The Book of Trespass

Fluidity, transparency, binary opposition

‘I should like to say one word about our kind host, Mr. Toad.

We all know Toad! (great laughter) –

Good Toad, modest Toad, honest Toad’ –

(shrieks of merriment)’

– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Water is the ultimate element of trespass. Dam-buster, ditch-leveller and hydraulic digger, it has no respect for borders. It slips through cracks and gushes down hillsides; it falls from the sky and seeps up through the ground. As it reflects, it distorts: it dissolves definition, blurs distinction and spurns division.

It is a nightmare for property lawyers. In his Commentaries, William Blackstone refers to it as ‘a movable, wandering thing’ and has to redefine its property to make it property: ‘It is observable that water is here mentioned as a species of land, which may seem a kind of solecism; but such is the language of the law.’

Water makes a mockery of legal fictions. As a river , it takes acres of land from one estate and attaches it to another as it bends, leaving lawyers to fight over the question: who owns the silt deposits? Often, it marks the boundaries of estates, and, just as often, it moves them so that the lines on a map rarely conform to its line on the land. It is neither on one side of property, nor the other: while it creates the moat that blocks the trespasser, it also provides the anti-gravitational capacity to cross it, with a lot more grace than a wall. That is, if you don’t mind getting wet.

There’s a flash, like a spark from a struck match, and the moment I see the kingfisher it’s gone. Everything else is still; the blanket of mist above the river, still in the windless air and a half-moon, still in the sky. It is cold because it is early, but today will be a scorcher.

I unzip the kayak from its rucksack, unfold it and pump air into its various compartments. Two dogs run by, and then a jogger. I slide its plastic fin into the bottom, plop it onto the water, tether it to a barge pin and load it with food, a sleeping bag, roll matt, several layers of warm clothing, a camera, sketchbook and crayons. I grab the paddle, slide in, and push off.

The River Kennet starts on Silbury Hill in Wiltshire and runs through Marlborough and Hungerford to arrive here in Aldermaston, West Berkshire. It flows another ten miles as far as Reading when it fuses with the Thames, which takes you all the way to London, where, barring extreme weather events and a potential breach of the inflatable, I hope to be in three days’ time. With the wide sky above me, and its reflection below me, and the long unbroken expanse of water before me, I feel a childish excitement, as if my whole life is ahead of me.

The river is where time flows gently, a world of soft green light where idleness is the only option. Unlike the seas, its gift is not the magisterial contemplation of infinity, but the parochial contentment of a quiet life. When Mole first meets Ratty in the opening pages of The Wind in the Willows, the fuss and bother of busyness meets the calming influence of the river. Having spent his entire life underground, Ratty’s boat is the first Mole has been in and he can’t quite trust his own excitement. So Ratty assures him with the book’s most famous words: ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’

But that’s easy for Ratty to say. He lives on the banks of the Thames, where right of access has, since 1623, been secured under a Navigation Act. But I’m four miles south of Ratty’s home, on the River Kennet, which, if you can believe the Fishing Officer on the Reading and District Angling Association’s forum: ‘is most defenatly [sic] NON-NAVIGABLE’. Like the vast majority of rivers of England, it seems the River Kennet is subject to a different ideology – the most extreme expression of the cult of exclusion. Of the 42,700 miles of river in England, we have a right of access to 1,400 miles, just 3 per cent. In England, if you’re by a river, on a river or in a river, there’s a 97 per cent chance that you’re not allowed to be there.

Rivers and their banks are subject to a category of legislation called Riparian Rights. While the Crown is said to own the water that flows through a river, the landowner holds the rights to the riverbank which extends across its bed towards an imaginary line drawn halfway through the river. To kayak or swim along a stretch of river, you must have permission from each and every one of the property owners on the banks, meaning the long stretch of open water is actually (or, rather, legally) divided up into an invisible grid of lines, each under the control of the lord of that section of land.

The ownership of a river has been particularised into its various components so that they can be rented and sold as separate entities. When the Liberty Stadium was built in Swansea, the home of both the football and the rugby club, a seventy-foot bridge was erected over the River Tawe so that people could actually get to it. For the privilege of building this city amenity, the council had to pay the Duke of Beaufort , who lives ninety miles away, £280,000 for an ‘easement’ (a Right of Way over private property) because for the last 400 years his family has owned the riverbed. But it is the fishing rights, usually but not always conjoined with the ownership of the bank and the bed, that cause the most friction.

I have slipped past various small villages and am now surrounded by open fields. I have entered the Englefield estate, owned by the former richest MP in Parliament, Richard Benyon. To my left, a mile north, is his manor house and on my right are tall iron fences, which gauze my view to the private fishing ponds beyond. Mr Benyon’s rights over this section allow him to rent the river and its ponds to angling associations whose members pay annual subscriptions to fish the bream, tench, carp and pike that live in the lagoon. These rented rights have created a fierce, ongoing enmity between fishermen and other users of the river. Principal among these are the kayakers, and the battles that flare between them and the fishermen are the modern expression of the old poacher/gamekeeper dynamic.

Kayaking turns a river from a boundary into a highway through boundaries and, in so doing, it undermines the total dominion of modern riparian rights. It calls attention to the absurdity of a legal fiction that pretends the river is segmented into private domains, partitioned by invisible lines that cannot be crossed. Fishing on rivers is by and large a fixed pastime, rooted to one spot, and property is comfortable with that notion: if you want this spot, it belongs to me, but you can access it for a price. But kayakers and swimmers slide through boundaries and are too slippery for property rights to get a grip on. Without a toll booth on every boundary line, property has not yet found a way of profiting from kayakers; kayaking is a vernacular sport.

The Angling Trust, who represent the interests of fishermen across England and Wales, see it differently. In the words of their National Campaigns’ Coordinator:

The Angling Trust has been challenging the claims being made by militant canoeists that they should have a right to paddle up every river, stream or brook in Britain irrespective of ownership or the impact this has on wildlife or other people’s enjoyment. The rights of navigation are clear in law and there are thousands of miles of navigable rivers and waterways to which canoeists have legal access.

Even down to the ‘s’ at the end of ‘thousands’, everything about this statement is disingenuous. The high-octane rhetoric of ‘militant’ is typical of the fishing lobby groups, and is incongruous to the point of surrealism. The reference to wildlife is also typical, and sly, and in spite of being repeatedly proven otherwise, it remains a dominant tactic of the fisher-kings. In 2000, the Environment Agency produced a report that stated conclusively: ‘there is no empirical evidence linking canoeing with damage to fish spawning grounds or damage to fish stocks … there is unlikely to be any significant impact on or lasting disturbance to wildlife from the passage of canoes.’

