The word ‘trespass’ these days has an antique quality; we perhaps associate it more with its King James Bible usage than with any sense of physical intrusion. In any case, ramblers are by no means the only people to impose themselves upon private property. In the Chilterns, just a few miles north of London, a rather larger proposed incursion is being fought furiously. It is a conflict which might have a curiously beneficial side effect for walkers.
The posters are everywhere; on every lamp post, every tree, every stretch of fence. ‘Stop HS2’, is their gaudily spelt out message. The people of the Chilterns are united in one great common cause, and that is to thwart the building of a new high-speed rail link across this self-consciously beautiful area. The fear that this mooted railway line has been generating is as old as the fear of all railways, stretching back to their genesis in the mid-nineteenth century. Not merely that the trains will bring noise and ugliness, but also that the line’s construction will rip open the pretty landscape, almost like a scalpel opening a body. The imagery is deliberately visceral. The people of the Chilterns fear that they will have more than most to lose.
This, it is argued, is an area that is a distillation of all the beauty of England. Here there are great swathes of old woodland of oak and larch and birch, fine country parks, and cherished wildlife, such as the once rare red kites, which now swoop and circle with wide winged aristocratic languor in the skies above.
Here is an area where villages of russet coloured brick and flinty churches and little greens seem almost absurd in their Englishness. Indeed, used as the locations for the popular TV detective series Midsomer Murders, this preposterous Englishness became controversial when the show’s producer claimed that they didn’t use black or Asian actors because they would unbalance that very particular ‘traditional’ feel. Yet the area – which is hugely popular with walkers – has real history too. If we reach back a couple of centuries, we see conflicts about the entire subject of trespass, and about the sanctity of land ownership.
One local conflict dating back almost 300 years involved another form of land seizure. Amid all the acts of enclosure of the eighteenth century came a new term: emparkation. Land that was once there to be worked – either arable or pasture – was now adapted by the landowner for quite a different purpose: that of private enjoyment, and of leisure. Rich wet furrows and hedges of sharp entangling hawthorn were transformed into artful gardens and carefully manufactured wood and glades, with new lakes and rivers and streams. Landscape artists such as Humphry Repton even created artificial hills and valleys for their patrons. For the majority of people who lived in and around such areas, this now meant being excluded from the land that perhaps they had once toiled upon. For with emparkation came very solid, tangible walls. The borderlines between private and public property were more sharply defined than at any time since the castles and their keeps. In 1726, Daniel Defoe visited a community near Tring in Hertfordshire, where such a process was just beginning:
There was an eminent contest here, between Mr Guy, and the poor of the parish, about his enclosing part of the Common to make him a Park; Mr Guy, presuming upon his power, set up his pales, and took in a large parcel of open land, called Wiggington Common; the Cottagers and the Farmers opposed it, by their complaints a great while; but finding he went on with his work and resolved to do it, they rose upon him, pulled down his banks, and forced up his pales, and carried away the wood, or set it on a heap and burnt it; and this they did several times, until he was obliged to desist.
If the good people of Tring imagined that they had won some sort of permanent victory over this tyrannical overlord, however, they were mistaken. ‘After some time,’ wrote Defoe, ‘he began again, offering to treat with the people, and to give them any equivalent for it. But not being satisfactory, they mobbed him again.’ Clearly, though, Mr Guy had some clever emoluments up his sleeve, for even after this outbreak of protest, he gave emparkation another go. When Defoe returned to the area some time later, he noted the developments with interest. ‘How they accommodated it at last I know not,’ he wrote. ‘But I see that Mr Guy has a Park … I mention this,’ he concluded, ‘as an instance of the popular Claim in England, which we call right of Commonage, which the Poor take to be as much their Property, as a Rich Man’s is his own.’
Quite so, and yet the rich men tended to win through. As parks grew, and the uses and the ownership of land sharpened further into the recessionary years of the early nineteenth century, the notion of trespass as a serious transgression also seemed to grow greater. With the parks came greater suspicion on the part of the landowners – especially of vagrants, and of travelling men and women. And they mirrored, in many ways, the old Royal Forests, with their exclusive rights to game. John Clare wrote much about the ‘mildew’ and ‘tyranny’ of enclosures, and in his poem ‘The Mores’ he recalls being able to walk and ramble and roam in country that was once open:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
Then, some verses later, he surveys, with cold rage, the changes that have been wrought upon this ancient walkers’ landscape:
These paths are stopt – the rude philistines thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
On paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’.
