Fires, tracks, lines and legislation
‘Any friend of mine walks where he likes in this country, or I’ll want to know the reason why’
– Mr Badger, The Wind in the Willows
On the morning of St George’s Day 1932, a teenager called George Beattie Elliot took the train from his home in Preston. With his climbing ropes and enough supplies for a couple of days’ camping and roaming, he travelled the sixty miles to the brim of the Peak District and set off on foot.
He was not alone. Every weekend, thousands of men and women would stream from the blackened, industrialised cities of Sheffield, Manchester, Bolton and Preston to catch a breath of fresh air and clean the chimneys of their lungs. Freed from the beat of the working week, they sought scenery and self-determination. They walked twenty miles up and down dale, and then back to the pub on a Sunday night for huzzahs, huzzoohs and a socialist singsong. Rambling, cycling and climbing clubs had spawned across the area, train companies were offering group discounts, and, with the new Youth Hostel Association offering cheap accommodation for the overnighters, the thirty-seven square miles of Bleaklow were a honey pot for the worker bees of the north.
George cut off the busy main paths and, trespassing now, he sneaked across the open moorland. He was heading to the Laddow Rocks, where he would spend the night in a cave halfway down a steep scree slope, a small pocket of secret space, silent and snug beneath the heavens. He slept, and must have woken early, because by mid-afternoon the next day he had already covered thirteen miles, passed Bleaklow, gone through Snake Pass and was ascending the north face of Kinder Scout, the highest point of the Peak District. The cities of Manchester and Bolton rolled beneath him and if the day had been crystal clear he would have been able to see, over a hundred miles away, the white peaks of Snowdonia. The rocks at the summit, silhouetted by the bright sky, ran like the turrets of a ransacked stone fort, and, as he approached them, he heard a commotion from the other side of the peak.
He climbed further and as the hill flattened out he saw a crowd of a few hundred, mostly around his age, singing and shouting, advancing towards a line of a dozen gamekeepers. As soon as the crowd saw George, their shouts inexplicably turned to cheers, they waved their caps at him and urged him on like a sporting hero. The keepers turned and, as several rushed towards him, George saw the broad sticks they were holding. George’s confusion intensified as the keepers circled him, even more so as they began to punch him to the ground. The crowd arrived, the keepers were hauled off him and George was pulled to his feet, slapped on the back and praised for his heroic work for the good old cause. The scene ended as quickly as it had sprung upon him, the crowd moved on and poor George was left, as before, to the silence of the Peaks. Bruised, utterly bemused, stars spiralling around his head, George continued his walk as planned, descending into the Goyt Valley and out of history.
It was only at work on Monday that he would have uncovered the meaning of this bizarre and briefly violent encounter. It was all over the papers. Four hundred ramblers had met at Hayfield, a few miles west of Kinder, and, amid a large police presence, had walked up the William Clough pass to protest for a greater right of access to the moors. Because it was well publicised in advance, the Duke of Devonshire’s men were ready with their sticks and hired men, and at the precise time George had crested the peak the crowd were beginning to break bounds, spill off the Right of Way and pile up the hill. Only a small proportion of the crowd made it onto the forbidden land, and only by about four hundred metres, before the violence George experienced spread into a tussle with the keepers. Some trespassers had hoiked away the keepers’ sticks and exchanged a few blows, causing one keeper to fall and break his ankle. The crowd had its climax and merrily they rolled along, singing ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’ back to Hayfield. The constabulary emerged from their hiding place in the local picture house, and the plain-clothed bobbies who had accompanied the trespassers pointed out the ringleaders, six of whom were arrested and taken for trial at the Derby assizes. Entirely unwittingly, George had fallen upon one of the most notorious land protests in English history, the Kinder Trespass.
We reach the dell and lay our fire. Scuffing away the black leaves with the toe of my boot, I scrunch a manger of newspaper on the wet earth and balance brittle twigs on top. My friend is off in the distance, crashing around in the bracken, gathering fallen wood. I touch a flame to an edge of the newspaper and a line of blue wriggles along its edge, blackening it, gaining ground like a tiny rising tide. I light the other available corners and begin to pile thicker twigs into a wigwam around the flame, black-tipped ash and brittle pencil twigs from a long-fallen elder.
