Should the access movement be less political?
a response to common criticisms of the right to roam campaign
This is a post by Jon Moses, co-director of Right to Roam. For more in-depth essays and thoughts from our campaign team, sign up to this substack.
I like Nicholas Crane.
When I began thinking more deeply about the politics of the countryside, his Making of the British Landscape was one of the first books I read. Yet when pressed on his thoughts about the right to roam in a recent talk at the Hay Festival, he gave some answers which I found pretty unpersuasive. In fact, they were a bit of a bingo card of the objections we hear time and again when campaigning for access reform.
Nicholas is an eminent geographer (a former president of the RGS, no less) so his words carry weight. They were duly reported in a Times article (“Why Britain’s ‘most famous walker’ has a problem with the right to roam”, May 29th 2026) and I was invited to participate in a quick debate with him on Times Radio, where there wasn’t space to get into the details. With that in mind, I thought I’d develop them here.
First, it’s that’s helpful to understand that access reform has different elements. Good reform will address all of them together, and ensure they’re complementary. These are:
1) the underlying statutory rights, which establish the access ‘contract’ and lay the foundations for what is and isn’t possible. These serve to protect areas of informal & existing access from being lost, and set the terms for how access is communicated on the ground. In England and Wales, the statutory rights are laid out under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. In Scotland, they’re covered by the Land Reform Act 2003.
2) the access infrastructure, which makes those rights practicable – this can be everything from informal tracks, to full-blown rights of way, to accessibility interventions, to launch ramps on rivers, or access points for swimmers on reservoirs.
3) the access culture, which sets the norms and standards for how access is undertaken, and ideally leverages it for the benefit of citizen science, nature guardianship and ‘leaving a positive trace’ (a concept we call Wild Service)
I start with this because it’s a habit of this conversation to trade these different elements off against one another - for instance, emphasising access infrastructure instead of statutory rights - or expecting culture to change before the rights that nourish that culture are permitted. I strongly believe this is the wrong approach. We instead need to consider all the elements together.
Now, to Crane’s comments.
‘Crane said a right to roam was “quite complicated in England, where population density is six times what it is in Scotland”.’
Other than ‘can I camp in your garden?!’ (to which the correct answer is an immediate stone-faced ‘Yes’) this is probably the most common criticism we hear: a right to roam is all well and good in Scandinavia and Scotland, but England is just too crowded.
But I think density is the wrong metric. It’s the distribution which matters. Sure, population density is lower in Scotland than in England. Given 70% of Scots are concentrated in the Central Belt, is this really so different to the situation in, e.g. the M62 corridor?
When the Land Reform Act was passed in Scotland in 2003 its innovation was to apply rights of access precisely to areas like the populated central belt and agricultural lowlands of Scotland (since customary access to the highlands was already long standing). There is no evidence that calamity ensued as a result. If it can work in such places, then why not in England?
Secondly, density is relative. Is England really all that dense? Only around 10% is actually developed. Of that, about 5% accounts for residential use and gardens. Look out the plane window while cruising over England and what you’ll actually see is a whole lot of green and a whole lot of empty.
Now, England can sometimes feel dense. After all – we’re all sharing the same small percentage of it. Perhaps it’s the very limits of access that creates the illusion of concentration.
‘“To be practical I think a right to routes would be more helpful so we could connect up the disjointed sections of existing public rights of way, so that we can reach schools, shops and railway stations or even just to make circular walks around villages.”’
This is another common criticism. ‘Why focus on roaming rights when you should be improving the Rights of Way network instead? After all, it’s the paths people want, not the right to roam everywhere!’
The truth is that not only are the two compatible, they’re complementary.
Imagine a local authority wishes to establish a new green travel route, or join up some existing footpaths in order to make a convenient circular walk. At the moment, creating such a route would require the agreement of the landowners, often many landowners. As an example, we worked out that creating just one of the government’s vaunted ‘national river walks’ along the river Dart would require negotiation with as many as 108 riparian landowners. Which perhaps explains why they already seem to have given up using the river walks to actually expand access, beyond some infrastructure improvements. Sure, some landowners might be open to such routes. But most will view them as an inconvenience. It only takes one landowner in the chain to refuse permission for routes to be made unviable or prone to awkward diversions.