The Angling Trust borrow this tactic from the owners of agricultural land, who persistently defend their exclusive use of their land with the claim that they are protecting it from the ignorant masses. This claim rests on a conflation of land ownership with land-stewardship, a story invented by landowners that conveniently overlooks the element of scale. While the inconsiderate rambler may occasionally stumble into the eggs of a ground-nesting bird, their effect on the wildlife of England is nothing compared to that of industrial agriculture. In the fifty years after the Second World War, the destruction of 121,000 kilometres of hedgerow (and the consequent decline in sparrow, linnet and thrush) was not the work of vandal ramblers but landowners, often using dynamite to blow the roots from their soil, seeking to increase the financial yield of their property.

The owner of this stretch of the River Kennet, Richard Benyon, has been a staunch defender of the rights of fishing. As the former Under Secretary of State for Fisheries and Natural Environment, Benyon has come under fire for what some perceive to be a vested interest in supporting fishermen over other users of rivers. In an interview with the Angling Times, he said ‘While we want more people to get out and enjoy activities in the countryside they must be complementary. There are plenty of places to canoe where it is appropriate and others where it is not. There will be no change to our policy of supporting voluntary access agreements as the only way forward.’

These are silky words. Once again, what is deemed ‘appropriate’ is determined by what is deemed property. Once again, the construct that ‘voluntary access’ is the ‘only way forward’ smacks of obstinate paternalism. And the notion that access to 3 per cent of rivers is ‘plenty’ has such rhetorical gall to it that it can only be described as Politicians’ Cant.

The open fields have morphed into the back gardens of the terraced housing on the outskirts of Reading. Something about rivers draws out the eccentricity of the English, and each plot here is decorated in a ramshackle, water-weathered style. There are stone owls, plastic herons, driftwood sheds, old rusted benches and bunting, blanched by the sun and rain, all sunk in glorious profusions of bindweed and buddleia. As I get closer to the heart of the town, the shallows are clogged with Lucozade bottles, discarded shopping trolleys, Walkers’ crisp packets bleached and leached of their colour, and along the scrubby banks, every twenty yards or so, the fishermen. Their long trail lines extend, almost invisible, out in the river , and I have to manoeuvre my kayak to avoid their hooks. I try a cheery Enid Blyton-style ‘hallo!’ to the various characters attached to the rods, and am met with stony silence. Further down the river I change gear to a gruffer, more macho ‘how do’, the kind of surly non-invasive tone appropriate to pub urinals, but this is equally fruitless.

I get the distinct impression that I’m intruding. The fishermen have bought an exclusive right to sit on this riverbank, and here I am, with no licence in my pocket, bursting their bubble of dominion. Their purchased right of property has created a division between us where none is necessary: across the country, kayakers report stones and lead weights thrown at them, threats hurled, and some are still paying off thousands of pounds of court costs for cases they have lost against fishermen. The peaceful river has become a tetchy battleground, an incongruous world of binary opposition, imposed by the idea that one right supersedes all others because it has been purchased. But of all the people on the river today, surely we have the most in common: we’re here for the stillness, the gentle passing of time, the simple pleasure of being enveloped by nature.

As the Kennet winds through Reading town, its banks turn to concrete, foliage disappears and the sounds of police sirens and traffic smother the birdsong. Before meeting the Thames, it cuts through the Oracle shopping centre, which has a loud, sticky grot to it. I slide past barges, boats and packed public houses, under the railway bridge and out into the dizzying breadth of the Thames.

In 2004, the Reve rend Dr Doug Caffyn wrote a master’s thesis entitled ‘The Right of Navigation on Non-tidal Rivers and the Common Law’ whi ch claimed that, between 1189 and 1600, there had been a right of public access to all rive rs. This, he claims, is confirmed by Clause 33 of Magna Carta and again in the 1472 Act for Wears and Fishgarths. Caffyn’s dissertation sparked England’s newest bout of Ownership Anxiety and was refuted in no uncertain terms by the fisher-kings. Interviewed on the BBC in 2013, the then CEO of the Angling Trust, Mark Lloyd, said ‘The law of the land is absolutely clear – there is no universal right for people to canoe on non-tidal waters.’ He had commissioned his own report by QC David Hart, who followed the footsteps of the judges in the Pierson and Post case, and trawled through the ancient legal texts, Glanville, de Bracton, Britton and Callis, to refute Caffyn’s claim.

According to Hart, the crux of a claim for Public Right of Navigation (PRN) comes down to two points: first, whether the river is navigable and, second, whether it has been used as such for ‘time immemorial’ (a romantic phrase that is actually very specific: in English law, the reach of memory goes back to 6 July 1189, the accession of Richard I). Both aspects need to be proven ‘before navigation rights can be acquired against riparian owners’. The last four words show how the cards are stacked against the public. Just as trespass can reframe a walk in the countryside as an attack on the rights of property owners, so, too, public rights along rivers are described as being ‘acquired’ and ‘against’ the private rights of owners. Yet the only thing kayaking takes from fishing is its exclusivity.

Nigel Saul, a Professor of Medieval History at the University of London, delivered a lecture to Parliament in 2013 arguing that Clause 33 of Magna Carta ‘was to be of enormous significance in the history of navigation in this country, because it established the principle of free passage along England’s rivers, so laying the foundations for transport development in the Industrial Revolution’. This position starts from the opposite of the Angling Trust, that rivers were always open access until they were privatised – in other words, in line with the entire history of land enclosure, private rights were acquired against those of the public. But Clause 33 is actually very vague. It demands that all fish-weirs should be removed across the inland waterways of England, essentially providing that there should be no blockages, or tolls, to impede free passage on the waters. It leans on an implicit understanding that waterways are free and therefore should not be blocked, and the fact that not one toll receipt has been found in the history of river navigation does seem to support this. However, as QC Hart argued, nowhere is this explicitly stated in law.

The same cannot be said of the River Kennet. The 1715 Kennet Navigation Act includes the emphatic declaration that ‘all the King’s Liege people whatsoever may have and Lawfully enjoy their free passage’. It turns out that public right of access to the River Kennet has for 300 years been specifically enshrined in law, which means my trespass on the waterway was in fact no such thing. But unlike with earthbound public Rights of Way, there was not a single sign along the river to indicate a right of access. In the absence of any clarity, the fishermen on the RDAA’s forum have, reasonably enough, assumed that, like the lion’s share of rivers in the country, I have no right to be there. And because I neglected to bring a laminated copy of the 1715 Navigation Act with me, the consensus remains that my quiet paddle along the river was an act ‘acquired against’ their rights as fishermen.

This leaves me with the predicament that nowhere in this chapter have I committed a trespass. Luckily, I have a plan. Deeply embedded within the common laws of trespass is the notion that an action of trespass is recoverable even if no harm has been caused to the land. The breach of the fence is itself the harm. The exact wording of this ancient code is as follows: ‘a person who enters upon the land of another without leave … and who breaks off a blade of grass in so doing, commits a trespass.’ This is excellent news. The extreme nature of this ruling allows me to save enormous amounts of time, and, if I wish, trespass every property along sixty miles of the Thames by simply plucking a blade of grass from the bank. I can maximise my trespass efficiency, and in one sweep more than double the amount of trespasses in this book. My inaugural blade of grass is plucked from the mown lawns of Shiplake College and stashed safely in my pencil case.

