Away from the hamlets and farms that dot the edge of it, the high moor on Dartmoor is a wild and solitary place, especially overnight and in the early morning. But if you like that sort of thing, you might be well-advised to make the most of it while you can. As a result of an unfortunate decision from the Supreme Court yesterday, the solitude may not last much longer.
The peculiarity of Dartmoor is that even though it looks like a public space, most of it is privately owned. The land is looked after by a mixture of large estate owners, farmers and others. Public access, for centuries tolerated by tradition, was in 1985 confirmed by an Act of Parliament specifically permitting anyone to access on foot and horseback for recreational purposes.
Allowing all and sundry to camp as of right will forever change the character of the moor
But there was a catch. Was the Act limited to passing gently across the heather and moss, with perhaps the odd rest for a breather or picnic, or did it afford a right to camp overnight? Landowners, aware of the problems a right to camp could cause, supported the former view; the park authority, supported by a number of open access campaigners and wild camping enthusiasts, the latter. Yesterday the Supreme Court decided against the landowners.
The decision, admittedly a plausible construction of the Act (though a contrary interpretation is at least equally, if not more, convincing), will delight militant ramblers and right-to-roamers. We should nevertheless regret it – for a number of reasons.
For one thing, the open access campaigners’ all-too-common vision of Dartmoor landowners as dogs in the rural manger, determined like Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant to bar the riff-raff from their private paradises, is at the very least misleading. On the contrary: most landowners were perfectly happy to allow camping on request, within reason, to anyone who looked unlikely to abuse such hospitality, seeing this as both a social duty and also consistent with decent stewardship of the property they were entrusted with.
Secondly, allowing all and sundry to camp as of right, even in the ecologically-sensitive form of wild camping – which is meant to leave no debris behind – will forever change the character of the moor. True, the authority will place a limit on the number of days individuals can stay: but even if that was enforceable in practice (which it isn’t), others will take their place. The inevitable result will be that during the summer the more desirable areas of the high moor will turn into more or less permanent campsites, thus destroying forever the air of desolation which till now has made the moor so attractive.
Thirdly, giving landowners the last word was important, especially when it came to the problem of misbehaviour. Anyone who misconducted himself (and some did) could be told to leave, and as a last resort thrown off, with the landowner confident that the law was on their side. Unfortunately this element of control will now become much more problematical.
True, there will be rules drafted by the park authority about what wild campers can and cannot do. But their enforcement is likely to be another matter. Imagine you are a landowner who finds a tipsy group of entitled youths lighting fires, playing music and generally making themselves obnoxious at midnight, who, when challenged, tell him to go fish because they have a right to be there. A breach of the rules, certainly. Want to get someone from the park authority or the police to do anything about it? I wish you the best of Devon luck.
We can’t particularly blame the judges for reaching the conclusion they did. They had to construe the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 one way or the other, and their view that it allowed camping wasn’t entirely untenable. But the result, ironically, is likely to amount to the kind of disaster that typically results from well-meaning meddling with long-standing institutions. Responsible private management of the Dartmoor landscape by landowners with a stake in their property and a decent feeling of the social obligation that went with it was a system that worked. We wish we could say the same about its replacement by bureaucratic rules with enforcement entrusted to understaffed functionaries on the public payroll. Unfortunately, we know the answer. It won’t.
There’s further irony here. One group which will welcome the decision is the government, since it chimes in beautifully with Labour’s vague ideological antipathy to landowners and its desire to be seen as calling for opening our countryside to the downtrodden masses. Indeed, when the judge at first instance in the present case supported the landowners, Labour (then in opposition) promised legislation to reverse the position. The courts have now saved it the trouble, the controversy and the flak as and when things go wrong. Keir Starmer and the ministers who run Defra may not know this, but they’ve just been dealt a major, if undeserved, stroke of luck.
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