This has led governments to try and incentivise the landowners to provide access in exchange for public money. These ‘permissive access’ schemes are much loved by landowner lobby groups and you can see why: they get money for a path over which they retain full control. It will never become a ‘right of way’ so long as it has formal permission, and that permission can be withdrawn at any moment – for instance, when the public money runs out. This is exactly what has happened. Something like £20million of public money was spent on permissive access schemes in the last round of this funding (twice what it cost to implement the ‘right of responsible access’ across the whole of Scotland). Since then, the funding has lapsed and the permissive access has been withdrawn (being temporary or contingent in nature, it could never be mapped anyway). Any capital investment in access infrastructure (e.g. accessibility improvements to assist those with limited mobility) has therefore been wasted.
Alternatively, local authorities can enact a Public Path Creation Order. In theory, this weighs the public benefit against the impacts on landowners and, if found reasonable, allows for the creation of new paths. In practice, the compensation requirements are such that this is both expensive and time consuming. Since exclusion is the default, it can be maintained that any new access represents a loss to the land’s value, for which the landowner must be compensated. As a result, PPCOs are rarely used.
By contrast, in Scotland, where the ‘right of responsible access’ presides over most land and water, there is no ‘loss’ for putting in such path infrastructure (in Scotland these are known as ‘core paths’) because the public access rights already exist. Since these rights are widespread, mostly uniform, and make sensible exceptions to protect things like privacy and crops, there has also been no impact on the value of land and therefore no compensatory requirements would apply.
In fact, where access rights already exist, the incentives for landowners change. It is then in the landowner’s interest to embrace path infrastructure, or even create it themselves voluntarily, since this becomes a helpful tool of land management (especially in popular access areas) rather than a mere imposition or inconvenience.
Where the underlying statutory rights provide a presumption of access, they therefore serve as an enabler for infrastructure in three ways: 1) by ‘unlocking’ the informal infrastructure which already exists 2) removing incentives for its obstruction and increasing the incentives for its voluntary creation 3) overcoming the legal and economic barriers to its creation.
Now, Scotland isn’t perfect. They’re facing the same budgetary constraints as everyone else to get the access infrastructure they need. And England and Wales definitely have a head start in this regard due to their more extensive Rights of Way networks. The problem is that this network is limited in what it permits, uneven in its distribution, and sometimes poorly maintained or purposefully obstructed.
In the event of a ‘Scottish style’ right to roam being introduced in England and Wales, we’d therefore like to see local authorities tasked with drawing up new access masterplans, which use the freedom of new statutory rights to create a modern, joined up network of routes and other infrastructure for the benefit of everyone in their authority.
‘Crane, who once walked the length of Britain as much as possible in a straight line — which he admitted on Friday involved trespassing — said he was also in favour of attempts to restore “lost ways” — 49,000 miles of routes that were used by the public for more than 20 years but were not made into public rights of way and have now fallen out of use.’
It isn’t an either / or – both are possible. But it is worth noting that every additional Right of Way is theoretically an additional maintenance burden; either on the local authority, the landowner, or on access volunteers. These historic ways do have an inherent cultural value. And it’s definitely the case that restoring some of them to full use will provide meaningful public benefits. Others may have fallen out of use for a reason, perhaps because they’re relics of kinetic patterns which no longer fit the habits of the modern countryside.
We need serviceable routes which fit modern needs, not to solely preserve the ways of the rural yesteryear; many of which were themselves compromises leftover when a wider, more ‘roamable’ countryside was fractured.
On the experience of trespassing: I know that Crane has spoken before of the fear he felt while trespassing across England. The way the anticipation of confrontation soured his experience of doing something as ordinary as passing through the landscape of his own country; even if the reality of his encounters with gamekeepers and farmers were mostly positive once the ice was broken (though this can vary depending on how you look and sound!). We should remember that this feeling is totally needless. In England and Wales, where trespass is a civil offence, the law achieves one thing alone: it makes the innocent feel afraid, the angry feel emboldened, and the atmosphere of the countryside soured by paranoia and misanthropy.