I paddle up through Sonning; I spot herons half hidden in the reeds and cormorants sunning their wings on the bare limbs of fallen trees, looking like black crucifixes on cragged, decaying shrines. The sun is beating down, sun cream and sweat is stinging my eyes, but it feels exhilarating to have come all this way. At Wargrave, squeezed in between two mansions and their football-pitch lawns, seven or eight teenage boys are messing about in the shallows of the river bend. They are shrieking and giggling, and seem like young otter cubs, playing rough, loving the living of life. Whatever the legal status of the river, they are protected from accusations of trespass by the dirt track behind them: the law states that whenever a Right of Way meets the watercourse, it continues to be a Right of Way, though in the slippery world of water no one knows exactly where this right ends. The scene is a picture of the public/private dynamic imposed on rivers – on either side, the private mansions have claimed acres of the riverbank for themselves, while the rest of the town must make do with a dirt track the width of a car.

The Angling Trust make out like they’re the reasonable ones. They have written to the canoeing governing bodies, offering the possibility of limited voluntary access, with various demands whose paternalism is rank even on their own website. They ‘demand’, among other things, that the canoe organisations:

Recognise and accept the law as it is (rather than as they would prefer it to be); Stop (wrongfully) asserting that the law is unclear; Stop discouraging paddlers from considering or entering into voluntary access agreements or arrangements; Stop encouraging paddlers to ignore the legal rights of others, commit trespass, and obstruct water bailiffs, anglers, fishery owners and riparian owners.

This hardly sounds like compromise. And it’s not just kayaking: any sort of walker, wild swimmer and general hot-day toe-dangler is banned from our rivers, by order of the fisher-kings. Their demands come from an interpretation of common law that assumes priority by right of property. Yet Australia, which has the same common law as England, interprets it differently: ‘while there is no public right to fish in non-tidal rivers, there is a public right to navigate a navigable river for all that can navigate it’. In America, following the Revolution , the Founding Fathers were quick to enshrine public access to all navigable rivers and streams, calling them ‘common highways, and forever free’. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Bulgaria, France, Hungary and Belgium all allow public access to their rivers and in Scotland (following the Land Reform Act of 2003) people have a general right of recreational access to all inland waterways. In these countries, the right of access to rivers is a common right, and the right to fish, or deplete the resources of a common wealth, must be bought. Perhaps most importantly, under this system, there is no cause for enmity.

I’m passing through Henley, crossing the large, slow bend of the river, and a mile downstream I see my bed for the night. Temple Island is a long, slim spearhead of land whose foliage spills across its perimeter over the water. The southern half of the island, pointing towards me, was cleared many years ago of its trees, carpeted with a plush lawn, and in 1771 a mock temple was erected, a fishing lodge for the MP of Pontefract, owner of Fawley Court and lord of the manors of Henley and Remenham, Sambrooke Freeman. It was leased in 1987 to the organisers of Henley Regatta, and is where the races start. For 999 years, they have the right to lease it out for weddings, corporate events, and as an exclusive enclosure for VIPs (or VRichPs), for five days a year during the Regatta. Offering champagne receptions, truffles and canapés, tickets start at £474 per person, rising to £599 on the Saturday.

Until the contention between the canoeists and anglers is tested in court, stalemate means status quo, and the fisher-kings remain in possession of 97 per cent of our rivers. If British Canoeing, the national body representing paddlesports, agree to the fisher-kings’ terms of voluntary access, they will be ceding the moral argument of public rights for a limited pragmatic gain. They will have ratified an unequal system, to be paid off by a licence to paddle in limited stretches of limited rivers, under limited conditions at limited times which don’t interrupt the fishing. And because this permissive access can be removed as quickly as it is given, the imbalance of private power over public access will remain intact.

As I approach the island, the temple rises like a paper-cut pop-up from the open book of valleys that fan out behind it. It is colder now, the sun has gone down and the banks are empty of people. The water seems to have thickened to mercury, and as boats pass their wake shines like silver cut with the black knife blades of the waves. There is a small, neat fence around the grass lawn of the island, so I paddle into the trees, where I find a sandy cove to disembark. The water, which I have barely touched all day, is warm. I haul my supplies onto land and tether the kayak to a tree. The small forest has a path that leads to the lawn, and I follow it to inspect the temple.

The statue under the cupola is not the original. In 1952, following their failure in the Regatta, a team of Irish rowers got drunk and tried to kidnap the statue. Misjudging its weight, they dropped it into the river and broke off its arm. But the replica is beautiful, and depicts a bacchante, a priestess of Bacchus, the god of getting high. I roll a joint, sit at her feet and watch the geese honk up the river. The sky turns from blue to violet to black. When I lie down to sleep that night, I feel the rolling wash of the water in my blood. And when I shut my eyes, my mind opens up to the wideness of the waterway, an expansiveness that feels just like peace.

The next day I wake just before dawn and go to eat my breakfast by the temple. Coming out of the curtain of trees, I see the morning suspended in an eerie dream, the whole river sunk in thick mist. The banks of the river are the only sign of the land around me, and their trees are dark silhouettes against ghostly veils of white. The fog conceals the land but in so doing it exposes its hidden truth: in terms of tax, it’s not there at all.

On the west bank of the river is Fawley Court Farm, said to be one of the inspirations for Kenneth Grahame’s Toad Hall, which was sold for £4.3 million to Fawley Court Inc., a company registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). Further south, the land is owned by Cherrilow Ltd, a company registered in Jersey. Over the river are 300 acres in the village of Remenham bought for £120 million by the exiled president of the Bank of Moscow, Andrey Borodin. The land was bought under the name Durio Ltd, which is also registered in BVI. On the east, there is a small strip of land owned by a family of turkey farmers from the local area, but, beyond that, land bought for almost £33 mi llion by Culham Court Inc., who are also registered in BVI. Just a mile north of me is the backdrop for ITV’s Midsomer Murders (that ‘last bastion of Englishness’), the village of Hambleden, whose 1,600-acre estate and forty houses, pub and village shops are all owned by Swiss foreign-exchange dealer Urs Schwarzenbach. The village was bought in 2007 under the name Hambleden Estates Ltd, who are also registered in the British Virgin Islands. Though it might not look like it now, this place is the Caribbean-on-Thames.

In 2015, Private Eye published an interactive map revealing the 490,000 acres of England and Wales owned by offshore companies, a glitch in the law that allows an area of land larger than Greater London to avoid stamp duty and inheritance tax. The magazine identified £170 billion-worth of properties acquired by offshore companies in just ten years, and described how such companies are used by property developers such as the Candy brothers to avoid stamp duty, by aristocrats such as Lord Rothermere to escape inheritance tax and by ‘any number of arms dealers and oligarchs covering up properties they’d rather nobody knew too much about’.