Enclosure, then, is not merely an affront to rights of way, and to the common enjoyment of a beautiful landscape; it also has the effect of trampling on precious memory, the very roots of childhood. Today, those who campaign against paths that have been obstructed, or old woodlands that have been closed off, feel much the same sense of emotional violation – that to lose a path is to lose part of the fabric of your life. As the nineteenth century progressed, the law was still very firm on what constituted trespass. Even a site such as Stonehenge, then owned privately, was subject to these same rules. A Judge Farwell gave his opinions on how such a place should be regulated:
The liberality with which landowners in this country have for years past allowed visitors free access to objects of interest on their property is amply sufficient to explain the access which has undoubtedly been allowed for many years to visitors to Stonehenge from all over the world. It would indeed be unfortunate if the Courts were to presume novel and unheard of trusts and statutes from acts of friendly courtesy and thus drive landowners to close their gates in order to preserve their property.1
Now, when you stride around in the glowingly abundant Chilterns – specifically, upon one particular woodland path near Wendover – you feel the occasional tremor of a trespasser’s discomfort when you reach a very particular place. It is a path upon which the most careless walker becomes extremely attentive within the space of a few yards. Yet it is also this area that illustrates so abundantly the strides forward made by the rambling movement in the last thirty years or so. Take the path up the hill from Wendover railway station, and within minutes, you are staring at a very large sign. It is the first of very many, all shouting the same thing: ‘The Ridgeway’. This is one of the most thoroughly reclaimed roads in Britain, and it constitutes almost the walker’s equivalent of a motorway. Stretching roughly from Hertfordshire to Dorset, east to west, and spanning roughly 180 miles, it has in recent years become something of a national jewel. For what track – save the North Downs running through Kent – could boast a comparable history?
The Ridgeway has Bronze Age roots, stretching back as far as the fourth century BC; along this grey chalkstoned road would walk men and horses, merchants and merchandise, travellers, soldiers, economic migrants. It is extremely easy to imagine the soft leather of their shoes scuffed with the white dust from the road. It is also along this track that you can easily imagine figures from a variety of ages – including Hardyesque sufferers like Jude the Obscure – walking forth, up and down the gentle slopes of these ridges. Here is Jude as a young lad doing that very thing in 1896:
Not a soul was visible on the hedgeless highway, or on either side of it, and the white road seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the sky … the whole northern semicircle between east and west, to a distance of forty or fifty miles, spread itself before him; a bluer, moister atmosphere, evidently, than that he breathed up here.2
The view from the top of Coombe Hill is one that seems to transcend time. Hundreds of feet beneath you, on a vast plain of contrasting greens, is the classic English patchwork: mostly fields of pasture, with some brown fields of arable, divided by thick dark green hedges, stretching off into the blur of distance. What hits you is the lack of anything obviously twenty-first century in view – until, that is, you round the corner of the monument on the hill and find yourself gazing upon the hazy, Turneresque prospect of the Didcot power station some twenty miles away. Its far distant cooling towers, flickering in the gold autumn light, look a little like ancient earthernware beakers in shape and colour. So even with modern industry, landscape is patterned with echoes.
Just before you head off into another copse of trees, there, down in the valley, snug and sheltered and secure, you get the first glimpse of a most exceptional redbrick property, about a mile or so away. A quick saunter through the silvery green of a birch wood carefully coppiced, then across a road, into a field – and suddenly the path signs are quite a different matter: these new ones are stern and stark, and designed to trigger anxiety. The walker is now piercingly aware that he must stick to the track for – as these large black notices at 100-yard intervals proclaim – trespass on this particular property would be a criminal offence. Judging by the proliferation of very heavy, large, black security cameras, you suspect it might even be a little more than that; that if you did decide cheekily to turn right and stroll through this pasture field, you would be surrounded within seconds by men with machine guns. Yet the unwary walker might have no idea – if he had not consulted a map, say – that he is now standing within the bounds of Chequers, the Prime Minister’s weekend estate. Move along the narrow brown path running at the edge of the field, towards a line of beech trees and what looks like a road; except that when you are standing on it, you realise it is not a road but a driveway leading up to the house itself. To your left are some very serious, locked gates. It is now that you realise that you are actually inside the estate. It is a weirdly thrilling moment, simply standing there in that pleasant afternoon silence, on that grand drive. How many heat detecting devices are homing in on my rucksack, remotely checking for sinister devices? Upon how many screens is an image of my face being projected, while it is checked against images of rather more fanatical folk? You simply cannot help wondering: if you were to now turn right, on that drive pointing towards the house, and break into a quick trot – the house itself is no more than about 400 yards away – how long would it be before you were mown down by marksmen? The Prime Minister has been rather more lenient with me, though, than a great many other landowners in the past would have been. Also, I suspect, this patch of path running through the Chequers estate has not been open that long. I cannot imagine for one moment the idea of 1950s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan tolerating walkers within a mile of his business.
