The walk had started cheerfully enough. We gathered in the village square, formed a polite circle and introduced ourselves. Many of those who turned up already knew one another, veterans of the Right to Roam campaign. Many had been involved in organizing the protests that had taken place earlier in the year against the ban on wild camping on Dartmoor.
‘It’s unlikely that we’ll meet the landowner,’ one of the organizers said, as he outlined the route for the walk.
As we set off, we continued to talk about the idea of trespass and the protests on Dartmoor, the organizers’ surprise when their small call to action on a Facebook group began to gather steam, and the 3,000 or so people who had arrived in coaches and busses from across the country to make their voices heard.
The atmosphere only shifted as we crossed a line on a map in a beautiful woodland from land in which we were free to go where we wanted onto the estate where we had no right to be. Across this invisible line, the woodland was just as stunning, and we walked down into a steep wooded valley of beautifully inosculated beeches and old holly trees, the branches of which, twining round themselves had grown to form a single branch. I am able to offer little in the way of knowledge of woodland ecology, though I was pleased to be able to use one of my favourite words, ‘inosculation’, which is the process by which two branches or tree trunks fuse into one another.
At the bottom of the valley, a stream ran noisily across stones and we watched small fish and dragonflies in the dappled light. Beyond the stream, we skirted the large pheasant pens from which young birds would be released in a few weeks, in advance of the shoots later in the year. Although the woodland was, in many ways, idyllic, there was now a palpable sense of tension across the group. Some were discussing what would happen if we were to meet the landowner, their experiences of previous trespasses, how concerned or unconcerned they felt, though the only members of the group who seemed genuinely unconcerned were the children. Miniature Wonder Woman was blissfully unaware that we were trespassing on someone else’s land, and she seemed entirely unaware too that we were now being observed through the trees by one of the estate’s gamekeepers, who had been keeping track of us from a quad bike.
‘Land ownership is a very powerful story,’ one of the group said to me as he pulled aside a curtain of holly for the group to pass through. ‘It’s something we’re socialized into. Our culture is shaped by the stories we inherit and Keep Out signs are part of our collective story. It’s a powerful story too, about where we are welcome and where we belong, about our place within the landscape. And it’s the story which is the biggest barrier, more than the fences and the threat of an interaction with a landowner.’
For him, like many of the other people on the organized trespass, the Covid pandemic had brought the lack of access into sharper focus. Confined to a small area for his daily walks, he had found much of the land around him blocked off, even those permissive paths that had been open before the lockdowns came into force. And even after the restrictions of Covid were lifted, he said, many of these paths remained blocked off by landowners who had decided they preferred to keep the land they owned to themselves.
‘We have a deferential approach to landowners that has been ingrained in us for centuries,’ he continued. ‘It goes all the way back to the enclosures. When you think about it, it’s ridiculous that someone should have access to all this land and that no one else should even be able to walk on it.’
It has always surprised me how little access we have to the land in which we live, in England in any case, the way in which we accept that we must keep to the paths, that we must not step on the grass. Perhaps it is, in part, a result of having grown up in view of both Kinder Scout and Winter Hill, the sites of two of the most famous trespasses. But more than that, it has always surprised me how little, in my lifetime, we have questioned our obedience to fences and cordons, to the signs marking private property that keep the overwhelming majority of the country away from vast swathes of its woodlands and rivers, and that we accept the monopolies of major landowners. In England, at least, we are brought up with the idea of land ownership as something sacred, though when the few rights that remain are challenged, the protests are often loud and vocal. Many of these rights, such as that of estovers (a tenant’s allowance of firewood or timber afforded from an estate or from the commons) and pannage (the privilege granted to local pig farmers to graze livestock pigs in a forest on Common Land to feed on fallen acorns) have fallen out of use in much of England, though the tradition of camping freely on the Dartmoor commons is one that many campers hold as particularly important. Dartmoor represents, for many, a symbolic freedom that is lacking across most of the country.
When the Right to Roam group put out the call earlier in the year for people to march on Dartmoor in protest against a High Court ruling that prevented wild camping on the commons there, what had started as a small protest resulted in some 3,000 protesters descending on the tiny village of Cornwood, catalysed by the threat to the long-established right to camp freely in this small, beautiful pocket of England. They arrived by bus and coach from across the country in one of the largest land rights protests in the UK since the Winter Hill protests at the end of the nineteenth century. They carried with them an effigy of Old Crockern, the guardian spirit of the moor who, legend has it, ‘grey as granite . . . his eyebrows hanging down over his glimmering eyes like sedge, and his eyes as deep as peat water pools’, rides out at night on a skeleton horse and keeps his terrifying wisht hounds in Wistman’s Wood, the most well-known of Dartmoor’s iconic woodlands. Old Crockern was a carefully chosen symbol for the Right to Roam group. The nineteenth-century Devonian priest and scholar Sabine Baring-Gould, wrote of a rich Mancunian who bought the land around Crockern Tor in Dartmoor and enclosed it to farm.
Depending on the telling, the terrifying figure of Old Crockern appeared either to one of the landowner’s men or to one of the infuriated locals, and declared of the landowner, ‘if he scratches my back, I’ll tear out his pocket’. The rich man turned farmer found the land he had enclosed entirely unworkable and, though he sank all his money into trying to prove his venture, he ended up returning to Manchester, penniless and broken.
Just as Baring-Gould’s story said much about the hubris of wealth, the story of the wild camping protest says much about where England is as a country. The landowners’ lawyers argued there was no specific right to camp freely on Dartmoor and, further, that campers were damaging the environment. By removing the right to camp, they said, they were working to ‘improve conservation of the Dartmoor Commons’. While the High Court ruling was overturned, reinstating the right to wild camp on the Dartmoor Commons, just a month after our far smaller trespass, the bigger picture remains that only about 8 per cent of England is covered by open access rules, available for the public to walk on freely without having to ask permission of a landowner. Dartmoor, where 37 per cent of the land is covered by these open access rules, is very much an outlier.
On the other side of the private woodland, in the shade of the oaks that marked the boundary of the estate through which we had passed, the group stopped to drink from their flasks. They sat and chatted among themselves and watched the house martins and swifts that were performing acrobatics across the valley on the other side of which was the woodland through which we had just passed.
One passed round a Tupperware of flapjacks and, from across the field, a figure in a floral shirt and brown flannel trousers marched towards the impromptu picnickers.
‘I would appreciate it if you would get off my land,’ he said. ‘Right now.’
Extracted from The Heart of the Woods, published by Arum.
Wyl Menmuir is a multi-award winning author based in Cornwall. His 2016 debut novel, The Many was longlisted for the Booker Award and was an Observer Best Fiction of the year pick. His second novel, Fox Fires was published in 2021 and his short fiction has been published by the BBC, Nightjar Press, Kneehigh Theatre and National Trust Books, and has appeared in Best British Short Stories. Wyl’s first full-length non fiction book, The Draw of the Sea, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors and a Holyer an Gof Award. His second non fiction book, The Heart of The Woods, was released in July 2024.
Call to action: Reclaim the commons by asserting your right to roam: https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/