Meanwhile, people who really do have ill-intent aren’t bothered in the slightest.
Who does such fear serve? What does it achieve? What would removing it really cost? Does it make any sense as a way to define our collective relationship to land? Not to me.
Crane said he recognised how “incredibly important” it was “not to be constrained to footpaths”, citing how people can “wander at will” in many areas including Dartmoor, the Peak District, Pennines, Snowdonia and Lake District.
I agree.
Yes, most people most of the time want an accessible path to follow (see above for how underlying rights support that). Still, there are many good reasons for wider roaming rights too. A lot of natural history, citizen science, practical conservation, guardianship, archaeological and spiritual interest and so on takes place, by necessity, off the path.
There is also the psychological freedom of moving through a landscape which doesn’t feel snipped and curtailed, or like its giving the absolute minimal allowance to your right to exist. See ‘The Iron Wall of Somerset’ for an extreme manifestation of something we’re often tacitly accepting all the time. Beyond the extremes, it’s a common enough experience to find a Right of Way reduced to little more than a “thin strip of legitimacy” (Nick Hayes) running between a barbed wire fence. The effect is mostly unconscious but I suspect sorely felt, and corrosive to some of the very things that make us human.
Yes, the burden of responsibility grows when one strays off the path, especially to our fellow species. But those who do it most are either 1) children, whose free roaming we can and must forgive 2) roaming with mindful intent, and therefore the most likely to attend to any resultant responsibilities 3) indifferent to what the law does and doesn’t say, in which case, are going to do it anyway.
“There is also the fact that food security is a massive, massive issue. We don’t have sufficient food security and so farmland is a critical resource,” Crane said.
I found this comment strange.
Leaving aside what we actually mean when we talk about food security (contra the National Farmers’ Union, it is not the same thing as autarky – in fact, that would be a profoundly insecure food system), I cannot understand what access rights have to do with it.
Food production continues in Scotland. And the ‘right of responsible access’ there, as in Scandinavia, applies to uncultivated ground or to the field edges – not to land where crops are growing.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the ideal solution for farmland connectivity. We’re open to other suggestions (our access-friendly farmer group has suggested a voluntary set of ‘recommended routes’). Yet a not unreasonable aim of agricultural policy - as mooted already by Dave Morris, who helped drive through the Land Reform Act - is to support leaving field edges or margins uncultivated anyway. Those with low footfall provide wildlife benefits, those with high footfall provide access benefits. They’re also increasingly relevant for integrated pest management, which increasingly features in agri-environmental payments. Win-win-win.
He [Crane] added: “It is simply not practical, as it was decades ago, to run around in fields when you have got absolutely ginormous tractors with spreaders and other stuff being towed around.
Okay, I also found this comment a bit of an eye-roller. To be fair, it may have just been a flippant remark for the audience… except that this is actually a genuine claim made by the NFU and CLA as to why we can’t have access rights. And one that was even solemnly repeated by the former Secretary of State for DEFRA, Steve Reed, when he explained why Labour wouldn’t support Scottish-style rights across the border.
There is no evidence to support it.
We have pulled all the data on fatalities on agricultural land in England, Wales and Scotland between 2018 - 2023. And guess what, the total public deaths on Scottish farmland across those five years was… one. The victim was actually a retired farmer, who sadly died while moving cattle (so not really a ‘public’ death in the ordinary sense at all).
Total public deaths overall are low, with a cumulative total of 24 over the five years across all three countries. Only 13 of these were access users.
You’ll notice that Scotland, which essentially had zero public deaths across all five years, despite having a universalist approach to access, is actually the positive outlier here. So the reality is the opposite of what Nicholas (and the NFU, the CLA, and Steve Reed) suggest, even as a proportion of population.
