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I once persuaded a friend not to move a picnicking family off his field. I spoke earnestly of access to nature, how we only understand what we experience, how 1 per cent of the population own half of the land, how we are all guardians. How can anyone own a river anyway! My friend is a Black American married to a farmer. “I don’t understand the way some of you think you can walk wherever you want,” he said, bewildered. “If I went on to someone else’s land back home, I’d be shot”.
We forget our English sensibilities about land are peculiar to us and our history. For the Right to Roam campaign, which wants the Scottish model of “responsible access” to be extended across the UK, that history mostly fits on a poster. Some high-profile books — Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England? (2019) and Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass (2021) were both bestsellers — and savvy media engagement means the movement is having a moment.
A nuanced look at this white-hot debate and the often-unheard voices affected by it was overdue. In Uncommon Ground, journalist Patrick Galbraith’s superb second book, we have it.
It took Galbraith three years of fieldwork across England and Scotland to research. The result is as much of a journey as it is a book, treading a path through the clichés as it fact-checks access arguments the author declares built “on flimsy foundations”. This is not pedantry; Galbraith sees real harm in romanticising a Gainsborough past “no more real than the countryside as conjured up by some land access campaigners holding megaphones at rallies”.
Voices often reduced to caricature — hill farmers, travellers, gamekeepers, poachers and landed gentry — offer surprises. Checking the prevailing narrative for himself, Galbraith discovers the more aristocratic the estate, the better the access. Like most conversations about land he infers this is less about nature and more about our national obsession: class. The real enemy is not “the man” but “a lack of understanding, a lack of experience, and a lack of opportunities to engage” with the countryside.
An impatient parent to Right to Roam’s perceived histrionics, Galbraith is funny in a way writing about nature rarely manages and not above blistering sarcasm. Empathetic to those who want people to know and love the natural world, he finds frustration among rural people: “I think that most of Right to Roam is just a bunch of rich Londoners trying to tell us what to do.” Examples of uncontrolled access wrecking fragile habitats and conservation efforts are plentiful. He even (heaven protect him) wades into the wild swimming cult, suggesting many seek communion with the water but forget communion requires reverence, not conquest.
The nub of Galbraith’s plea is that focusing on our access to nature lacks reciprocity. Hanging knickers from trees and making “big puppets and big claims” risks access becoming less about engagement with land, and more about performance upon it.
Is he right to be so scathing? In Margate’s Turner Contemporary hangs a picture taken in April 1932 of the men and women who defied laws prohibiting public access on Kinder Scout in the Peak District (smiling and not a placard or drum between them). Galbraith opens his book with the anniversary of this mythologised cornerstone of access campaigning, but refuses it credit for the creation of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act except it “no doubt raised the profile”. Is that not the point? Aren’t campaigns successful in moving the needle because they push it?
The question is whether all the noisy boys have drawn enough attention to shift the argument towards a balanced resolution. There are signs. Right to Roamer Amy-Jane Beer has formed a group of landowners and campaigners to debate the arguments (I am a member). Meanwhile as the case builds for a criminal law of ecocide and civil courts grant rivers, forests and mountains legal personhood, nature may end up being granted relief from access by us, not the other way around.
Time will tell but this pithy and passionate book is sure to help get us there.
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship With the Countryside by Patrick Galbraith William Collins £22, 368 pages
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