Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 24 January 2019

The behaviour of militant right-to-roamers risks death and destruction

The frustrating thing about rights is that when you give them to people they don’t cherish and appreciate them. They turn them ungratefully upside down like a modest-sized Easter egg and shake them vigorously to try to work out if something better might be inside.

Right to roam is like this. You would think walkers would be delighted to be told they can wander across a farmer’s land, skirting fields full of sheep and horses to take a short cut to a pub, or to make a nice circular route for their Sunday ramble.

Not a bit of it. Since right to roam, walkers seem to be almost exclusively furious about footpaths. They want to know why they cannot stray off them to wander around your fields as well, letting their huge dog loose to run around chasing your horses. Perhaps they feel this makes a proper day of it.

Sunday is the worst day, especially in Surrey where white collar crime pales into insignificance beside what I call Gore-Tex collar crime. Sundays I wake up and just want to shut my eyes again and not go outside. Inevitably, I will be forced to fight a series of pitched battles with nice middle-class people in hiking gear.

On this occasion, I set off with the little lodger riding Gracie and me walking the spaniels on the lead, the builder boyfriend in tow. As we went through the five-bar gate at the top of the track, two walkers came through with a large dog that went straight into the horses’ field where it ran round and round.

‘Would you mind,’ I asked them, ‘keeping the dog on the lead or at heel, because the public footpath is the track you are on, not the field he is running around?’

They looked at me blankly, so I added the clincher.

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