The largest mass trespass in a generation will take place in Devon today. Hundreds of protesters belonging to the pressure-group Right to Roam will descend on Vixen Tor, a slightly sinister-looking granite outcrop on Dartmoor a few miles from Tavistock. Since 2003, access has been banned. But given that much of Dartmoor is already open to the public, why the stress on this fairly small part, which is not?
Those marching on Vixen Tor say the reason is simple: a small part of the high moor where hikers have the right to walk at will is inaccessible because it can only be reached across the Tor, which is privately owned and lacks any public rights of way across it. Demonstrators say that bureaucratic confusion has created a number of such ‘access islands’ in England, which you can theoretically roam over but cannot reach without technically trespassing on someone’s land.
Right to Roam are not a group of downtrodden factory hands asking the gentry for a weekend escape
The protesters have a point, but there is much more to this campaign than meets the eye. It’s also questionable whether a mass trespass is really the best way of achieving victory in this particular fight.
If the problem is simply one of ‘access islands’, the answer is simple. Local authorities already have the power to give access by creating footpaths, if necessary without landowners’ consent. But this, it quickly appears, is a bit of a red herring. What Right to Roam is really after is much, much more: essentially they are seeking a legally-enforceable right to wander over (and camp, swim and climb on) woodlands, all downland, Green Belt land, rivers and river banks. This is worrying. True, the scheme works after a fashion in relatively unpopulated Scotland. But England is different. Moorland here is often taken up by activities such as sport or upland farming, meaning that we have to hold the ring between recreational users on one side, and farmers and landowners on the other, who, when all is said and done, have a business to run.
This weekend’s protest is seeking to follow in the footsteps of the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout, when something like 500 working-class walkers intruded en masse on a large Pennine shooting estate and caused a much-publicised stand-off with gamekeepers and others. But don’t be fooled: the parallel is almost entirely specious.
Right to Roam are not a group of downtrodden factory hands asking the gentry for a weekend escape from coal-dust and smog, but a middle-class organisation with a distinct political and social agenda. They face nothing like the complete bar on access that motivated the Kinder Scout protesters. There is already a careful system in place on Dartmoor to balance business, recreation and property rights. A private Act of Parliament gives an unassailable legal right to walk over a good deal of the high moor; this is supplemented by footpaths, access agreements between many owners and the Dartmoor National Park Authority, and informal tolerance by many others even where the strict law is on their side.
Right to Roam’s targets are not a toffee-nosed aristocracy determined to keep the riff-raff at bay. True, much of Dartmoor is private property; but its owners are, to a large extent, not large proprietors but small-to-medium farmers and other businesses. Mary Alford, the owner of Vixen Tor, is no exception. A sixth generation upland Devon farmer, a regular and entertaining writer about moorland agriculture (known among other things for having pioneered a scheme to use surplus Dartmoor ponies for meat rather than simply culling them), Alford is committed to preserving the delicate social ecosystem that prevails there. True, when she bought Vixen Tor in 2003 she withdrew the public access that had previously been informally allowed, and successfully resisted legal countermoves to have access to the area opened up under Tony Blair’s Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. But she did so on the basis that the land had been partly improved and used for farming; that her insurers were worried about potential liabilities to visitors; and (one suspects) that having to allow a legal right of access willy-nilly to trippers, rock-climbers and the like made her land more difficult to make a living from.
Was it this exercise of a landowner enforcing their property rights that really got the goat of Right to Roam? The organisation and its followers certainly seem impatient with the idea that recreational rights might have to yield to the interests of proprietors in making a living from their land; deep down, some of these protestors give the impression of being deeply suspicious of private ownership of land and appear unhappy with allowing private proprietors much say over what is done with it.
This should worry anyone concerned for the future of Dartmoor. One of the attractions of the present compromise is that it recognises that, even in open spaces where people walk, property owners often have the best incentive to provide good stewardship while still promoting the interests of visitors. But to make this work they have to be assured of the power to police matters, if necessary by ejecting or excluding those who abuse their licence by making noise, fouling the place or leaving litter. Before owners are made to cede these powers of control to some worthy public authority armed with the power to set rules for responsible use, just think a moment: try asking a park warden late at night to deal with a group of jeering yobs exercising what they see as their right to do as they like on land without the landowner’s say-so. I wish you luck.
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