An owl hoots, cool and spooky, and it suddenly seems much colder. I drop to my knees, hands on the wet earth, and I lay my head alongside the fire and I blow long gentle streams of air into its centre. The twigs glow red like the filament of a bulb, and, as my breath runs out, the flames reappear, stronger than before. I breathe in and blow, breathe and blow, and there is a warm crackling noise as the fire takes. I blow harder and the fire roars, comes alive, and is soon ready to fend for itself. My friend piles on shin-length logs that he has cracked underfoot from the fallen limbs of ash, oak and cherry. We both blow, then step back to watch the flames rise up the wooden scaffold, searing at the rough bark, unlocking decades of stored sunlight into our damp, gloomy dell.
The air is smoky, charcoal-blue, smudging the outline of the trees. The winter sky is dark and bright, a blank cinema screen projected into an empty theatre. A stillness has descended. Three miles beyond the wood, in the pit of the glacial valley, by the River Thames, the boundary between West Berkshire and Oxford, the geese start their honking.
The fire orchestrates the space. The thrumming light gives a rhythm to the static features of the dell, as if seen through water, causing the shadows cast from the exposed roots around us to seethe like snakes; its orange glow simmers up and down the steep slopes of the pit, and lights the underside of the yew tree bright white. The fire has the motion of a busy engine, a generator of light and heat, whirring and flaring. Thin gusts of air sweep through a heavy white mist in its glowing rib cage. Shafts of gas burst and squeal from the old wood, the spiky yew sticks hiss and spit, drooping into the growling hearth beneath them. The rough packing of the cherry and birch trees cracks and splits and flakes of its skin rise with ghostlike motion into the air, like flaring Amaretti wrappers, disappearing into the black above.
When the wind comes we hear it from miles away: a low timpani roll, sweeping up the steep valley slopes through the empty wood, pouring into our dell and rushing the fire into clouds of sparks, drawing deep on its furnace. Noise returns to the blackness around us. The owls are hunting, screeching, the undergrowth skitters and rustles and every so often there is a chilling cry, hoarse and insistent, that echoes through the woods. We roll a joint, pop the caps of bottled beer and follow rambling lines of conversation. We are comfortable, easy with each other and with our surroundings, and it is only when we go to piss, stepping outside the orange glow, that we remember the coldness and inhospitality of the night.
In time, the fire is sleepy. Fiery furnace fades to starry constellation and its orange bulb extends only as far as its ash perimeter. Snug in my sleeping bag I can hear a steady breathing and can’t see if my friend is sleeping or entranced. My eyes close.
I discovered our dell a decade ago. I had returned from London to the village I grew up in. I had a notion for a book, a graphic novel, and needed a couple of months to draw up the idea and tout it around publishers. It was a leap in the dark: I wasn’t at that stage an illustrator, hadn’t studied it, hadn’t practised it, and to try and get a book on the shelves seemed a lot like hubris. I didn’t want to tempt fate or trumpet something that didn’t yet exist, so had told few people of my plans. Leaving the city at night, with my books stored in a friend’s loft and everything I needed on my back, I felt like I was sneaking away, eloping, just me and my idea.
I was sleeping once again in my old single bed. A miniature desk, a beanbag and a wall papered with the flyers of nineties indie gigs. Every day I drew, legs squeezed under the desk by the window, and at the weekends I went for long walks linking the various haunts and dens of myself and my childhood friends.
Back then, we weren’t particularly interested in the great outdoors. We didn’t skip through the long grass with butterfly nets, we never went fishing or bird-spotting, we barely climbed a tree. The countryside around our homes was important chiefly because it offered us a space outside of adult rule. The steep basins in the woods that we dared each other to bike down, and where later we set small fires for aerosol cans that would explode and come singing through the air like ragged ninja stars. The benches on the Recreation ground, by the woods that sloped down to the river, where we listened to trance tracks on minidisc speakers and rolled our first joints. But on my return these friends were now living ten miles away in Reading, and these spaces, though resonant, were empty. So I walked on.
