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Title: The Right to Roam
Author: Harold Sculthrope
Date: February 1992
Language: en
Topics: land, The Raven, right to roam, Parliament
Source: Retrieved on 1 July 2022 from https://libcom.org/article/raven-17-use-land
Notes: This article was originally written for The Raven Anarchist Quarterly #17: Use of Land, pp. 76–80.

Harold Sculthrope

The Right to Roam

Only as part of a major social upheaval will the land they lost be taken

back by the people. Land lost by enclosure during the 18^(th) and

19^(th) centuries to the great benefit of the Lords of the Manors and

other country gentry, and of no less benefit to the new middle-class

industrialists in the towns. Most of the dispossessed, men, women and

children, had a choice; to starve or move to the expanding towns of

northern England to be housed in appalling conditions and work for long

hours with little reward in the factories and mills. For some there was

not even a choice, as in the case of 389 men, women and children who in

1835–37 were moved by the Poor Law Commissioners in canal barges on a

four-to-five-day journey from Buckinghamshire to work in the Lancashire

factories[1]. Those who did stay behind became part of a whole new class

of labouring poor, for who, when old age or sickness made work

impossible, there was, after 1835, only the workhouse. Enclosure of

land, unless agreed by all the landholders, required a private bill to

parliament and the period from 1760 to 1820 was the great time of

parliamentary acts of enclosure[2]. Between 1750 and 1845 over two

million acres of common land and four and a half million acres of open

fields were enclosed and the percentage of the population living in the

country declined from 80 to 50 per cent[3].

History is written by the powerful, so it is not surprising to find

little account of active resistance to this enforced exodus, but

resistance there was and occasionally accounts have survived. The first

private bill of enclosure to come before parliament was in February 1710

and concerned Ropley Commons and the old disparked park of Farnham

within the bishopric of Winchester. This was unpopular and vigorously

contested and contributed to the ill will which led to raids on the

bishop’s deer and eventually to ‘blacking’[4]. When Charles II enclosed

Richmond Park and built a high wall around it, blocking numerous rights

of way and rights of common, deprived parishioners pulled down the park

wall several times and when one went to law about his rights, royalty,

incredibly, lost. But this was exceptional, a victory for bourgeois

commoners with money and resources not usually available to rural

commoners[5].

Much of what now remains of the ancient commons is the high moorland in

the northern counties and the sandy heaths of the south and west, land

not profitable for the new industrial farmers to cultivate. These,

together with the surviving foot and bridle paths that criss-cross the

English countryside are the open spaces walkers today seek to keep open

in their campaign for the right to roam. But that which is left is

constantly under threat: from the military who demand and take more of

it for their wargames; from the new water companies who see an enormous

potential profit from selling off the common land they own, to

developers; from the grouse moor owners who, to protect their killing

profits, try to keep walkers off the moors of northern England; and from

the large scale farmers, as likely as not anonymous national

corporations, who tear up hedges and destroy rights of way to create

desert-like wastelands of monoculture.

The desire to escape the noise and pollution of the towns to the fresh

air of the countryside for rest and recreation persists. The modern

rambling movement dates back to the early 19^(th) century to a time when

many town dwellers were just one remove from rural life. In the early

years the struggle to achieve the right to roam freely on uncultivated

land was pursued with radical zeal by whatever method was to hand,

according to available resources and circumstance. It included direct

action as in the 1932 mass trespasses of Kinder Scout and Abbey Brook,

in Derbyshire, and the series of demonstrations at Winnats Pass which

followed. Many of these early large-scale protests concerned the open

moorlands of Derbyshire which were so accessibly dose to the massive

industrial conurbations of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but throughout the

county individuals and small groups were defying ‘Private keep out’ and

‘No Trespassing’ notices, despite threats from gamekeepers and warnings

from the police.

By the end of the nineteenth century the numerous rambling clubs in

England and Wales were the focus for such activities and after the

1914–18 war when walkers realised that most of the existing country-side

amenity societies, and especially the influential Council for the

Preservation of Rural England, were not particularly sympathetic to

their demands the merits of forming a National Association were widely

discussed. The result, against a background of accounts of walkers in

the Peak District of Derbyshire being threatened with guns and

revolvers, was the formation in 1931 of a National Council of Ramblers’

Federations which in 1935 became the Ramblers’ Association. Not all, at

this time, were in favour of such a centralised organisation. Some

preferred to keep to a federation of local groups. However, with the

creation of a national body based in London, the campaign concentrated

more on lobbying parliament and supported a series of parliamentary

bills.

