This is Two Tree HillIt is just one tiny pixel of our vast and largely inaccessible countryside that laws exclude you from. Michael Fordham has had enough...
Two Tree Hill is a tump smack in the middle of Farmborough Common in the county of Bath and North East Somerset. The common is an area of relatively flat ground that forms the gateway to the deeply valleyed land that was, until the last pit closed in 1973, the North Somerset Coalfield. Climb out of Bath to the south and sooner or later you’ll see Two Tree Hill.
At 177m, it’s not the highest point in the area, The Sleight, at 200m, which is at the back of our family’s house, looks down on it, but because of Two Tree Hill’s beauty, cone-like prominence and location amid the disc of Farmborough Common, it is a beacon for folks who live and walk around here.
Fifty years ago, Lucy, now my wife, would walk up there and have a flask of tea and honey sandwiches with her grandad. To walk collectively and individually in the landscapes we love is a passionate tradition that our family and friends cherish. The madness is that Lucy and Grandad were breaking the law.
Right now, you cannot legally walk up Two Tree Hill.
There is no public right of way that leads up there. And even though there is a solid network of well-managed public footpaths, permissive paths and byways networked around Farmborough Common, try to walk, as is your natural human instinct, to the beautiful summit and rest your back against one of the two trees up there, and the chances are you will meet the wrath of the large, ruddy (and in my experience aggressive) fellow who owns, or at least farms, the land here. It can’t be right, can it? So how did we get here?
We Walk
To relish the sensation of walking is definitive of our species. Anthropologists of every kink and creed are in constant debate about just how and why the ability to walk on two limbs arose. Slightly less contentious is that this ability to achieve gentle dominion over its immediate environment, and then to seek out new territory without claiming permanent ‘ownership’ of that land, is one of the crank handles of human evolution. I nicked that phrase from one of the masters.
The English-born writer, art expert and traveller Bruce Chatwin implied throughout his work that the impulse to move and explore was the driving force in human evolution. Through Chatwin’s lens, our ancestors’ nomadic lifestyle was crucial for survival. Travelling on foot developed physical aptitude and adaptability to the constantly emerging conditions of the landscape. Complex social and spiritual structures developed in relationship to those landscapes – famously and intensely in the context of the aboriginal Australia that Chatwin documented in his 1989 book Songlines. It’s only when you get settled that you get agriculture and animal husbandry. It’s only when you get farms that you get fences. And it’s only when you get fences that you get the stench of ownership and the innate fear of otherness. But the root of the instinct to explore the landscape in which you find yourself goes much deeper than ideas of ownership and trespass. It goes to the heart of your very identity – which in turn is a nexus of emotion and mind, heart and body.
In many ways the landscape you inhabit is you. And you are the landscape.
Acts of Enclosure
You don’t have to be a card-carrying social justice warrior to be righteously indignant about the evolution of land ownership in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – and particularly in England. Inherited control over vast tracts of these islands has been handed out by various crowns to an aristocracy who were granted these lands in perpetuity, most often because of their ability to raise militias and to forcibly remove populations from said areas, or to dominate and coerce communities by levying taxes and tithes upon them – a large portion of which was, of course, ‘kicked upstairs’ to the level of the hierarchy immediately above them.
The ‘acts of enclosure’ that parliament began to introduce in the 1600s exacerbated existing injustices.
Common lands, which were previously shared by local communities for grazing, farming, hunting and other uses, were enclosed by hedges or walls and fences and became privately owned and farmed using new methods motored by industrial tech. Peasants and commoners were displaced and forced to migrate to cities in the name of agricultural efficiency and economic development, where they became the urban working classes, whose blood and sweat would fuel the industrial revolution. Or they emigrated and used the experience of what had happened to them to steal other people’s land.
Ownership and the power that bestowed was concentrated deeper and deeper into the hierarchy anointed by the Crown and by Parliament. The enclosures themselves radically altered the physical structure of the countryside. The hedgerows and dry-stone walls we now aesthetically fetishise, and see as ‘nature’, became barriers that divided and excluded as well as enclosed. The roots of this feudal system remain buried deep in the earth of England, and its flowers are the current situation.