The largest swathe of English land hidden behind offshore companies is the grouse moor Gunnerside estate, whose 27,258 acres of the North Yorkshire moors is registered in the British Virgin Islands and which, over the last decade or so, received €430,000 of handouts from the taxpayer, in the form of agricultural subsidies. Lord Salisbury is mentioned, the descendant of Elizabeth I’s spymaster-general Lord Cecil, whose 2,000 acres of land are registered in Jersey. Before the map was created, these tax-avoidance schemes were largely unacknowledged, manifested as occasional news reports, obscured behind consensus. However, with their visualisation on an interactive map, they are harder to miss. You can see how they speckle and cluster around cities, how towns like Newmarket and Marlborough are disproportionately affected, and you can zoom into your own town and see exactly where the tax is drained from the land.

I go back into the woods to change into my swimming trunks, which are hanging from a tree, still wet. I am shivering. I step into the water, load up the kayak and push off into the river. There is no sound but the occasional plip of a fish’s lips and the slosh of my paddle. The sun has risen and, since the river leads me east, I paddle into a mirrored infinity of blazing sky, dazzled as much by the beauty as the light.

As the sun burns off the mist, it remains in curious lines of smoke rising from the water, ghost weeds on a long fallow field, little wispy strands that blur into a low blanket in the distance. Either side of me the bank is shaggy with jungle-lush greenery, great willow trees like the heads of river gods, just emerged, dreadlocked hair draping over their faces and woody spines. With no road or field visible behind the trees, floating on the mirrored glass of the river, with the whole sky trapped beneath me, I feel as if the world has flooded and I am the only soul left alive.

Joggers ruin the illusion. They are the first sign of the suburbs and soon I am passing through some of the most expensive land in England, Hurley, Marlowe and Cookham, where almost every house has a vast garden lawn dressed in the uniform of wealth. Red carnations spill over fake Grecian urns, there are ubiquitous small wooden outhouses, flat-packed follies for the nouveau riche, and acres of clipped, lush turf. Some houses are built into the bank, their post-modern aesthetic fusing fairy-tale turrets and steel-framed glass veneers, an architecture built around the value of a view.

The beauty of river life is another perquisite of property, sold in the brochures as a ‘feature’, and no one but the super-paranoid builds a wall between their house and its river view. For this reason, the kayaker gets a rare glimpse into private property, an accidental understanding of what it really looks like. And just as so much of England is hoarded behind brick walls, so the information about the land, and its ownership, is secreted behind paywalls and bureaucracy. What happens to the land is of immense public significance, but in England it has always been categorised as private information. There have only ever been five attempts to create a census of English land ownership: the first was in 1086 with Domesday Book, followed by a 700-year breather until the next four attempts between 1830 and 1941.

The obstinate resistance to opening up data on land use is an indication of the power of both land and knowledge, which, since the Tudor surveyors, have been for ever fused. It was in this era that knowledge of the land itself became a kind of property: as the land was enclosed, so, too, were the exact specifications of its acreage, use and ownership fenced off from public access. But to peer over these walls of secrecy is not just an act of nosiness; it is essential to both the economy and democracy of England. Without openly accessible data, the market of land sale operates sluggishly and inefficiently: infrastructure is harder to implement, long conveyancy chains are retarded and the market is biased against new house builders who struggle to find the information on land they have interests in (today only eight companies build half the houses in Britain). How land is used in England has far-reaching implications for the whole of our society – it determines where we build our homes, how we grow our food, what our taxes are used for, how many bees, badgers and birds we make space for. Without the full facts of how land ownership operates in England, we forget how much it matters.

In France, you can walk into any town hall and request to see the maps of ownership for that part of the country. In the US, Montana’s land registry is online for all to access. New Zealand opened up its land registry in 2015, and now has a minister for Land Information whose job it is to oversee the transparency and accessibility of this data for the public. In England, when Companies House went online in 2015, it opened up data including registered office addresses, filing history, annual returns and shareholder details: the world kept turning and companies were subject to a greater scrutiny of fair practice. In spite of these successful alternatives, the resistance to opening up the Land Registry continues to this day, because when you put up a fence around land it becomes your business and yours alone.

So it falls to the trespassers of the digital domain to expose the truth. Anna Powell-Smith is a computer programmer and data analyst who worked with Private Eye to construct their map of offshore ownership. In 2004 she volunteered with a civic hacking movement that began constructing various websites aimed at opening up the secret keep of parliamentary democracy. They built the website faxyourmp.com, which allows you to contact your MP securely and directly; they opened up Hansard, the verbatim minutes of all parliamentary debates, to the public; and they set up theyworkforyou.com, where you can cross-reference every MP with their voting record. In 2008, she spent a month of evenings after work transferring the data of the 1087 Domesday Book online. She has made maps and matrices for everything from house prices in the UK to algorithms that translate the multitude of dress sizes across the world into comprehensible, relevant data for the consumer. Not unlike William Tyndale, she takes large swathes of dense, incomprehensible information and translates them into a language the public can use.

Following her work on the Private Eye offshore map, Powell-Smith met writer and activist Guy Shrubsole, who was beginning to compile information for his blog, and subsequent book, Who Owns England ?. Together, they sourced information from environmental maps from Natural England, OS Open Data downloads, valuation maps and freedom of information requests to local councils.

One set of maps proved particularly useful: following the Highways Act of 1980, all landowners who wanted to protect their land from claims for additional Rights of Way through their acreage had to deposit a statement and a map to their local authority, which also showed the boundaries of their estate. To protect their land from public access, they had to expose its parameters. Bit by bit, estate by estate, Shrubsole and Powell-Smith began compiling a map of England that is available online at their blog, an anarchist iteration of the map owned by the Land Registry. The map is not so much a levelling of the walls of secrecy, but holes drilled into it, shining sporadic light on the truth of land ownership.

I have turned a bend in the river and come to an immense unswerving corridor of trees, a liquid avenue that extends five miles due south before me, before it curves towards Windsor Castle. I am suddenly very hungry and stop at a tier of ancient stone steps that lead from the water’s edge up into an estate hidden by the flush canopies of the trees. This is Cliveden , one of the grandest estates in England, the residence of a long line of English nobility, including three dukes, an earl, a prince, several countesses and, most recently, the Viscount s Astor.

These steps, and the summerhouse they lead to, was where Christine Keeler first met the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, where the two embarked upon an affair that would eventually bring down the Macmillan government. They are fraught with the tension between private and personal spheres: here, the private world of politicians leaked into the public life of politics; here also is the line where the public commons of the Thames turns into the private domain of the landowner. With my feet dangling in the water, I munch my sandwich, and think again of William Beckford’s estate at Fonthill, how he used his estate to construct a personal haven that walled out the homophobia of Georgian society. Home, for everyone, is a bastion of privacy, an essential personal space where one can live according to one’s own parameters. But when these parameters extend over thousands of acres of land, the binary line between public and private becomes more contentious.