I went further into the country around our village than we had ever thought to go as kids. Several weeks in, just before Christmas, I was walking across the Rec to the valley woods. Snow had fallen, just a couple of inches, but it was a weekday and no one was around, so the playing field was a blank canvas. I cut across it to the woods and took the Right of Way, winding steeply down the hillside to the road at the trough of the valley. I could see right through the woods to the farm on the opposite side: lorries, barns, white fields and grey sheep. The woods felt like an empty marquee, hushed, the party long gone.
At the valley bottom another path emerged, a thin ridge of earth marked by an indent in the snow, a line veering off the Right of Way. A badger track. Because I was alone and had the day to myself, and because it led me into the woods, not out of them, I followed it. It took me to a wide gap cut through the trees for the pylons, blocked by a wire fence. The path ploughed straight through the dead bracken under the fence and stumbled and swerved across the field, barging again beneath the fence beyond. I climbed the fence, crossed the field, in full view of the farmhouse on the facing slope, climbed a broken metal gate and, under cover of trees again, continued along this ghost of a path.
I passed the badger sett and continued along a ledge tyre-marked by the farmer’s 4x4. Through the trees I could see a large white slope, like the roof of a gingerbread cottage frosted with sugar. My heart gripped: this might be someone’s home. I stopped. There was a tree growing right out of its apex and still I couldn’t work out what I was seeing. I turned from the track and moved slowly towards it. The roof was in fact a steep hill, an island of earth that ran from its peak at ground level some forty feet down into a disused clay pit cut from the valley slope. Its rim was lined with the roots of thin, reedy ash trees that led up to an aperture of grey sky. Secreted away from the roads and paths, there was a calmness here. It felt like a place I would return to.
When, finally, I had sent off my proposal for the graphic novel and, mercifully, it had been accepted, I asked my parents if I could stay for the year. I had a book to draw but, better, I suddenly had a licence, a temporary artist’s permit, which gave me the right to sit and read and draw outside of the shadow of idleness. As the year progressed, I followed the badger tracks that crossed the woods, cutting through the clouds of bluebells, the forests of ferns and nettles, the clumps of bramble, on tracks that barrelled through the bracken, bust under fences and burrowed through hedges. Every now and then the paths would lead me to their homes, large mounds of greenish chalk, clannish compounds, like Iron Age forts, some of which were inhabited, some of which were empty. Just so long as I kept up with the book, I felt free to wander at will, and sit until my legs went numb, drawing whatever I saw before me.
I returned in particular, again and again, alone and with friends, by day and by night, to the dell I had discovered. There was a new bond growing between myself and this place, one which came from simply being there, through looking, listening and sketching. In mind and body, drawing stills you. Sitting at ground level, hidden by nettle and fern, making studies of the trees and topography, it was as if the animal world would drop its state of high alert and come out of hiding. Small packs of deer would rest in the shade, birds would scuff around in the leaf litter, yards from my feet. Rooted to the spot, silent and motionless, I saw more of this countryside than ever before. And as the sketches I made began to cover my bedroom walls, I began to internalise the world outside of me. A relationship was forming: I was drawing closer to the land.
I pulled books from the shelf that hadn’t been opened since they were given as birthday presents decades before: Wild Birds of Britain, the Usborne Guide to English Wildflowers, The Observer’s Book of Trees. When I finally cracked their spines, and started to recognise the pictures on the paper as details I had drawn on my walks, my perspective changed: I began to see the trees from the wood. Oak, ash and hazel became distinct from each other, elder, hawthorn, birch and cherry stepped forward from the fray, with temperaments and idiosyncrasies, like characters from a play.
There were other books on the shelf. One, by a local amateur historian, details a history of the village so comprehensive that it begins: ‘In Africa some 4.5 million years ago, a species of primate started walking upright …’ Reading that book was like watching a light sinking down a mineshaft into the earth, illuminating Mesolithic communities, sacred groves of Neolithic pagan worship, Celtic tribes, Roman forts and pitched battles between Saxons and Viking invaders, all buried beneath the neat gardens and greens of the village. King Sweyn and the Viking army had sailed up the Thames and pillaged everything from Reading to Wallingford. Sixty years later, Duke William had just won the Battle of Hastings and, aiming to ford the Thames, was drawn by Wallingford and was the next to raze my village to the ground. It was non-stop ransack.