The route through parliament has had some notable successes including

the 1925 Law of Property Act which gave public access to common land in

some urban and metropolitan police districts, and following the National

Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 national parks and a

network of long distance footpaths were created. The opening in 1965 of

the first of these paths, the Pennine Way, owed much to the previous

efforts of Tom Stephenson. Tom was born in 1893 and started work at 13

as a labourer, working 66 hours a week in a calico printing works. A

member of the Independent Labour Party and a pacifist, he ignored his

army call-up papers in 1917 and as a result was twice court martialled,

sentenced to hard labour and spent two years in prison, some of it in

the company of Sidney Silverman. This criminal record lost him his

scholarship to London University to study geology but diverted him into

a life-long campaign for walkers’ rights. A full account of this can be

found in Tom Stephenson’s autobiography Forbidden Land: the Struggle for

Access to Mountain and Moorland published in 1989 shortly after his

death.[6]

The parliamentary path to the hills dates back to 1884 when James Bryce

MP introduced an ‘Access to Mountains’ bill. Neither this nor any of its

successors got very far, opposed as they were by the powerful landowners

lobby, until the introduction in 1939 of another ‘Access to Mountains’

bill. This was received with jubilation by those who inexplicably

thought that the bill which had been repeatedly rejected by parliament

during the past 50 years would be successful.’ but this time they were

right, right except that when the ‘Access to Mountains Act 1930’ did

reach the statute book in 1940 it had been “so mauled, mangled and

amended by parliament as to become a monstrous unrecognisable

changeling, not an access bill but a landowners protection bill”.[7]

They did not give up. In 1979 an ‘Access to Commons and Open Country’

bill was introduced but not debated due to objections and when it was

reintroduced the following year with the comment that “men only want the

same rights as their Lordships’ grouse except that they did not want to

be shot at”[8] it did not get a second reading. A 1982 ‘Walkers (Access

to Countryside)’ bill suffered a similar fate.

The latest attempt is in the form of a ‘Ramblers Manifesto, Action for

the Countryside in Parliament’ issued by the Ramblers’ Association which

“urges political parties in Britain to support action which would enable

people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to gain access to the

countryside for peaceful recreation”. The 14-point programme includes a

demand that footpaths and other rights of way be cleared of obstructions

and properly maintained; that new paths and parks be created; that there

should be an established right of access on foot to mountain, moor,

heath, and other open country and, in particular, to the one million or

so acres of common land that remain. Sadly, except for the references to

National Parks “there should be more of them” and a demand that the

spraying of harmful pesticides over public rights of way should be

stopped, this manifesto would not have seemed out of place a hundred

years ago.

A glaring omission from the manifesto is any reference to the continued

incursions of the MOD on to common land. There is thus no apparent

support for the campaign against Charles Windsor who, as the landowning

Duke of Cornwall, has recently agreed to let the military carry out

artillery and mortar firing for a further 21 years on 20,000 acres of

Dartmoor, much of it common land, or to South West Water’s intention to

give the MOD nine more years of use to over 2,000 acres of South West

Dartmoor for ‘dry training’ (not lethal, but noisy).[9] No support

either for the local inhabitants’ complaint that the hills around

Coulport in Scotland, near the Faslane nuclear submarine base, once open

walking country, are now closed off and used as vast underground

munitions stores.

If the story of the parliamentary pathway is mostly the story of bills

thrown out, delayed interminably or emasculated, this is no more than an

anarchist would expect, but this is not to dismiss the Ramblers’

Association as having failed. Apart from the practical service it

provides for in 87,000 members it is a democratic organisation with much

grass roots activity by its individual groups that has maintained a

tradition of radical opposition to the attempts by the powerful

land-owning Interests to keep the land for themselves. At the local

level it has had many successes: land previously closed by the owner is

now walked on and footpaths blocked by a farmer are soon reopened.

Supporting single issue pressure groups like the Ramblers’ Association

is often criticised by anarchists as being too reformist, even trivial,

diverting time, energy, and resources from the work for a more

fundamental change in society, but such activities, particularly when

they involve direct action by small groups at a local level, can be

useful political activity complementary to more revolutionary action. It

is certainly considered political by landowners and campaigning for

access to the land is hardly trivial.

[1] Forbidden Land, The Struggle for Access to Mountain and Moorland.

Stephenson, T. (1989) Manchester University Press.

[2] Customs in Common. Thompson, E.P. (1991) Merlin Press

[3] On Common Ground. Reed, P. (1991) Working Press.

[4] Customs in Common. Thompson, E.P. (1991) Merlin Press

[5] Customs in Common. Thompson, E.P. (1991) Merlin Press

[6] Forbidden Land, The Struggle for Access to Mountain and Moorland.

Stephenson, T. (1989) Manchester University Press.

[7] Forbidden Land, The Struggle for Access to Mountain and Moorland.

Stephenson, T. (1989) Manchester University Press.

[8] Forbidden Land, The Struggle for Access to Mountain and Moorland.

Stephenson, T. (1989) Manchester University Press.

[9] Open Space (1992) Vol. 24 No 3