reverse the ban on wild camping, but they would go one step further and introduce a Right to Roam Act if they won the next general election. Darwall’s victory in court may have signalled one of the biggest own goals in the history of the landowning community.
On 18 May, Green MP Caroline Lucas opened a debate in the House of Commons about public access to nature, after proposing an amendment to the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (affectionately known as CROW). Her bill, scheduled for a second reading on 1 December, aims to extend public access to woodlands, the Green Belt, waters, and more grasslands. Under the current legislation, the public can only access roughly 8% of the land in England, including some areas of mountain, moorland, commons, downland, heathland, and coastline.
Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, said: “The CROW Act is limited and it’s much more in the uplands and the north and west of England than in the south and the east. Currently it’s like flicking a paintbrush over southern England – you get little specks of access land which is no good to anybody because you can’t get onto them and they’re so small. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Towards the end of the debate, shadow nature secretary Alex Sobel took the opportunity to clarify Labour’s pledge: “Like in Scotland… we will replace the default of exclusion with the default of access.”
Those words could represent one of the biggest tipping points in the land justice movement since the Kinder Scout Trespass of 1932, and the most significant upheaval of land access laws since William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066.
However, that’s not what Marion Shoard, author of A Right to Roam and expert on land access, took from the debate. “Alex Sobel has muddled the current right of access with rights of way,” she said. “Expanding public access to woodlands and waterways doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a new right. It’s all a bit vague.”
A clearer model of legislative change is the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, which codified the ancient notion that you have a universal right to be on land anywhere. Scots law mirrors Sweden’s ‘allemansrätten’ (everyman’s right) which exists in most of Scandinavia and some parts of Europe, with sensible exceptions such as railway lines, schools, crop fields, building works, quarries and gardens connected to houses.
The right is governed by the Scottish Outdoor Access Code (SOAC), a highway code for the outdoors, which emphasises responsible access, respect for the environment and a reciprocal duty for land managers and access takers. To find out more about SOAC, I flew to Edinburgh to meet Bob Aitken, who helped to draft the code.
“Farmers are currently dealing with the withdrawal of EU support and mental health is a huge issue in the farming community."
- Sam Durham, NFU
Population density and intensive farming are also reasons cited by Sam Durham, chief land management adviser of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), as to why a full right to roam may be unworkable in England. “You have to balance population and extensive farming - there’s much more cereal production in England than in Scotland, for example.”
He warned of the disturbance to wildlife, such as ground-nesting birds and rare plants, damage to crops and worrying of livestock that could be associated with an increase in public access. “Areas on urban fringes already experience higher levels of littering, vandalism and problems such as gates being left open,” he said. “Issues like these would undoubtedly become more widespread if access was increased.”
“It’s not just the issue of irresponsible behaviour by the public,” he said. “Farmers are currently dealing with the withdrawal of EU support and mental health is a huge issue in the farming community; these issues pile up on farmers.”
Andrew Gillett, chief legal adviser for the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), echoed Durham’s position: “The greatest complaints the CLA receive from landowners relate to rubbish left behind, damage to boundaries, gates left open and general damage to the wider environment caused by members of the public.”
“There are already thousands of footpaths and public rights of way crossing the countryside and this provides ample opportunities for people to access nature,” he said.
However, Helen Todd, the manager of campaigns and policy at Ramblers Scotland, pointed out that there are potential benefits of access to farmers: “We recognise that farmers are dealing with a lot of pressures, but access is a public good and it's right that farmers should be able to get funding to pay for paths, signage and so on. We're working to try and get this included in future agricultural support schemes."
"For a lot of farmers, increased access is quite good - no end of farms now have farm shops or cafes next to public walking routes," she said. "Since Brexit our taxes will now be going directly into farming, so people may be asking a few more questions about access. Maybe farmers will need to be more aware of their own responsibilities to respect access rights."
Although it is helpful to look north of the border for a tried and tested example of a right to roam, both landowners and the public will have to wait until Labour get into power, at least by the end of next year, to find out what form the legislation would take. Negotiating with the relevant stakeholders while pleasing all parties could prove a challenge for Keir Starmer.