Now my eyes had focused, I kept finding books in the local Oxfam, or pamphlets for a quid in the library, all written by the unacknowledged heroes of England – the local amateur historians. I read now about the legends specific to our village. The giant stone, riddled with holes, twenty miles from my parents’ home, onto which King Alfred pursed his lips and blew a horn that gathered the militia from miles around to face the Vikings. Old Farmer Nobes, whose tomb was now a pile of ancient mossy stones by the gates of the shooting school, whose spectre rode a white horse around the woods. The witch, Nan Carey, whose name was recorded on the tithe maps, who had owned what was now the deserted chalk pit by the B-road; steep, crumbling ivy-clad cliffs hidden in a copse, an inconspicuous non-place that was now charmed by folklore. There was no path to this learning, no structure and no signposts; this was wayward wandering and wondering. Like the badger tracks in the wood, I cut lines through tracts of land and text, entirely oblivious to partitions between history, myth and ecology.
There was another layer to this land: the literature. Just across the river, the countryside of Oxfordshire had been the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The land held the spirit of Frodo and Aragorn and that modern Merlin: Gandalf. But closer to home, my mother had grown up outside Newbury, in a Nissen hut for prisoners of war, on the verge of Watership Down, thirty years before Richard Adams immortalised the place with his book of the same name. It was the first book I’d ever read all by myself. Returning to it now, the legends of Hazel and Fiver, the dark spirits of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit poured out of the book like Jumanji, enchanting the woods around me.
Another book was even closer to home. Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows just twenty miles upriver, in Cookham Dean, but came to the next village on from mine to retire. In 1931, following the book’s success, the publishers commissioned Ernest Shepard to illustrate the new edition of the book and the artist, already famous for his depiction of Winnie-the-Pooh, came to Pangbourne to sketch the countryside.
This was all it took for Pangbourne to claim the book, slap its title on the village sign and brand its café after a song from Chapter Two. In the book, the Wild Wood above Ratty’s river lodge was full of ‘copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration’. The woods above the River Thames in Pangbourne were my woods and exactly the same. The Wind in the Willows bridged the gulf between reality and fiction and now the luscious description of Mr Badger’s warm-hearted home, hanging hams and brick floors, shabby, dishevelled, gruff and welcoming was an apt description of our dell: ‘it seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.’
Then, one day, the real world caught up with me. I was walking with my mother after lunch at the local pub; we were crossing the perimeter of the pig farm, where the River Pang cuts a straight line between fields on its way to meet the Thames. There’s a lightning-cracked willow with a wild beehive, a deserted house almost entirely sunk in clematis and honeysuckle, and among the surge of spring flowers the scene is chocolate-box pretty, John Constable on sherbet. At the time it was the only place I’d ever seen a kingfisher.
But we never got there. A quad bike came chugging across the paddock and parked itself, just a little too close, in our way. More often than not, the opening line is the facetious: are you lost? But this guy came right out with it: ‘You’ve no right to be here. You’re trespassing.’
Without a moment’s thought, we apologised and left the land. I walked with my mother back to the car, promised to show her the kingfisher lair on some other occasion, and opted to walk the five miles home. I crossed the grass fields and made my way home, marvelling at the power of the words he had spoken. In two sentences he had managed to reverse the direction of two free-willed adults, imposing his will over ours: he got his way and we redirected ours. It was as if his words had cast a spell that had tied our feet and dragged us away.
In Harry Potter there is a rarely used spell called mobilicorpus: ‘The person who casts the spell can control the recipient almost like a puppet; it is as though invisible strings are supporting them.’ The professors of Hogwarts are comfortable calling this a spell, but in the real world, professors of linguistics prefer the euphemism ‘speech-act’, which refers to any utterance that causes manifest changes in the world. Linguistics divides the speech-act into three sections: first, locution, the actual words uttered: you’re trespassing. There were many ways to cut the cake on what my mum and I were doing. To a literalist, we were walking, putting one foot in front of another; to a romantic, we were bonding, sharing the world as we met it; to a nutritionist we were digesting our meal in the recommended method of a stroll, and to a more metaphysical bent of mind we were offering ourselves to the magic of the world, to the possible glimpse of a kingfisher. But this man had managed to reframe all these subjective assessments into one objective assertion: we were trespassing. None of these other perspectives counted quite so much as his.
