ACCESS TO THE COUNTRYSIDE.

Marion Shoard describes the centuries-long battle waged by Britons for the right to roam over the hills and vales of their island.

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 o 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.

It 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.

The 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.

Scotland 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.

By 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). She will be speaking at a conference on `The Contested Countryside: Rural Controversies in Historical Perspective' at Reading University on September 18th; for details tel: 0118 9318665.

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Title Annotation:	public access to lands in the UK to be reopened if law passes
Author:	Shoard, Marion
Publication:	History Today
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Sep 1, 2000
Words:	2591
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Topics:	Land reform Analysis Landlocked countries Political aspects Landlocked states Political aspects