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It’s 9.30am and I’m brushing my teeth in a car park, watching a pair of sparrows fight over a Stockans oatcake. It’s a beautiful day, the morning sun is bursting lustily above the tree line and I’m acutely aware that I’ve never seen a protest quite like this before.
Everywhere, merry demonstrators are unpacking hiking poles, donning mirrored shades and gaiters. We’re in Ivybridge, close to the Devon-Cornwall border, one of those parts of England where place names seem to reflect whatever was listed in the Domesday Book. Just to the north is Dartmoor, a huge craggy section of national park shrouded in mysticism and prehistory.
Dartmoor is essentially sacred to ramblers. It is the only place in England where you have a right to camp out in the wild without permission. At least it was until, earlier this month, a man named Alexander Darwall took the Dartmoor park authorities to court, arguing that camping was not “recreation”, and therefore not protected by the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985. Darwall, a hedge fund manager, owns the 4,000-acre Blachford Estate, as well as 16,000 acres in Sutherland, in the northern Scottish Highlands (where he has antagonised gold-panners by limiting their access to rivers).
The mere mention of his name triggers boos that ripple through the crowd. His court ruling is the reason everyone’s here today.
A day earlier, a private deal had been struck between Dartmoor National Park Authority and Devon landowners, allowing limited wild camping in return for an undisclosed sum. This was received by campaigners as a sellout, reducing public access by restricting campers to specified areas. People here want an appeal in the courts, and organisers are threatening ancient magic on the landowner: the return of Old Crockern, a pre-Christian guardian of the moor, a “gurt old sperit” astride a skeleton horse, coming for greed with “eyes as deep as peat water pools”.
The group I’ve joined at Ivybridge is just a small part of the protest. Following a 40-minute hike over the hill to the village of Cornwood, we’ll join a much larger group. No one is sure how many will turn out: thousands have signed up online.
It’s obvious that this is about more than just wild camping. One man from nearby Kingsbridge, who “thinks” he’s 69, tells me that he is also inspired by a wider push for people’s access to land at a national level. “I look to countries where they have a right to roam with absolute envy,” he says. “The access that they have to the countryside brings a feeling of being involved with your country and not dissociated. The benefits are enormous.”
People who grow up in cities often have a view of the countryside as a broad, expansive land through which one can wander in any direction. However, according to Right to Roam, one of today’s main organisers, 92 per cent of the countryside (and 97 per cent of the rivers) in England and Wales is out of bounds — much of it controlled by a handful of landowners.
The public do have some roaming rights: 1932 brought the Rights of Way Act, which allowed people in England and Wales to claim paths if they could prove 20 years of unhindered public use. However, the landowners could simply rebut these presumptions by, for example, posting notices.
In 2000, the Countryside & Rights of Way act set in law public access to roughly 8 per cent of England. Since then, groups such as Right to Roam, started by Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, and the environmental campaigner Guy Shrubsole have pushed for an expansion. Their aim is to extend access to “woodlands, all downland, Green Belt land, rivers and river banks”, an arrangement similar to that in Scotland — and, as anyone involved in this movement will tell you, Scandinavia.
This is no easy task in a country so deferential to power and rigidly enclosed as England. Between 1604 and 1914, around 5,000 enclosure acts saw more than a fifth of England transferred from common ownership. Many people have attempted to buck this trend, and in 1932 about 400 young communists conducted a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District. Many were arrested and beaten by gamekeepers, but the action helped lead to the creation of the National Parks Commission by the Attlee government.
Emerging on to Dartmoor, you’re struck by the endlessness of the landscape. There’s a brutal beauty to this place, one that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baskerville hound, as well as the folklore of Old Crockern and a local ogre called the Cutty Dyer. To the north, rolling tors extend like the spine of a terrible sleeping giant.
Traversing streams and rock-strewn footpaths, one protester tells me how access to Dartmoor has helped him in his struggle with mental illness. “It’s about walking in a landscape that doesn’t care for you. So much can change when you’re on the moor. It really zones you in and, with that, you forget your worries.”
Another recalls how, after the death of his father-in-law, he and his family packed up to camp on the moor and grieve under the stars. When they came back, ready to face the world, they learnt that one of their best friends had been admitted to hospital. “We wouldn’t have had the strength [to visit her] if we hadn’t been out on the moors.”
Arriving at Cornwood, the true scale of the protest becomes clear. There are thousands of people milling around, bottlenecking the narrow village streets. They cover the full archetypal gamut of rural Britain, an unlikely alliance of pro-hikers in expensive gear, second-homers with pedigree dogs, students with field recorders and barefoot crusties in handmade helmets.
There’s a brief address and a reminder to leave no trace, then we’re off up the hill, the lot of us. There’s clear blue sky overhead, people sharing out homemade fudge, and children splashing about in the brooks that flank the paths. At our rear is the Devon flag — green for the hills, black for the moors, white for the salt spray.
Among the throng, midway up the hill, I find Guy Shrubsole, looking slightly overwhelmed. “This is more than we could possibly have hoped for,” he says. “It feels quite historic.”
Shrubsole runs the “Who Owns England?” blog, an invaluable resource. “Land in England is owned by a vanishingly small number of people and Dartmoor is no different,” he tells me. “Fifteen landowners own about half of Dartmoor National Park, and there’s the contradiction — ‘National Park’, but it isn’t owned by the nation.
“It would be fantastic if we took a leaf out of Scotland’s book. It does go beyond a right to roam. It goes to a new relationship with nature, with the land. We’re trying to reconnect more people with the countryside and to ensure those people become careful stewards of it.”
As the hills’ bald heads come into view, I reflect that Dartmoor — and indeed, the UK — wasn’t always like this. Shrubsole’s latest book, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, tells us that temperate rainforests once covered a fifth of the country, a proportion that has been reduced by sheep farming and timber extraction to just 0.5 per cent. About 16 miles north of here is Wistman’s Wood, home to one of the last ancient groves. People speak of it in hushed voices — a weird place of tangled, searching branches.
At the top of the hill, the landscape opens up again. We’re on the roof of the world. People are strumming banjos, sharing tea, Pot Noodles and hasty sandwiches. In the rain, the moor grass would be saturated, but today it’s dry and soft as goose down. The sun is beginning to set now, splitting protesters down the middle into dark and gold sections. We’re addressed by Martin Shaw, a “teacher of the mythic imagination”. He gets the crowd to call out “We are Crockern!” and tells them to take that deep into their “secret little mischievous hearts”.
Led by Shaw, we embark on a sort of ritual summoning. Then, over the crest of the hill, trailed by dancers, guitars, drums and strings, Crockern comes — a figure twice the size of a normal man, covered in linen and streamers. The children rush to him with open arms.
Delight abounds in this rebellion. For people here, the right to wild camp, the right to roam, is not an innate departure from tradition. People here don’t want something new, but rather something that’s been lost. A simpler, more innocent reading of the past, projected into the future.
Miles Ellingham is an FT editorial assistant
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