The second part of a speech-act is the illocution, or the intention behind the words, very clearly: get off this land, now. And the third part is the perlocution, the influence of the words on the listener. We felt a flush of guilt, a moral sense of being in the wrong, but there was also a sense of being wronged: the abruptness of the intrusion, the absolutism of his approach. Finally, of course, his words caused the reversal of our direction. I wondered what these puppet strings were that yanked us away from the field, how they worked and where their power came from.
When I got home I typed ‘trespass’ into the search engine. The definition of trespass from the House of Commons library is: ‘any unjustifiable intrusion by a person upon the land in possession of another’. And that’s the last clear statement you’ll get. From here onwards, you have a muddy trek through thick legalise, a language obfuscated by its very precision. You might like to purchase one of the 800-page law textbooks that deals with trespass, the most popular being Winfield and Jolowicz on Tort (although other breezeblocks are available) or call up your local law firm, and have them look into it for you, for 200 quid an hour.
I’ll save you the bother. The first thing you should know is that the famous sign ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ is an out-and-out lie. Jolowicz calls such signs ‘wooden falsehoods’, a neat phrase he borrowed from the arch-trespasser of the 1920s, G. H. B. Ward. Since 1694, the misdemeanour of trespass has resided in the province of civil, not criminal, law, and can only be brought to court if damages have been incurred. However, if you resist the landowner’s command to leave, if you are impolite, the police can be called and if you resist them, you can be done for a breach of the peace, or for obstructing a police officer.
A landowner is allowed to use reasonable force to encourage you to leave the land, though no one can agree what that means. They are not allowed to detain you, nor are you compelled to give out your name and address. When they do ask you to leave, you don’t necessarily have to retrace your steps; it is your right to leave at the closest available exit. If you return to the property, the landowner is allowed to apply for an injunction, which they have to send to you by post, which will be impossible, because they don’t have your address. If they do manage to serve you with an injunction and you are caught back on the land, you will now be in contempt of court, which most likely means paying a fine but, in theory at least, can mean prison.
However, owing to two relatively recent pieces of legislation, trespassing can be scaled up into the criminal sphere. In 2005 the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) extended the arrest powers for the police and allowed them to keep DNA evidence of suspects, even after they had been cleared. Perhaps most controversially of all, it criminalised unauthorised demonstrations in Parliament Square, finally clearing the ten-year anti-war demonstration of activist Brian Haw, emptying the square and silencing his protest. Following the advice of the Armstrong report of July 2003, an extra section was sneaked into the Act, which as a statutory instrument required no new debate from Parliament. Its purpose was to ‘create a deterrent to intrusions at high-profile secure sites and to provide police officers with a specific power of arrest of a trespasser at such sites where no other apparent existing offence had been committed’. On these sixteen sites alone, walking is a criminal act.
Armstrong’s report came off the back of a publicity stunt by a comedian called Aaron Barschak who had climbed into Windsor Castle during Prince William’s twenty-first birthday party. Dressed as Osama Bin Laden, he had mounted the stage, stolen the mic and lifted up the hem of the pink skirt he was wearing to reveal a dark wig of pubic hair, shouting ‘Here’s the heir apparent’. Even those that didn’t find this remotely funny could not have denied the satire when, two years later, it would be classified as serious and organised; clearly, it was neither. But from 2005, Buckingham Palace and fifteen other properties were charmed with a twelve-month jail sentence. The list includes various high-security GCHQ sites, Westminster, Parliament Square, sites of national security interests, but also large areas of land owned privately by the queen and her offspring, with nothing to do with the state.