High above wheels a red kite. Until a few years ago, the only ones left were to be found in North Wales – there were none in England at all. Now they seem to be back in force. The one lazily circling my head, seemingly buoyed on thermal currents, has a very relaxed air. You wouldn‘t have thought that it was eagerly hunting carrion. They are quite wonderful to watch when they are swooping down; not far from here, in a friend’s back garden, I have seen a magnificent red kite glide insouciantly in at the suggestion of some dropped kitchen rubbish. Meanwhile, Chequers represents a nice example of late, unobtrusive emparkation. Here, in the lee of a wooded valley, a small sanctuary has been established, with geometrical ordered roads and trees and hedges; while the fields immediately around it represent the edited highlights of countryside.
We return to questions of land ownership and property rights; one of the arguments that anti-HS2 protestors – among them local farmers – have deployed has been precisely to do with walkers’ rights. The new line, they have argued, will result in the abolition, or indeed the complete destruction, of dozens of local footpaths. Added to this, they say, will be the destruction of the beautiful views from the Ridgeway path. In other words, they appear to be saying, one of the grounds for stopping HS2 is the rights and aesthetic considerations of walkers. It is a rather lovely point; one that tells us much about the political position of today’s ramblers, and the weight of opinion that they are perceived to carry.
Let us not forget the ground upon which we walk and, in several senses, its tremendous value as well as its attraction. ‘The Country Landowners Association welcomes considerate walkers,’ proclaims a yellow sign upon a five bar gate. Well that’s very good of the CLA; considerate walkers are suitably grateful. But the notice seems calculated on another level to let it be known that we are just one step away from transgression; by all means use the footpath: but make sure that you remember exactly who all this belongs to. Ramblers are quite accustomed to such narrow eyed passive aggression. It is preferable to the outbreaks of aggressive aggression that we still read about from time to time.
In the 1990s, there were regular battles between ramblers and the millionaire property developer Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, who has an estate down in Uckfield, East Sussex. His house, Hamilton Palace, was the largest private residence built in Britain, and was adorned with a copper dome. The house also had a mausoleum. Added to this, though, was a 150-year-old footpath running a little distance away, from which the house was visible. Van Hoogstraten referred to ramblers as ‘the great unwashed’, and ‘the scum of the earth’. He blocked access to the footpath by means of concrete blocks and old refrigeration units. Locals and Ramblers’ Association campaigners repeatedly petitioned the local council to take action; the council seemed powerless in the face of such an implacable and aggressive figure. In the meantime, any walkers who did contrive to get beyond these crude barriers were intimidated and harassed by security guards and contract workers. It was only really when Van Hoogstraten was wrongly jailed in 2002 (the conviction was quashed a couple of years later and he was released) that at last the council paralysis was broken, and the obstacles to access were removed.
Another blow to walkers’ pride came from the reedy singer Madonna in 2004, when she and then husband Guy Ritchie succeeded in blocking access to a path across their estate, Ashcombe Park in Wiltshire. Two overriding reasons were cited. First that because there was so much game shooting, walkers would be at risk for half the year. Second, and perhaps rather more germane, Mr and Mrs Madonna felt ‘their human rights would be infringed’ by members of the public tramping around in sight of the house, or even just by sitting on the paths and watching them. The difficulty is that – perhaps even more than politicians – pop stars are rather vulnerable to the attentions of disturbed people. Look not only at John Lennon, but also at George Harrison, who was attacked by an intruder on his Oxfordshire estate. If I was Madonna, I’m not sure that I would be that keen on seeing perfect strangers milling around near my French windows. And in fairness to herself and Ritchie, the walking ban did not apply to Quakers; there is reportedly a Quaker burial ground on the estate, and access to it was not blocked in any way.
It’s difficult in those kinds of cases. Apparently less difficult was the recent case of a landowner in Kent, who in August 2010 was locked in bitter dispute with local walkers, and found himself receiving very unfavourable coverage in the newspapers. Walkers complained that since buying the estate, he was blocking access to a previously well-used path. His view was that the path across his land was home to many rare species, and as such should be accorded the status of a Site of Special Scientific Interest; it would be deleterious, his team argued, for the local wildlife to be disturbed by constant access.