I wouldn’t want to speculate too much as to why that is. But perhaps it’s actually easier to avoid farmland hazards when you’re not scared of being accused of trespass. The most dangerous thing you’ll encounter on farms as an access user is cattle. And it’s much simpler to avoid the cattle if you’re not forced to stick to a very specific path. Sure, tractors are big. But they’re also slow. If the ordinary person can navigate cities full of traffic, I’m confident they can move out of the way of an off-road John Deere inching along at 6mph in a field.
“And there is the dog issue which has complicated matters enormously because landowners and farmers have a scapegoat now. The public can’t control their dogs [they say] so we can’t allow people to walk on farmland. That is now a massive issue.”
On this we can agree. Dogs are definitely a problem (and wonderful and beautiful and good for us in all kinds of ways). There are more of them than ever. They’re especially a pain at the moment because a lot of them missed proper socialisation during the pandemic lockdowns. They can wreak a lot more havoc on wildlife and livestock than humans can. Roaming rights should probably not extend to them in the first instance.
Obviously – none of this is the fault of the dogs. They’re just being dogs. But I think it’s fair to say we do have a cultural problem with dogs and we’re (mostly) doing bugger all to fix it.
But it’s also true that this issue is completely resolvable. The Right to Roam campaign has done quite a lot of thinking about how to resolve it and been quite bold in calling for greater regulation. It’s a bit annoying that, years on, we’re still having the same unproductive conversation about the fact dogs are an issue, when pretty much everyone agrees. It’s time to discuss the solutions. Here are ours.
In fact, I’m starting to get suspicious, as Nicholas himself seems to suggest, that some of those stakeholders rather like having a bogeydog to blame. We invited groups like the NFU to co-sign our proposals to show there’s unity on this between access groups and farming groups alike. They didn’t bite.
It’s also notable that when you go back through the archives to previous eras of access debates (prior to the CRoW Act in 2000 for instance, and the Land Reform Act in 2003), the same debates recur again and again: ‘It’ll be a disaster! It’s the end of farming as we know it! The end of wildlife! The public will cause havoc! We already have enough paths! Dogs!’. Yet while nothing is perfect, it should be obvious by now that these tales of calamity have never come to pass.
I’ll leave you with the words of one former president of the National Farmers’ Union who, when interviewed after he’d left his office in 1996, noted that “I think farmers are extremely conservative when it comes to granting public access… I have had no problems. I think farmers in general greatly exaggerate the threat.”
The 72-year-old author and broadcaster told the Hay Festival he also worried that the right to roam campaign was more of a political issue than a genuine “countryside access movement”.
I don’t know what it means to distinguish a “genuine countryside access movement” from a “political issue”. Of course it’s a political issue. Nearly all decisions about land are inherently political. They’re about power, history, policy, democracy, property, and contesting rights. That’s why every single ‘genuine countryside access movement’ I can think of has had a political character.
In his Times Radio interview, Nicholas cited the Open Spaces Society as a standout example of such a movement. But the OSS was created out of mass protest against the attempted enclosure of Epping Forest. The Winter Hill mass trespass on the moors above Bolton: organised by a local branch of the Social Democratic Federation. The Kinder Mass Trespass: organised by a group of young Mancunian communists. The first full-time secretary of the Ramblers Association, Tom Stephenson: a conchie, a socialist, a pacifist.
What of the opponents of access reform? When it was founded in the early 20th century, one of the main aims of the Country Land and Business Association - the lobby organisation for major landowners - was to prevent public access to private land, and to force compensation claims when access rights were granted. They continue to be the main lobbyists against access reform today. Are we saying it’s apolitical when these groups act in their interests, but of an unseemly political character when campaign groups do the same in the public interest?
Some may consider it impolite to draw the obvious links between our feudal history, the vast concentrations in land ownership, and the paucity of rights of public access. I think not doing so would be an act of intellectual dereliction.
Want to hear more from the Right to Roam campaign? Sign up to our newsletter at righttoroam.org.uk. Want to become a campaign supporter and help us win a true right to roam in England and Wales? Visit: righttoroam.org.uk/donate.
Sounds like he has forgotten why the caged bird sings. Great thorough article