It’s often said that the less important the issues at stake, the bitterer the argument about them becomes. This seems to have been more than confirmed in the last few weeks in Devon by the curious case of the argument over wild camping on Dartmoor.
The high moor on Dartmoor is an anomaly. Although nearly all of it is privately-owned by a mixture of estate owners, small farmers and others, for as long as anyone can remember people have in practice been walking and riding across the wilder unfenced parts of it, known as the Commons, for recreation without anyone making objection. Since 1985, any objection would have been futile: a private Act of Parliament that year gave the public a right to do exactly that – access the moor on foot or horseback for the purpose of outdoor recreation – whether the landowners liked it or not.
A couple of months ago, however, problems surfaced. Users of the moor increasingly not only hike the common parts but camp there. On a small scale, this normally causes no problems but can cause overcrowding, pollution and disturbance to livestock. In January this year the High Court, at the instance of a landowner and farmer concerned at the possible damage from unrestricted camping to the environment, decided that the access guaranteed by the 1985 Act did not include the right to camp. Unlike walkers, in other words, campers were tolerated but not entitled: they had no right to be there, and the owner of the land could move them on if he chose.
Labour has been only too happy to play to the wackier ideas being promoted on social media
This holding made headlines, but actually changed almost nothing on the ground. Even if now theoretically entitled to act like Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant, the Dartmoor landowners, including the person who brought the High Court proceedings, did no such thing. They had previously condoned camping, on occasion if necessary cleaning up after less responsible parties, in the same way as before 1985 they always tolerated walkers they could in theory have excluded. Following the High Court ruling they have essentially agreed with the Dartmoor National Park Authority to continue to allow camping subject to its regulation.
Making moorland proprietors tolerate passage over the remote parts of their land is one thing. Imposing on them by law a duty to tolerate overnight occupation is very different; the time is longer, and despite an ideal under which nothing is left behind the practical effects are more permanent. True, bye-laws prohibit campers from staying more than two nights. But bye-laws are not always obeyed: besides, tents left up during the day sully the landscape, and there is little to prevent the better spots from becoming serially-occupied, thus turning them into semi-permanent institutions and destroying the solitude that attracted campers in the first place.
And consider what happens if people do abuse or sully the places where they camp. It is far simpler for the law to back up an owner who tells them to leave his land, than to allow the campers to refuse to budge and challenge him to contact a warden or other functionary, who may very well have better things to do anyway.
Unfortunately, however reasonable and balanced the ruling, its result has been explosive. Ramblers UK and some more fringe groups have organised mass demonstrations (or the nearest equivalent possible in the narrow lanes of south Devon) demanding its instant reversal and the enactment of an absolute right to wild camp. DNPA, the National Park Authority, has caved to their pressure and has officially said it will appeal the judgment on principle. As if this were not enough, the matter has now gone national. Labour is now promising legislation to provide for rights to wild camp throughout English national parks; Lib Dem Richard Foord, MP for nearby Honiton, has already tabled a private member’s Bill.
This reaction is worrying, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is fantastically out of proportion. No-one is being deprived of the ability to wild-camp responsibly on Dartmoor or anywhere else. Despite the insistence that high principles are at stake, Kinder Scout at the time of the 1932 mass trespass this is not.
Also less than reassuring is the role of the DNPA, an organisation that might be expected carefully to hold the ring between recreation, wildlife and the rights of landowners – from small farmers to estate owners – to run their businesses. This now seems to have been captured by the rambling, rewilding constituency: interestingly, it is getting funding for its appeal from the fiercely pro-rambler pressure group the Dartmoor Preservation Association. No wonder farmers and others, already angered by its previous demand for big cuts in the number of animals they are allowed to depasture, increasingly doubt its position as honest broker between themselves and other users.
Perhaps most disconcerting, however, is the way this storm in a cream-tea cup is being elevated into a kind of genteel class war. Labour has been only too happy to play to the wackier ideas being promoted on social media that this is a case of landowning toffs obstructing the workers’ deserved recreation. Its demand for a legal right to camp involve, in effect, something close to a demand for expropriation of property rights on Dartmoor, or at least their reduction to a mere shadow of little significance.
This matters. Currently on Dartmoor we have a system of live and let live, of benevolent management by property owners with a stake in the land. Demands to replace it with bureaucratic control by a quango will not only amount to a power-grab and set landowner against visitor: they will encourage anti-social behaviour and in the end will be bad for Dartmoor and for those who love and look after it. They need to be resisted firmly.
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