Those ranged against him argued that the path in question was part of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way, and was self-evidently a long-term key walking route. It is still not quite known how the entire dispute has been resolved, but the interesting thing is the way that the press seemed to automatically side with the ramblers, rather than with the landowner. When it came to the public inquiry on the subject, prominence was given to the voices of his local walking opponents. In this sense, times have changed, and very clearly in favour of the walker. It is actually not all that long ago when more barbarously minded landowners – using devices such as mantraps and spring-guns – were regularly favoured by local magistrates. Such savage implements themselves dated back to an even older conflict that raged on from the time of the Norman landgrab: the war between landlord and poacher.
Mantraps, now featured chiefly in reruns of vintage thrillers, had steel jaws that would clamp with lightning speed the leg of the transgressor, biting through both flesh and bone. If the trap was set in a particularly remote location, it was perfectly possibly for the poacher (or general interloper) to die in this position through blood loss. Other sorts of mantraps were held to be more humane, in that they didn’t cut the flesh, merely smashed the bone. In 1821, Sydney Smith wrote:
There is a sort of horror in thinking of a whole land filled with lurking engines of death … the lords of manors eyeing their peasantry as so many butts and marks, and panting to hear the click of the trap and to see the flash of the gun. How many human beings educated in liberal knowledge and Christian feeling, can doom to certain destruction a poor wretch, tempted by the sight of animals that naturally appear to him to belong to one person as well as another, we are at a loss to conceive.3
William Cobbett also found instances in the early-nineteenth century when any trespasser was eminently deserving of sympathy, especially in cases of wood-gathering, where areas of trees had been enclosed by the local landowners. In the winter, such wood was vital as fuel, and there were cases in the West Country where certain timber poachers articulated a feeling within small communities that such a resource had once been seen as common, like water, and that it was a fairly obvious moral wrong to have had it removed from them in this fashion.
Even in the Edwardian age, a walker’s act of trespass could change the course of a life. In his recent book about the friendship between the poets Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, author Matthew Hollis cites a trespassing incident in 1914 that was the pivotal moment in the association between the two men. While on one of their customary walks around May Hill in Dorset, the two men were confronted by a gamekeeper with a gun. In an angry exchange, the gamekeeper told them to ‘clear out’; Frost countered that he was entitled to roam where he wished. Indeed, the incident so infuriated Frost that the two poets followed the gamekeeper to his home, where they confronted him. This time, the keeper was altogether more threatening with the gun and the poets once more backed off. But Edward Thomas considered that he had behaved in a cowardly fashion, insufficiently supportive of his friend, throughout; and later, the incident played upon him, more and more – his fear, and his apparent failure to stand fully by Frost. Hollis quotes Frost as saying: ‘That’s why he [Thomas] went to war.’4
The use of guns by keepers and farmers persisted for an extraordinary amount of time. Tom Stephenson cited a case as recent as 1953 when two ramblers in Sussex were blasted in their faces by a spring gun – in essence, a shotgun hidden in the undergrowth. The men, wounded but otherwise all right, traced the gun to the bracken. Their case came to court. The game-keeper in question claimed that he had mistakenly loaded the shotgun with cartridges rather than blanks, and that he had been using this method to warn him of poachers for the last twenty years. He claimed that in all that time, there had been no mishaps of any sort, and that this device was really merely an ‘alarm gun’. He was asked, if this was the case and that it was merely the sound of the shot that was necessary, why the gun was not pointing at the ground? However, the gamekeeper was backed up by the local police, who insisted that such armed guns were legitimate. The gamekeeper was acquitted.
It might be worth swiftly hearing a word on the subject of trespass from the most famous gamekeeper in literary history. Oliver Mellors, Lady Chatterley’s lover, is quite assiduous about his job. But when it comes to trespass and the law, his attitude is at best ambivalent:
‘I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I caught and, oh well, I don’t like people.’
He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice.
‘Do you hate being a game-keeper?’ Connie asked.
‘Being a game-keeper, no! So long as I’m left alone. But when I have to go messing around at the police station, and various other places, and waiting for a lot of fools to attend to me … oh, well, I get mad.’