As little as 8% of the realm is freely accessible to the general population. And according to campaigning Group Right to Roam, that figure drops to 3% when you’re talking about access to rivers.
The Answer
Any regular British hill walker, hiker, climber and rambler knows that the network of footpaths that exist in England are amazingly well maintained and relatively extensive. But they will also sense that these slim pathways, often accompanied by aggressive warning signs that speak of the consequences of veering off the pathways, offer us all only a pale simulacrum of foot-bound freedom. Two Tree Hill is just one example of tens of thousands of anachronisms in which huge tracts of lands are barred from the general population, sometimes in the name of the protection of livestock and native flora and fauna, but most often simply because of the exclusivity of private ownership.
If the environmental catastrophe we’re facing whispers to us of anything, it is that deep emotional and physical engagement with our immediate environment is the only way we learn to love that environment. And part of the human birthright is that we protect the things we love. Of course, freedom and privilege comes with responsibility — but I believe a right to roam wherever we like all over the earth would lead to us becoming true custodians of the place that nourishes, diverts and stirs within us a deep sense of gratitude, and yes, ownership. I’m talking about a different kind of ownership. The sense of emotional possession that transcends the latent power of dusty title deeds.
Do Something…
Right To Roam is campaigning for a change in the law to allow public access to more of England’s countryside, woods and rivers. They describe the current state as a crisis. ‘92% of the countryside has no right to roam and 97% of rivers have no uncontested rights of navigation: meaning some bank-side owners feel entitled to shout at people just for going for a paddle, or a swim.’ It has been ingrained in the English psyche for so long that this situation is accepted as normal by the populace, but you might have noted the word English, not British, because Scottish law allows more access to land.
‘In all but one tenth of the English landscape, to wander off the footpath, to swim in a river, to explore and educate ourselves about our countryside, can leave us branded a trespasser and expelled from the land,’ say Right To Roam. ‘This is neither fair nor reasonable, and in a time where the need to reconnect with nature is more urgent than ever, it is not sustainable. The law must be changed.’
Due to generations of denied access, it’s easy to throw ‘buts’ and ‘what ifs’, however Right To Roam’s website have the answers to many of the naysayers’ doubts. We chose just a few…
People don’t know how to treat the countryside with respect, there’ll be loads more litter.
We hate litter, and like many in the countryside, pick it up whenever we see it. By far the majority of people who come to the countryside treat it with respect. For those that don’t, how will people they ever learn the code of the countryside, how to behave in nature, if they cannot regularly experience it in practice? If people continue to be cut off from the beauty of nature, how will they ever care about how it is treated? Let’s create a culture where people are much more aware of their responsibility to the land, to nature, and the communities that live and work in the countryside. And remember: those who disregard the rules that already exist don’t care what the rules are anyway. The only people we’re putting off with our current access laws are those who, by their very nature, are seeking to do the right thing.
Of course Right to Roam works in Scotland, there’s lots of mountains and open air, but there’s not enough space in England.
This is one of the oldest stories told about the English countryside. Only 9% of England is built upon, and the rest comprises open countryside, farmland and ‘natural spaces’ (forests, lakes, grasslands etc). England is full of space, but it’s hidden by brick walls and barbed wire. It only feels full because, most of the time, we’re all sharing the same tiny proportion of it.
Isn’t this just about abolishing private property? Isn’t this just the ‘politics of envy’?
Not at all. In countries that have enshrined the Right to Roam, the land is still owned by individuals. Private property is still intact. The only right they cede is the right to exclude others. This is not about envy. It is about equality. When access to the health-giving resources of nature is so vital, how can it be fair that so much is given to private individuals? Private property has always been a bundle of rights to be negotiated in tandem with society’s needs. Access is no different.
To read more, and get involved, visit righttoroam.org.uk
Words: Michael Fordham Illustration: Nick Hayes
First published in Issue 2 of Bother Magazine, August 2024.
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