As I’m packing up my rucksack, two keepers descend the steps from the estate and pretend to fuss over a tree leaning out into the river. They’re ten foot away and are hoping their presence alone will send me on my way. I say ‘hello’ as I climb into the kayak, and now they have to turn, and descend the steps to me: one is in his sixties, the other in his mid-thirties, my age. I ask them how they’re doing. ‘We’re fine,’ says the older, and in the simple inflection of the first word he manages to convey the entire dynamic of property rights since William the Conqueror. I’m floating on a Right of Way, but with my fingertips still touching the steps I fall under their jurisdiction.

I’m reluctant to push off just yet: I want to see if we can get past the usual enmity, to a place where we can exchange a few pleasant words with each other. The younger keeper asks me where I’m going, and I say that I hope to be in Runnymede tonight. The older one scoffs: ‘that’s four hours in the skiff’. I tell him that I’m in no rush. There’s a long pause. He asks where I’m coming from, and I tell him Henley and after another lengthy beat he replies: ‘Well, you’re a long way from home.’ This is starting to sound like an artless pastiche of a Harold Pinter play, every word a threat that is somehow both veiled and explicit. They’re evidently better at this game than me, and privately, as the older keeper’s ‘four hours’ estimate sinks in, I’m starting to wonder if I probably should be in some kind of rush. I lift my fingertips off the land, take the paddle and push off down the river.

In all my trespass es, I’ve never met the actual owner of the land. It is always their gamekeeper or ground staff that approaches me, and, secondary to their actual job of caring for the land, it falls to them to protect it from invasion. I have a huge respect for the ground staff, gardeners and keepers of these properties: they spend much more time than me outside, they know the area better than I ever will and they don’t need a Google search to identify one wildflower from another. Yet in the binary dynamic of property, we are always cast against each other.

Sarcastic, sardonic or point-blank rude, the approach of a gamekeeper often rests on a kind of masculine aggression that is fuelled with indignation, as if they are justly retaliating to the first act of violence, the trespass. And the civil law that governs trespass, known as tort law, encourages this notion. Tort governs a vast scope of civil law, seeking to standardise the civil responsibilities we have to each other, any interaction we have that is not governed by a contract. It covers physical assault, battery, defamation, libel, negligence, and aims to assess what damage has occurred, where the responsibility lies, and thus who is liable. The word ‘tort’ derives from the Middle English meaning ‘injury’ and operates under the assumption that a person’s property is an extension of their self. To step over the line into private property is, in the eyes of the law, not an act of digression but of aggression, and makes the landowner the victim.

The same law of private property projects such an extreme perspective on reality, one so entirely lacking in nuance, that it fails to acknowledge the factors of scale, proportion and context. By denying any difference between a private patio in a suburban street and a dense woodland on an 11,000-acre estate, it turns a stroll in the woods into a home invasion. It refuses to accept the point-blank bleeding obvious: that in terms of harm, they are worlds apart.

There is a defensive paranoia to private property, to the extremity of its position, to the absoluteness of its demands of dominion, that, with the barbs on its wire and spikes on its walls, looks something like fear. In mid-nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire, when the 5th Duke of Portland sought to close the public roads that ran across his vast estate of Welbeck Abbey, the government had to intervene to stop him. The duke was a recluse, and hated the notion of bumping into other people, so instead commissioned a vast network of underground passages to be built beneath his estate, where he could live without the threat of human interaction.

Many of these estates have that same sense of seclusion. It’s hard to comprehend fully the silence and emptiness of their grounds until you hop back over the wall and land in the busy clatter of the streets, the chaos of other people. The walls of these estates don’t just exclude the outside world, they buttress a misanthropy and fear of what lies outside them. In the words of Donald Trump, referring to the most isolated magnate in the world of cinema, Citizen Kane: ‘in real life I believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people – it’s a protective mechanism, you have your guard up.’

The river becomes busier as I leave the Cliveden corridor, turn the bend and see Windsor Castle before me. By the time I have passed the abandoned Bray Film Studios and Eton College, the river has become a commons once again, buzzing with the wide variety of life. There are eccentric elderly gentlemen, with handlebar moustaches and straw hats, chugging around in antique paddle boats; there are tanned, portly executives in river cruisers with their grandchildren; there are towering three-tiered tourist paddle boats, whose guests wave happily at anything that passes, lovers on hired pedal-boats and several other kayakers. Toddlers are throwing bits of bread at ducks, seagulls swooping at chip butties and the river is a kaleidoscope of noise and act ion. I look up to the windows of Windsor Castle, and imagine the view from there, the silence of separation from the masses. The monarchy, of all institutions, knows what it is like to have your guard up – at the top of the pile of the English hierarchy, only a few families have walked the castle’s corridors: the houses of Normandy, Blois, Anjou, Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart, Hanover, Saxe-Coburg and Windsor, all constantly threatened by a host of royals, lords and peasants who have wanted, more than anything else, to cuckoo them from their feathered nests.

I pass Windsor town, and follow the curve of the river to the quieter back garden of the castle, Home Park. This area of land, formerly a common, then cleared for a deer park, then walled to create the private gardens of Queen Victoria, has to be the loneliest park in England. It is one of the sixteen areas of land, largely associated with the monarchy, that since Aaron Barschak raised his smock to reveal his pubic ‘heir apparent’, have been upgraded to the charge of criminal trespass . I paddle up to its raised bank and float alongside the clipped green lawns. Neat signs stuck at intervals along the bank show the silhouette of a person enclosed in a red circle, with a red line dashed diagonally across their body: ‘This is a protected site under section 128 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Trespass on this site is a criminal offence.’

Somewhere inside this park is the Herne Oak, a tree that commemorates Berkshire’s greatest pagan deity, Herne the Hunter, referenced by William Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor. There’s no one around, not a soul in sight, and I’m tempted to moor up, ignore the signs and see what happens. Instead, I lean over and pluck a blade of grass from its bank.

The sun has set by the time I reach Runnymede. The geese are honking up the river, drawing in the darkness, and I’m wondering where I’m going to stay tonight. Runnymede is where Magna Carta was signed, but because of the capricious oscillation of the river no one can be sure whether it was on this side of the bank or that. Some say it was signed under a 2,500-year-old tree called the Ankerwycke Yew, and others claim it was on a thin spar of land that juts into the river, called Magna Carta Island. On this island is a stone upon which the great charter was supposedly signed, but this foundation stone of English liberty is enclosed in an oak-panelled room, which is enclosed in a Grade II listed mansion, which was sold to a private family by Sotheby’s in 2014 for £4 million. Not for me, then.

Eventually I find a sandy cove on a small turn of the river, co-owned by the National Trust and a small, irritable robin, who bounces indignantly about the place as I disembark. The boughs of a chestnut tree reach over the cove, out into the river, draping down to the lip of the water, forming a perfect camouflage net from the park and busy road opposite. As I shut my eyes that night, my mind sparkles with iridescence of the river water, the fluid, ever-changing shapes of the colours and the dazzle-dance of light.