Mellors has a more personal sense of ‘trespass’ than that encompassing the woodland; it is very much to do with his own privacy, and his own desire to be alone. One wonders about all those real life gamekeepers, the sort whose job it partly was to chase urban scamps like John Bunting off the moors. The notion of trespass, and the sense of an unwarranted invasion of property, is felt by Mellors’ employer Clifford Chatterley, much more keenly:
A jay called harshly, many little birds fluttered. But there was no game; no pheasants. They had been killed off during the war, and the wood had been left unprotected, til now Clifford had got his game-keeper again.
Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.
‘I want this wood perfect … untouched. I want nobody to trespass in it.’
Fiction it may be, but we hear a groundswell of the sort of emotion that many landowners really do feel; the sense of heritage, the idea of land being safeguarded and passed down through the generations. The notion, above all, of proud inheritance. To them, walking or rambling is a very clear transgression. The walkers might leave no trace of their passing, but the mere idea that they have disregarded the idea of private property, treated it as though it were nothing more than an airy abstraction, poses a very direct and emotional threat. In that sense, the walker as a figure represents pure anarchy, caring nothing for old ties, or possession. The walker stands at the head of a more destructive principle; if he can wander over private property, as though it belonged to no one and everyone simultaneously, then what about all those who might follow?
Today, even with open access and the fact that so much land seems to be owned by the National Trust, there are very particular laws about trespass. According to the Ramblers’ Association, trespass is where ‘a person who strays from the right of way, or uses it other than for passing and re-passing, commits trespass against the landowner.’ In most cases, trespass is a civil rather than a criminal matter. A landowner may use ‘reasonable force’ to compel a trespasser to leave, but not more than is reasonably necessary. Unless injury to the property can be proven, a landowner could probably only recover nominal damages by suing for trespass. Of course you might have to meet a landowner’s legal costs. ‘A notice saying “trespassers will be prosecuted”, aimed for instance at keeping you off a private drive,’ the Association continues, ‘is usually meaningless. Criminal prosecution could only arise if you trespass and damage property. However, under public order law, trespassing with an intention to reside may be a criminal offence under some circumstances. It is also a criminal offence to trespass on railway land and sometimes on military training land.’ In the case of beleaguered celebrities, there is also such a thing as ‘aggravated trespass’ which is also viewed seriously. This is the sort of trespass carried out by crazed fans intent on getting close their idols.
I know it is heresy among walkers to say so, but are there not occasions when we should feel some sympathy for landowners? As a walker, I often find myself feeling rather embarrassed when a path seems to wind close to a private front door, or trails across what is obviously somebody’s back garden. Yes, the path might well have been there since the sixteenth century; equally though, you don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable by peering in through their kitchen windows. There is a telling thought experiment that you can carry out. If you had had some good fortune and as a result, you were to buy a house in the country, and this house had a big garden, and perhaps a field or two, and a path, how far away would the path have to be from your windows before you felt truly comfortable: 20 yards, 100 yards, 250 yards, out of sight altogether? Is it perhaps that those who hail from towns are more sensitive to intrusions on private space, given the scarcity of that space in cities? More pertinently, might it also have to do with fear of crime? No one is ever going to think that a pair of married middle-aged ramblers are career burglars. However, there are rogue elements operating in rural districts, and for many people, it is difficult not to become a little tense at the sound of unfamiliar footsteps marching close, or of fleeting glimpses of strange figures nearby.
So we raise our sunhats to the current Prime Minister, David Cameron, and all his predecessors who have been so gracious about inviting us to the edge of Chequers. Happily, it now also works both ways – that is, the grand man in the grand house hobnobbing on the rather more populated footpaths all around. Over Christmas 2010, Mr Cameron together with wife Samantha, education secretary Michael Gove, and also in their party, the actress Helena Bonham Carter, wandered out of Chequers and up Coombe Hill, with all the other Barbour jacketed, golden labrador walking ramblers. And this very upper-middle class Prime Ministerial party happily posed for photographs with other walkers. This would never happen in a city; it could only ever happen upon a popular footpath frequented by like-minded middle class people, in sensible walking shoes and warm woollies. More than this: the invincibly upper-middle class Camerons have in a curious way conferred the ultimate respectability upon rambling. Instead of sticking to privately owned ground, they instead went walking on land that is, in effect, held in trust on behalf of the State. I can’t help feeling that the Kinder Scout trespassers would have regarded this warmly.
Less than a hundred miles to the west, though, and there is a great mass of land so forbidden to the casual walker, that even the Prime Minister himself would have to ask before he and his wife and guests could ramble across it. Even then, it is not completely guaranteed that permission would be granted on any particular day. That would depend very much on where the tanks were rolling.