But the real hocus pocus had come a decade before. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 introduced criteria to arrest people for the newly invented crime of ‘aggravated trespass’. In 1992, 20,000 ravers and travellers met on common ground for an impromptu May Day rave in the Malvern Hills. It lasted a week and prompted police from the surrounding districts to descend on the land, searching diligently, desperately, for something to arrest them for. In the absence of any actual crime, this proved both difficult and embarrassing. So the bobbies lobbied hard, and two years later, alakazam! – trespass stepped up a gear.
The lawyers define ‘aggravated’ in their own breezy way as ‘any circumstance attending the commission of a crime or tort which increases its guilt or enormity or adds to its injurious consequences’. A hidden knife would be aggravated assault; and from 1994, a hidden intention had the same effect. Section 61 of the Act legislated that a police officer could remove two or more people from any private land, if they have met for a common purpose. That’s for the ramblers. Section 63 criminalises any gathering of twenty people or more who meet to dance to amplified music. That’s for the ravers. Section 68 criminalises the intimidation, deterrence, obstruction and disruption of lawful activities on land, which turns all protest on land not owned by the protesters into an illegal activity. At the time, this was primarily to restrict the hunt saboteurs, but is used in the vast majority of protests of all flavours, from fracking, to animal rights, to war. Your right to protest is secured by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but for the last twenty years, if you do it anywhere but your back garden or a highway, you can be arrested and sent to jail. On top of this, since 2014, a common ruling has inserted the phrase ‘additional conduct’. If you are trespassing on land and engaging in any additional conduct, literally anything, it can now be classed as intimidation. In the words of the Crown Prosecution website:
There is no requirement that the additional conduct should itself be a crime, so activities such as playing a musical instrument or taking a photograph could fall within anything. What limits the scope of anything is the intention that must accompany it: the intention to obstruct, disrupt or deter by intimidating.
In short, if you are doing something that is not illegal (photography, dancing, playing the flute), while doing something that is not criminal (trespassing) you can be automatically arrested, and liable to six months in prison and a level-four fine. In this equation, two rights combine and somehow make a wrong.
But there is another dimension to trespass that runs deep beneath the scaffold of the law. ‘Trespass’ is one of the most charged words in the English language. For such a small legal infraction, the notion of crossing a fence line, wall or invisible boundary is wrapped in a moral stigma that runs to the heart of English political and civil life. Many of our liberties and the restrictions on them are expressed in terms of land, parameters and property, so much so that it is hard to tell which is a metaphor for the other.
If someone has crossed the line, they have strayed over the limits of acceptable action and their words or deeds are deemed to be beyond the pale (the old Saxon word for fence). We talk of access equally in terms of the physical, with disability rights and the right to roam, and in the abstract realm, in terms of education, health and opportunity. Segregation, which directs the mindset of race and gender, is a word whose Latin root means to be cast out of the flock, and which reinforces the prejudice that racial groups that can be distinguished by a line alone. The legal texts are full of variants of an old word seisin, whose origin lies in the French word saisir, to seize. This word was the French version of the Latin rapio, which leads us to the word rape, where our understanding of sexual politics is structured through metaphors of personal space and acceptable boundaries.
To wander and to roam are implicitly connected with moral failings and the word ‘vagrancy’ has as much sense in morality as it does in legal cases concerning homeless people. A deviant is someone who has turned off the right way. To stray from the path suggests a clearly marked line of righteousness, signposted by societal or religious doctrines. And the most fundamental link between the physical world of trespassing and its moral parallel, is the origin of the word itself. Trespasser is the French verb meaning to cross over, which came from the Latin word transgredior, from whose past participle we get the English word: transgression. Transgression, which carries with it that pungent whiff of candle smoke and incense, that sense of religious damnation, is the reason Christians pray for the Lord to Forgive us our trespasses.
There are boundaries in nature. There are rivers, forests, escarpments, ravines and mountain ranges; there are cellulose walls. But these boundaries are in fact areas of transaction, semi-permeable membranes. The notion that a perimeter should be impenetrable is a human contrivance alone.
