With agri-businesses up in arms about the removal of a 2031 cutoff for rights of way registration, it’s time to ditch the idea and embrace the right to roam
~ Rob Ray ~
My dad’s just pulled on his boots and donned his favoured winter flat cap, ready to take Dolly the dog for a quick post-Christmas walk round the fields that surround their village. There’s a dozen paths that carry him, squelchily, away from the house and Dolly could probably walk them all without him, but they both like the company.
It’s a very normal place, this village, as far as the English conception of normal goes. Nestled at the crossroads of a half-dozen small farms, there’s a slim tarmac road leading in one direction to a high-speed feeder towards the towns, or in the other, down winding tracks to nearby villages. A connected place, but rural and stuffed full of the middle classes, who often scoff at towns and cities (especially London) as being noisy, dangerous, somewhat alien.
As a normal village, it has normal farmers. Which is why my dad, who has lived in the same spot for more than 30 years, has stories of villagers clashing with them. Depending on the farmer (they are not, much as Farage and the National Farmers Union like to pretend, all of a mind), they can sometimes be obliging about dogs and their pals taking a given path, or they can turn the whole thing into a contest of wills. Sometimes residents are okay but visitors are not, or longtime residents have a sort of grandfathered-in, unofficial easement where New Folk don’t.
And sometimes the same path, turned over from one generation to another or bought out, can go from obliging to contested overnight.
An example of this happened to my parents’ village when a farmer passed on the old stead a few years back. There’s a shortcut at the edge of a field, next to a copse of trees, which connects two bits of Officially Walkable footpath together. People have been crossing over it for donkey’s years. The new farmer, however, was not a fan of walkers in general and on this stretch in particular, so first of all up went the signs. No Access. These wound up in a nearby hedge. Then there were the wildflowers, planted alongside another sign. Rare Flowers, Do Not Trample. There was trampling. Next was the mysteriously sudden appearance of a thistle thicket, which dogs understandably don’t want to walk through. I kicked a few of those to death myself as Dolly gingerly picked her way around them.
Such efforts are made by farmers up and down the country to enforce the Keep Out so beloved of Britain’s rural landowners. Anyone who’s tried to ramble has come across similar, from piles of rubbish concealing footpath signs all the way to threats and electrified fences. It is these people alongside profit-only corporations, sometimes represented by the suits of the Country Land and Business Association, who are whinging about the removal of a 2031 deadline to register historic rights of way.
And their anger at the loss of this deadline is why the idea of a permanent registry itself should die entirely, replaced by a proper right to roam.
Nick Hayes does a far better job than I could of talking through both the everyday realities and the national statistics of land hoarding in his Book of Trespass, but what crops up most is this: 92% of land in England is inaccessible to the rest of us. It’s a powerful statistic, but the implications go far wider.
You don’t need much imagination, perhaps only the example of water companies, to come up with scenarios in which Big Agribusiness might abuse the privacy afforded by control of endless acres of land which nobody is allowed to walk on. Satellite studies may be able to tell us in broad strokes that the UK’s soil is steadily becoming poisoned by excess levels of nitrates, phosphorous and acidification, while biosphere health is declining with loss of insect and birdlife particularly notable. But that doesn’t give us a good idea of what’s actually happening.
The NBN Atlas of biodiversity offers a great example of this. If you zoom in on its maps of where studies are taking place, the vast majority are simply the 8% where we can get at. The only people with reliable access to the rest are government officials, a grouping that can never be well-staffed or incorruptible enough to watch over all the fields of England. Mass public participation would really be the only way to achieve such coverage.
It’s thus an obscene gift to the greediest landowners in our society to offer them a permanent, uncontestable right to tell the rest of us to Keep Out unless the track we’re walking happens to be on officials’ maps. It offers us a bare minimum protection for travel across 8% of “our country” while encouraging an aggressive elimination of any other option in the name of the law. Those who hide behind wildflower patches are aching for the deadline to pass, to be able to finally, categorically say “it’s not on the list” and put down any argument to the contrary. It doesn’t just get rid of an annoyance, it’s a shield for whatever they see fit to do when exploiting the land.
This whole argument isn’t really about clarity of rules, it’s about control and exclusion. Not just by the unfriendly tweeds of today, but by those of every generation ahead, as agribusiness continues its long march to monopoly.
We cannot rely on a combination of legally-protected routes covering a bare fraction of the countryside and the changeable whims of lords, little and large, who have been given impunity to exclude. Even Labour knows this to be true, and not so long ago had taken on board calls to bring right to roam into law. Yet in 2023 they abruptly ditched pledges to fix the situation, part of an asinine attempt to attract support from disaffected Tories, which lost them 500,000 votes and left them reliant on Reform for their majority—a campaign which is, currently, going about as well as could be expected with tractors battering down the constituency doors of Labour MPs.
Endless reasons to re-connect town and country
Those technocratic geniuses in Westminster have managed to simultaneously abandon basic moral imperatives while getting not a bean in return. It’s an utterly predictable outcome, and you have to wonder how much longer they’re going to delude themselves that their mix of clueless economic tinkering and cackhanded sops to right-wing sentiment will ever make them popular in British farmyards.
But there is an argument for right to roam that can be made to farmers, even if Labour is too thick to make it.
The root cause of much of the sector’s discomfort is alienation. Of production from retail, of countryside from town. Those villagers who sneer at townies? Of course they do, working class urbanites are often as foreign to them as the dinghies that land in Kent. A thing to be feared, people who litter and talk loudly and don’t follow the ways. Then on the other hand why would townies, whose closest natural experience is neighbourhood foxes rooting through their bins, care about farmers’ problems? And as a result, why would Westminster?
If farmers want city folk to start caring about where their food comes from, these lessons can’t just be offered through the pages of the Times and the Telegraph. You can get a certain distance by plonking petrolheads in front of a telly to watch Jeremy Clarkson fool around getting oversized machinery stuck, but what’s missing is physical connection. We’re currently watching half the country’s gardens get ripped out and tiled over in the latest fashion trend because so many people have no idea how to tend them, take no joy in watching things grow; reversing this lost love should be a priority.-
Empathy and support comes from familiarity. Bringing the public into the countryside may benefit us, but it also benefits those farmers who want more engagement, who need a more direct way to shift their produce than begging another skimpy cheque from the Tesco brass. There’s endless reasons to re-connect town and country that should appeal to everyone: fewer miles from field to plate, bypassing of middlemen, health, happiness, and greater mutual understanding. Any campaign to improve the small farmer’s lot starts with ditching the priorities of big firms and getting the public—those Labour can’t do without—on board. And as a bonus, we all know what will happen when the public has fuller access to the fields of the big firms. All that unsustainable destruction can finally be exposed, the lie of stewardship laid bare, and pressure applied.
Walkers like my dad who plod the rural routes today are a pale shadow of the masses who used to watch and participate in the agricultural cultures of our countryside. They are funnelled down carefully-controlled paths, or generously allowed to access a handful of routes at the behest of old manor houses. They often play at “revival” with theme-park renditions of old traditions, and have books talking about what used to be, but the reality across most of the country is empty fields and a heavy silence, with no-one to watch.
The true beneficiaries of this system are those who abuse it, while the rest of us have not even seen what we’ve lost. Farmers who genuinely care about the land shouldn’t fear right to roam, and Labour would lose little from re-embracing it.