Considering the future of English access, Bob Aitken said: “When I look south of the border, I think it’s all very worthy, but the bottom line is you’ve got 10 times the population we have, but you certainly have not got 10 times as much open land as we have. I can’t see the NFU standing for anything that says to farmers: ‘your land should be available on Scottish terms’.”
Similarly, Marion Shoard did not feel overly optimistic about Labour sticking to its promise: “I don’t think Keir Starmer is going to have much money to do anything anyway. He could get away with several things and still say it fits within this pledge.”
“Huge amounts of time and effort went into drawing up the Scottish code. Are we really going to see that amount of effort in England? I really don’t know Jacob,” she said.
Aitken also pointed out that allemansrätten has existed for hundreds of years in Nordic countries, while Scotland has only had 20 years of notional freedom to roam which is “still shaking down and shaking out.” Furthermore, the slash in central funding after the 2008 financial crash reduced the number of access officers from 65, across 32 Scottish local authorities, to around 20.
With several local authorities now without any access officers and ranger services “decimated”, according to Helen Todd, the ability to maintain a right to roam in practice has been significantly downgraded.
Nevertheless, some English landowners are feeling slightly twitchy about the idea of anyone and everyone being able to make use of their land. Lord Charles Brocket, who inherited Brocket Hall, a Grade I listed stately home, and its 543 acres of parkland in Hertfordshire fears there will be backlash.
But if there is one right which Lord Brocket and his team of SAS paratroopers will not be able to prevent you from exercising, it is your right of way. As Jack Cornish, head of paths at the Ramblers says: “What recorded rights of way give you is not just ease of travel or access, they are also an important way of recording and protecting our history. Paths are a real expression of working-class history, of ordinary people's movements around the landscape.”
“If the public have used a path for twenty years it becomes a right of way. If that access is denied, we are here to support people with getting that legally recorded,” says Cornish.
In his short film ‘black strangers’, featured in the ‘Right of Way’ collection, Dan Guthrie goes for a walk in the woods in search of his “18th-century namesake” Daniel – whose burial appears in a parish record in Stroud from 1719 – asking him a series of questions about his experiences as a person of colour in the countryside 300 years ago.
“I wonder if these birds sang the same for you as they did for me?” Guthrie asks Daniel. “Perhaps someone will come looking for me around here, 300 years down the line. Maybe one day, in the 24th century, if humans are still around, a Danny or a Danilo or whatever iteration of our name is in vogue will go for a walk, in search of me in search of you.”
Discussing how art is used to energise the land justice movement, folk musician (and friend of the campaign) Sam Lee said: “Music is such a direct way of reaching people’s hearts. If I can embed all the enormous amounts of legality and oppression and severance into songs that are able to communicate a trauma that we all live, I can speak about it in a way that highlights this situation and challenges people’s lack of awareness.”
“Slowly landowners are going to accept that, ‘ok, we have a right to roam’ and maybe it’s not going to be the end of their estate. Maybe we’ll have a culture that is more engaged with nature, with a higher rate of environmental stewardship,” he said.
In the next two years we could see dramatic changes to access laws in England and Wales, but as campaigner Jon Moses tells me, there is a long road between a politician’s promise and legislation: “when the NFU and the landowners get over the scare stories around access,” he said, “I think there are all kinds of potential mutual benefits.”
The easiest way for Labour to implement a right to roam in England would be to use the Land Reform (Scotland) Act as a starting point and create an Outdoor Access Code to match, according to Nick Kempe of the parkswatchscotland blog. “They could then amend that legal framework to take account of differences between legislation in the two countries, such as rights of way, but there should be no need for England to re-invent the wheel.”
There are legitimate differences between the English and Scottish landscape and important questions about funding and infrastructure which Labour will have to answer, but now may be the best opportunity since Kinder Scout for the public to reclaim their right to be on land.
Cowpasture Lane in Suffolk is a protected right of way, credit: Zorba the Greek
Cowpasture Lane in Suffolk is a protected right of way, credit: Zorba the Greek
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