When the concept of trespass first entered the law records in the thirteenth century it was meant to establish some reparation for damage – damage to person or land. Over the years, the requirement for damage has disappeared, and a landowner can be compensated, hypothetically, for the breach of his property alone. In a court ruling in 1874, a horse had leaned over a fence in Glamorgan and bitten the plaintiff’s mare. There was a debate as to whether the horse had trespassed, so leaving its owner liable for damages. The judge, Lord Coleridge CJ, made what came to be a defining statement: ‘If the defendant place a part of his foot on the plaintiff’s land unlawfully, it is in law as much a trespass as if he had walked half a mile on it.’
With this ruling, the absolute inviolability of property, a notion that had been hardening for 500 years, was finally consolidated into law. A property, whether your back garden, or 20,000 acres of grouse moor in the Peak District, had become a hypothetical space, a legal force field, a man-made spell. Whether marked by a wall, fence, sign or just an imaginary line, crossing over it turns the inclination of the law against you. The concept of property really is a bubble, a hallucination conjured by a history of privatisation, whose hard, impenetrable border is in fact a flimsy meniscus – one foot over the line, you pierce its logic and the bubble bursts.
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the response of both the keepers and the crowd to George Beattie Elliot as he blithely walked over Kinder Scout all those decades ago. To cheer a man for walking through heather and likewise to beat him up for it are both absurdly disproportionate to the act itself. But inside the logic of the bubble, such an act is tantamount to anarchy, because it threatens the spell. When the Kinder Trespass was reported in the press, the bare facts of the case were sunk beneath a seething froth of outrage. The Manchester Evening Chronicle led with the headline ‘MOB LAW ON THE MOORS’, stating that ‘the danger of mob law usurping the constitutional methods in the ventilation of grievances, real or imagined, is viewed with apprehension not only by landowners, but by thousands of ramblers’.
In their sputtering indignation at the trespass, both sides of the land access debate had finally, with delicious irony, found common ground. To the rambling associations, these kids were naïve upstarts, too brassy to negotiate the slippery political terrain, and had set the campaign for open access back several decades. To the landowning establishment, both the national water boards and the aristocracy, these kids were out of line, bold, impudent commie hooligans threatening to take down the entire state. They must be taught a lesson, slapped with the patrician’s rod.
The six young men arrested on the day were taken to the Derby assizes, sixty miles from their families in Manchester, and held there for several months until the trial. Five of them were sentenced to a total of seventeen months behind bars. Because it was not then a crime, none of the men was charged with trespass, but instead with the ancillary charges of the breach of the peace and assault, for which the keepers, who brought the batons and who some might say had started the fight, were not even accused.
This spell was only recently cast upon the moors. The uncultivated land of the Peaks had for centuries been classed as King’s Land, free to roam. When it was enclosed in 1836 and parcelled off to the surrounding landowners, the Eyres, Norfolks, Shrewsburys and the Duke of Devonshire were suddenly able to exercise their right to exclude. Only twelve tracks of more than two miles were left open to the ramblers of the surrounding cities, and a private security force uniformed in tweed jackets was brought in, acolytes to light the lines of this enchanted, indicted land.
In 1953, the battle to free Kinder Scout was finally won. The 5,624 acres of land belonging to the Duke of Devonshire were signed over to the Peak District National Park, which had been set up two years earlier. Keepers were now replaced by professional rangers and volunteer wardens whose job was to protect not the ownership of the land, but the land itself. With a wave of a wand, or a judge’s hammer, the spell was lifted.
To those in the rambling community who consider themselves in the know, the Kinder Trespass has never been anything but a footnote to this victory. They point instead to the actions of a Liberal MP named James Bryce, who in 1884 brought the first open access act to Parliament. They point to G. H. B. Ward, who set up the first rambling clubs in the north and scoured the old tithe maps of the Peaks for forgotten Rights of Way, or Octavia Hill, who set up the National Trust, or any number of politically minded activists across the country, who worked tirelessly to keep up the pressure on the government, lobbying, pamphleteering, repeatedly pushing bastardised versions of Bryce’s bill into Parliament, only to have them rejected by the members. Because it was only with the constitutional success of the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act that a structure was secured for the land to be returned to the people. Yet to dismiss the power of legend is to miss the need we have for stories, however fanciful. The Kinder Trespass challenged the power of ownership right at its narrative source. In the myth of property, for all to see, the land had been unspelled.