I wake up late, stiff and cold. Beyond my chestnut leaf camo-net, the day is grey. My body feels racked by the kayak, stretched and raw. I pack up my litter and float out to deposit it in a bin beside the wan smile of Queen Elizabeth II, a statue erected in 2015 to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. On the very day that the queen and Prime Minist er David Cameron assembled to honour this great charter of Liberty, a group of thirty or forty squatters were at a High Court trial, being evicted from waste land just beyond Her Majesty’s shoulders, across the water meadows, up in the woods.

Following the eviction of the Occupy demonstration in 2012 , a group of protest ers walked out of London to pursue their protest elsewhere. They had discovered a sixty-five-acre site, formerly a campus for Brunel University, in the valley overlooking Runnymede. The land had been bought five years earlier by an offshore property investment company called the Royalton Group, who were looking to develop it into 600 luxury apartments, a high-end gated community they called Magna Carta Park. But for years nothing had happened, and the land was used for illegal fly-tipping, strewn with broken fridges and car tyres. The group of squatters called themselves Diggers 2012, after the occupation of St George’s Hill by Gerrard Winstanley and a smaller group of land reformers in 1649. Like Grow Heathrow just across the river, their ambition was not just to protest against the unequal division of land in England, against the hoarding of empty buildings, against the worst tenant rights in Europe, but to culture its alternative, to grow food and live in low-impact, eco-friendly fashion.

They built a geodesic dome for community meetings, a longhouse kitchen and about forty homes from scrap, salvaged and recyclable materials. They dug a well to access water from a natural spring and, just like Winstanley’s Diggers, they began planting crops. This was the living re-enactment of John Locke’s justification for private property: they were improving the waste ground, making it theirs through their own labour. But 300 years after Locke, the logic of property had taken on its own momentum. Private property was no longer justified by use and improvement, but by itself alone.

There was a nuance to John Locke’s argument about private property that has, from the moment it was written, been conveniently overlooked – for Locke, the enclosure of common land was only justifiable so long as there was ‘enough and as good left in common’. Nicknamed the ‘Lockean Proviso’, this small addition shines an altogether more egalitarian light on the logic of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. But it has been buried under almost 500 years of capitalist ideology, meaning that the Diggers 2012, who were not only protesting homelessness , but providing actual homes, had no rights to the land. The Royalton Group sent in the bailiffs twice, destroying their buildings and tearing up their crops, and on the eighth centenary of Magna Carta, the High Court issued the Diggers with an injunction. Finally, in September 2015, the land was cleared.

I pass beneath a great concrete bridge of the M25, a huge cavern of concrete that hums with the tyres rolling above it. I yell BOLLOCKS at the top of my voice, and it returns back to me, satisfying, round with reverb. Since Locke’s time, the power of private property has swelled into a gargantuan monster that trumps freedom of expression, the need to subsist and the right to shelter. But while it primarily secures the rights of a tiny elite over the public rights of the many, its secondary effect is to establish a two-way dynamic of enmity, a binary polarisation between the haves and the have-nots.

On one side of the fence the have-nots are criminalised in their attempts to use land, and, on the other, the haves are simultaneously vilified, turned into fairy-tale ogres as if their own personalities are to blame for the current system of private property. E. P. Thompson quotes a smuggler from Dorset in the eighteenth century who justified the murder of an excise man by saying ‘the smugglers swore they did no more matter to kill him than they would a toad’.

Such a dehumanising attitude was understandable in a time when a poacher could have his neck broken for feeding his family. But the sentiment lasts to this day in a tired, robotic resentment that allows men of power to dismiss political dissent as personal financial envy. When he was implicated in the parliamentary expenses scandal in 2009, MP Anthony Steen responded: ‘I’ve done nothing criminal … and do you know what it’s about? Jealousy. I’ve got a very very large house, some people say it looks like Balmoral … what right does the public have to interfere with my private life?’

The answer, of course, is that the public paid the £87,000 of his expenses for his ‘very very large’ second home, which made the issue very, very public indeed. But the story is emblematic of how a stream of specific allegations can divert into that stagnant pool of loosely defined resentment that England keeps for its wealthy. It’s a pool that we wallow in.

I have marched alongside protesters in all manner of demonstrations, walking shoulder to shoulder with people carrying signs that declare: ‘Fuck the Rich’, or, more humorously, ‘Eat the Rich’. But such a focus on the character of the rich is simply an inversion of the coin that declared the aristocracy a superior breed of human and fails to examine the basic inequality of the system that makes their actions legal. It imagines a world where the line of morality can be drawn as simply as the line of a fence; rich is bad, poor is good. It reinforces the partisan belief that richness is itself a sign of moral failing. Worse, it engenders a kind of orientalisation of the working class, that old biblical trope that there is nobility in poverty. And, worse still, it internalises the central fiction of the fence – the lie of binary thinking.

A fence is first and foremost a method of division. When the line is drawn in an argument, it implicitly creates the illusion that, according to its logic, one side represents the direct opposite of the other. The notion of common ground, the idea of shared values, is entirely obliterated by the dualist command of the fence. It divides the value judgement from all context and polarises the debate into an absolutist, partisan mindset of good versus bad. The partisan is a servant of partition.

Life is more complicated. Thomas Beckford was the richest man in Europe as a direct result of the African people his father enslaved. To the binary judgement of the fence, he was a villain. But lift that definition from his life and you can see a more complex picture: in the gay community, he is celebrated as a hero, an icon. Like Ludwig II of Bavaria, or Oscar Wilde, he was a gay man harangued by a fiercely judgemental, hypocritical society, a man who refused to capitulate to the bigotry of his era. Similarly, John Bentinck, the 5th Duke of Portland, was, on one side of the fence, a mad recluse, nicknamed ‘the Mole’ for his obsessive tunnelling projects that led him as far away as possible from society. But remove the fence line and you find that local historians also view him as a benevolent landowner, creating employment opportunities for the people in his manor, who were living in abject poverty. His schemes cost him £100,000 per year, and provided a living for 15,000 workmen and women, for eighteen years. So was he a hero or a villain? The answer, along with the question, is meaningless.

In the words of the great trespasser of partisan politics Christopher Hitchens, ‘the truth seldom lies, but if it does, it lies somewhere in between’. Truth lies in the free movement of ideas, in other words, discussion, where either side is on equal footing with the other. The need to turn characters into cartoons of good or bad is something that drives newspaper sales, structures the narrative of Hollywood movies and keeps Twitter twittering, but it doesn’t help the land debate. Winston Churchill, who himself crossed and re-crossed the fence line of partisan politics, said much the same thing: ‘It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the state which would be blameworthy if it were not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice.’

In some ways landowners are just as trapped within their walls as we are outside them. In the earl y 1700s, an eccentric aristocratic landowner called Richard Norton died. Warden of Bere Forest, he lived at Southwick Park in Hampshire and possessed estate s worth at least £60,000. When he died in 1732, with no children or direct heirs, he left a detailed and unambiguous will bequeathing his entire estate to the poor of that district. Inevitably, with so much money at stake, his distant relatives contested the will and, seven years later, a special jury of Hampshire gentlemen declared the will null and void: so great was the consensus of private property that Norton was deemed, by law, to be mad to give it away. The land was eventually given to Norton’s nephew, Francis Thistlethwayte, whose family still own the 7,000-acre estate and take rent from the seventeen farms, various commercial industries and 164 houses.