I went to see the farmer, the one whose house was nestled into the facing flank of the valley of my firepit. Those woods of mine were his, not mine. And his right to eject me from Mr Badger’s Wild Wood had become strikingly apparent. He could meet me one day on his land and, on a whim, ask me to leave. If I refused, the police could be called. If I was drawing, mad as it might seem, they could charge me on aggravated trespass. If I came back within three months and was caught again, I would be liable for a fine of £2,500. It wouldn’t take many more meetings like that for me to blow the advance on the book I was working on. Yet just as he had the right to deny me, I had the right to ask for ‘permissive access’, so I knocked on his door.
We spent fifteen slightly awkward minutes in his front garden, rocking on our heels, looking out across the valley. There was a heritage to his presence on this side of the valley that carried an authority I couldn’t deny. He had been born in the front room behind us and had taken over the farm from his father. He had known that land for seven decades longer than me. We discussed the various parts of the wood we both knew and he told me that our firepit had in fact been a clay mine for bricks in the 1800s, and maybe even 2,000 years before, since the Romans were also fond of a good brick. Beside us, in the yard, covered in creepers, was a large boulder, a Sarsen stone, which, more than 10,000 years ago, had been carried from Liverpool by a glacier. It was a historical pin in the landscape and the succession of houses and barns of the property had been built around it. He was happy to let me make fires in the dell, and didn’t mind me drawing on his land.
Standing by his side, I looked over the valley in front of me and saw for the first time my woods from his side of the road. They seemed smaller, neater, enclosed on all sides by fence and field. Behind the woods are private houses and their gardens, marked by wooden fences. To the north, over the hill, there is the shooting school, and north-east, hidden in the woods behind ten-foot-high electric fences, the deer enclosure. Follow the path east through the woods and you come to Basildon Park, an estate now held by the National Trust. Its 400 acres of parkland were enclosed by Francis Sykes, the former MP for Wallingford and Governor of Cossimbazar, whose fortune was amassed through his work for the British East India Company. Ten miles south of us run the razor-wire fences of Burghfield and Aldermaston’s nuclear weapons facilities. The interests of agriculture, hunting, aristocracy, colonialism and war were laid out before me in the undulating valley, like a series of open books.
E. P. Thompson, the historian of the working class, said of the eighteenth century that ‘land remained the index of influence, the plinth on which power was erected’. Turn the past tense to present, and his words still apply. I had no interest in the gardens of strangers, but in the rest of the wide, open landscape, I couldn’t see a single place I was allowed to be.
‘You have no right to be here’ moves easily, with the slip of a comma, to ‘you have no right to be, here, there, or anywhere’. If those that own the land can dictate what happens on the land, then this private elite can conduct those in society who have nowhere else to be but the land. Race, class, gender, health, income are all divisions imposed upon society by the power that operates on it; if this power is sourced in property, then the fences that divide England are not just symbols of the partition of people, but the very cause of it.
In the gaps between our conversation you could just make out the hum of the pylons that cut through the wood, crossed the road and ran over our heads to the horizon behind us. Buzzing with 400,000 volts of electricity, they distribute power across England. But the fence lines below were charged with a different kind of power, a national and international grid of control whose effect was to divide the people of its land from its worth – its minerals, its game, its goods, its kingfishers – and from each other. You can follow these fence lines and walls all across the country on your Rights of Way, you can keep to your codes of conduct and never question this status quo. Or you can cross these lines, look inside this system and find out who put them there, and how. Because someone cast the net; something cast the spell.
The day is mine: I am free. So I thank the farmer for his time and tea, and follow the drive down to the bottom of the valley, out onto the road, up the tunnel of trees and left along the ghost-path. I climb the fence, cross under the pylons in full view of the farmer’s house, climb the broken gate and make my way along the tyre tracks. I pass our dell and continue up through the empty woods to meet the Right of Way. I join the main road for a corner and immediately come to the closed gates of Basildon Park. I put my hands on the flint wall and climb over.