On top of the legal system, the social network of wealth, its customs, responsibilities and shared ideologies exert tight restrictions on its bearers. When the Duke of Westminster inherited the Grosvenor estate from his father, he became the richest man under thirty in the world, with over 130,000 acres to his name. But with interests in sixty-two international cities, with almost 11,000 employees worldwide and total assets of almost £50 billion, can he really be expected to give it all away? With respect to his employees, does he even have the right?

The most popular caricature of the landowning class is Toad of Toad Hall. He is vain and narcissistic, imbued with an ugly sense of entitlement and entirely unqualified to wield the power in his possession, symbolised by the new motorcar that he is forever crashing into country verges. Typical of the English, we love him. Or love to hate him: he makes us feel secure in the simplistic enclosure of values. But the truth behind Toad is more complex.

The inspiration for Toad Hall was Hardwick House, then owned by the Baronet Sir Charles Rose. He was friends with Kenneth Grahame and entertained the author on several occasions. His house is a Grade I listed Tudor building, which once played host to Charles I. It sits on a straight run of the Thames just before Mapledurham Lock and its 900-acre estate stretches out over the steep hills of woods and wildflower meadows behind it. I grew up roaming his estate.

Its current owner is the 4th Baronet Sir Julian Rose. Like many of the other Toads in this book, he inherited his wealth and his titles: he is a paragon of privilege. But even the most hard-bitten, anti-rich ‘militant’ would be hard pressed to criticise how he has managed his fortune: his estate embodies almost every ideal of the land movement.

His farm on the estate is resolutely free of genetic modification. He is a pioneer of ecologically sound farming techniques, beginning the conversion of his farm to organic in the mid-1970s, joining the Soil Association Board in the 1980s and writing several books that promote what he calls ‘the proximity principle’, an ethic that fuses food growing with local community interaction. He refuses to sell to supermarkets, distributing his food locally instead, and various low-impact growing schemes and businesses have been given space on his land: there is a renewable energy company that supplies biomass boilers, an organic veg box scheme and a non-profit organisation that offers outdoor activities for younger children. They specialise in working with children with autism, anxiety and other issues that they believe can be managed by exposure to an outdoor environment. Every spring, locals are encouraged to come and help out the toads in their mating rituals, by carrying them in buckets across the main road.

Over the course of writing this book I found myself increasingly keen to speak with a landowner, to offer a right to reply, to hear a perspective from the other side of the fence. With his openness to so many of the core ethics of the land movement, Sir Julian had always seemed the most likely candidate. But Sir Julian’s Hardwick estate is on the other side of the Thames from where I grew up, meaning he resides in Oxfordshire and not West Berkshire. He is not the lord of my manor.

Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England?, is, like me, a West Berkshire boy, and one of the posts on his blog was a detailed investigation into who owns the land we both grew up on. He discovered that over half of the county is the private property of just thirty landowners. The Ministry of Defence is listed, with its acres at Greenham Common, Aldermaston and Burghfield , there are various industrial farming corporations, offshore corporations and the Iliffes, a family of newspaper and media tycoons, who restored Basildon Park to its former colonial ‘glory’. But principal among these is a landowner who controls 12,332 acres across West Berkshire. In my home county, the real Toad of Toad Hall is former MP Richard Benyon.

Richard Benyon is a controversial figure, the fulcrum (or fence) between partisan opposition. With a net worth of an estimated £130 million, he was for fifteen years the richest MP in Parliament. He was Defra under-secretary during Natural England’s prosecution of Walshaw Moor, and, himself the owner of a substantial grouse moor in Scotland, he was suspected by some newspapers of a vested interest, of being at the heart of the decision to drop the case. He launched an enquiry into the link between buzzards and pheasant populations which led to a trial licence for keepers to kill this otherwise protected species. The campaign drew so much criticism that David Cameron was forced to withdraw it almost instantly and, when asked if it had failed, Mr Benyon replied, in marvellous Politicians’ Cant, that it had ‘hit a wall of credibility’. In 2014 he criticised the welfare state as a ‘something for nothing culture’ and yet the year before, as the largest landlord in West Berkshire, received £119,237 in housing benefit. Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller has painted a picture of him prostrate on his grouse moor, being eviscerated by buzzards, one on his chest, pulling out the strings of his intestines. To the left-wing environmental lobbyists, Benyon is simply a Toad.

On the other side of the fence, however, he is well liked by many of his constituents, including my own parents. He was named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the ‘saints’ of the MP expenses scandal. ‘There are two things people often say having met Richard Benyon MP,’ wrote fellow Conservative MP Robert Wilson in an online profile on Benyon. ‘First, “What a bloody nice bloke” he is, and second, “Is he really 52?” He can disarm even the most lunatic of left-wing opponents, with a few well-chosen words, and, when coupled with his boyish looks, it’s difficult to find someone more earnest and likeable.’

Mr Benyon is the landowner whose holdings, by being closest to my childhood home, are closest to my heart. I have trespassed many of his 14,000 acres, in both Hampshire and West Berkshire, including his ancestral seat at Englefield and its gorgeous undulating deer park. I did this not in opposition to anything, least of all Mr Benyon himself, but because it is full of hills, dells, streams, glades, meadows, river s and kingfishers. I lived in the area, and wanted to see it, to draw it, to know it.

But to the orthodoxy of land ownership we are sworn enemies. The trespasser is the bogey man of property, the personification of the threat to the cult of exclusion. By refusing to accept the rules of what Locke called ‘the foundation of all democracy’, the trespasser is the antithesis of natural order, a lunatic, left-wing opponent to common sense. Likewise, to the trespasser, the landowner is the mysterious, unseen puppet master, the power behind the curtain, the hand that pulls the invisible string that yanks us from the land. Mr Benyon and I may have grown up only five miles away from each other, but we live in different worlds.

It is this schism between us that allows either side to be caricatured into a lunatic or a toad. But if the mantle of lunatic didn’t seem to fit my quiet rambles over the countryside, then why should the figure of Toad apply to Mr Benyon? I wanted to see if an abstract trespass was possible, if I could engineer an encounter with him that would lead us both over the lines of partisan politics, to a pun that no land rights activist can resist: common ground.

A few months before my paddle along his stretch of the Kennet, I figured out a way that we could meet. I discovered a rule that allows people with more than one home to choose where they cast their local votes, which meant, with my parents’ permission, I could re-register my voting address from London to their home in West Berkshire. In doing so, I was suddenly eligible to attend one of his Friday afternoon open surgeries. So I booked my place.

I’m down a side street in Newbury, waiting for the Conservative office door to open. I have in mind the famous scene in Michael Mann’s film Heat , where the two enemies, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, meet for the first time. They’ve been playing cat and mouse all through the film, and when they meet in a diner it is a tense, quietly aggressive display of machismo that forges an unspoken mutual respect between the two. There is a moment where the two meet each other’s eyes, share a lingering look, and almost smile. This is the Holmes and Moriarty moment, the loving connection shared only by nemeses, the moment they realise they are the yang to each other’s ying.

I’m wondering if something similar will happen here when a man steps out of a side door into the street, in a suit and white shirt, and I realise it’s Mr Benyon himself. Very graciously he approaches me, we introduce ourselves, and he offers to forgo his errand. The description was right: with his ice-blue eyes, his boyish looks, I am dazzled and disarmed. ‘That’s very kind,’ I say (a little too emphatically) and we step inside.

The office has two or three people working on computers, and immediately to my right is a small, bare cubicle, with just a table and a chair either side of it, that looks like a police interview room. I am, annoyingly, nervous. I have never spoken to a man of such power and wealth before, and already the furniture has placed us in opposition. This is my one opportunity to speak to someone outside my coven of left-wing lunatics, to test the ideologies of land reform that, from my side of the fence, seem so clearly beneficial to all of society and, from his, so abhorrent to natural order.

I have eight questions in my sketchbook that I hope will lead us from a discussion about public rights along the River Kennet, through public rights to all rivers, through public rights to the value of land, and eventually to a place where we can talk about the right to roam. I’m hoping that we can be civil, discuss the issues of public access without retreating to our partisan trenches. There are many other issues that put us on the same side of the fence: from Britain’s position in the EU to the importance of localised fisheries for the reduction of discarded fish stock, we agree on many things. We even have shared interests, namely the land he owns. I’m hoping we’ll get on.

But that’s not how it goes. In the next fifteen minutes the scene descends from formal politeness to a horrible awkward tension. Our session ends with him on his feet, with the door open, declaiming to both myself and the volunteer Conservatives in the next office how the fiasco of the New Era Estate had damaged his family, how he never wants to revisit that period of his life again, ‘impeaching’ me not to believe everything I read in the papers.

But I hadn’t asked about the New Era Estate. I knew that the intricacies of this saga, which included ninety-three residents facing eviction from their Hackney flats on land that the Benyons own, and also included comedian Russell Brand dressing as a chimney sweep, stapling an eviction notice to the door of the Benyons’ London office, would occupy too much of our limited time together. I had only mentioned it towards the end of the interview because I live five minutes’ walk away in London. There was something performative to his speech, something rehearsed, something disproportionate to the questions I was asking. It felt histrionic.

We had started gently. With reference to his earlier quote, I asked how access to only 3 per cent of rivers in England and Wales could ever be regarded as ‘plenty’. He appeared not to know the exact percentage, and when I said it had been confirmed by the CEO of the Angling Trust, his reply marked my inaugural live exposure to the phenomenon of Politicians’ Cant: ‘I don’t want to get tied down in percentages.’ Tied down? I’d seen this on the television and heard it on the radio: politicians live in an extraordinary unreality where questions can be deflected with scripted sentences. Words as walls. I wondered how many landowners know the statistics, how many of the earls and dukes in this book know the exact histories of how they had come to gain the land. One of the perks of privilege is that you rarely need to stop to question how you got it. When I suggested that the privatisation of rivers could be the source of the enmity between fishermen and other users of the rivers, he echoed Julian Fellowes’ vision of a harmonious stratified England, twice wondering: ‘Look, why can’t people just get along?’

It was the moment I asked about the extraction of shale from Benyon’s Inclosure that the smile fell from his face and the atmosphere turned. This Inclosure, with its nineteenth-century spelling, was the area of common land that was fenced off and enclosed by his ancestor in 1829. Mr Benyon is currently mining 350 acres of his Inclosure for 200,000 tonnes of sand and gravel, employing the same rights to the land as the commoners held for centuries, but on an industrial scale, and for his profit alone. I wanted to use this as an example of how the community that lives around land might benefit from a share in its worth. They might even, I suggested, have a right to it.

The notion of commoning, the shared regulation of resources along the principles of anarchism, community decision-making, where every member of a community has equal rights to the value of the land, appeared so detestably ideological to Mr Benyon that by simply raising the point I had automatically disqualified myself from the debate. Oh, I see, he said, as if I had just dropped my cards and revealed my hand. He refused to speak about philosophical or ideological issues, as if they could be partitioned from their pragmatic effects on the ground. We both ploughed on with our argument, steadily getting nowhere. We were both framing the issue differently: for me, Benyon’s Inclosure was emblematic of a wider discussion of how the value of land could benefit all society while, for Mr Benyon, it was quite simply, in both senses of the word, his own private business.

Impasse. Brick wall. A line in the sand. Any step further would be treated as an act of aggression. Be it common land or conversation, when the wall goes up, dialogue is blocked. While the issue of land ownership continues to be defined as a private interest, even the discussion itself seems to be off limits. When public land is enclosed, it becomes the private business of its owner alone, and just like the issue of transparency of data, or the argument between the anglers and the kayakers, it is the landowners who define the terms of the discussion: to own the land is to own the debate.

As our meeting came to an end, Richard Benyon rose to his feet, opened the door and began his monologue about the New Era Estate. Then, with a flourish of an imaginary velvet cape, he exited stage right to the silent, but impassioned, applause of his office workers. I was left alone in the office, stunned. No handshake, no farewell. I had promised my mother I would be polite to her MP and now I was heading home for dinner to tell her I had virtually chased him out of his office. From a distance, this time-encrusted system of private property in land is a rock-solid castle keep. But get anywhere near it, it is just a house of cards – one prod, and all the kings and queens come fluttering down.

This scene passes through my head all the while that I’m paddling into London and my chest still tightens as I think about it. It was horribly tense. The issue of land use is such an emotive subject that, when raised, it seems impossible to meet in the no man’s land between trenches. But without the discussion, without the dialogue, I was unable to understand the view from the other side of the fence. I was left wondering if perhaps the true source of the paranoia of the cult of exclusion, the roots of Ownership Anxiety, the obsessive evasion of scrutiny, is that it simply cannot be justified.

An hour or so after the M25 tunnel, the river loses its wildness. I pass through the uniform green lawns of business parks in Chertsey, and just before the neat flats of Walton-on-Thames I come to the strangest space of land in this book, D’Oyly Carte Island. It is a small eyot, whose foliage grows wild into the river around a mown lawn and Swiss-style wooden chalet. Bought for £2 million by Eyot House Ltd, a company registered in Hong Kong, it is now inhabited solely by a pack of semi-feral guard dogs which live in the house and roam free through its open door. The dogs, fed daily by a local employed by the absentee owners, protect the property from invasion and keep it empty while the land it is built on appreciates in value. This strange, vacant isle is the manifestation of how far the property concept has come since Locke ’s justification: land is no longer valued for its use, but for its worth as an investment. Empty, bewitched and worthless to all but its owners, this is England.