THE RIGHT TO ROAM
IS THE RIGHT TO RECONNECT
We are campaigning to bring a Right to Roam Act to England so that millions more people can have easy access to open space, and the physical, mental and spiritual health benefits that it brings. To get updates and to get involved, please sign up below.
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THE CONTEXT
Ours is a wild and a beautiful island. But the vast majority of it is unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. We are excluded from hundreds of thousands of acres of open space simply because exclusionary laws fail to recognise the importance of nature to the public.
But the law of England should not be excluding us from nature. It should be encouraging us towards it. Lockdown demonstrated the vital importance of such access for everyone’s physical and mental health. With depression, anxiety, and obesity all on the rise, science is telling us that we need a deeper connection to nature. Meanwhile, nature is telling us it needs us too. With our ecosystems at crisis point, we need everyone to become nature's advocate. But without that fundamental connection to our environment, we cannot know what we're losing, nor what's at risk. Without us, nature has no voice.
Yet in England we only have a right of access to 8% of the land, and uncontested rights to 3% of our rivers. These rights have only been extended to walkers and climbers. And they only apply to landscapes which are often remote (applying only to "mountain, moor, heath and down") and inaccessible to those who cannot afford a car,, rather than helping connect most people to where they actually live – and are best placed to help protect. Over 150 constituencies in England have no real right to roam at all. Most others have only tiny percentages.
Everywhere else the public are made to feel unwelcome in their own landscape, running gauntlets of barbed wire and angry signs, portrayed for centuries as a threat to the countryside, rather than a part of it.
But our desire to access nature should not be subject to such arbitrary whims and unjustified aggression. In recent years, science has built an irrefutable bank of evidence proving what our hearts have always known: we urgently need access to nature, its beauty, its space, its flora and its fauna, for our health, our creativity and our peace of mind. In a world of steel, glass and concrete, of stress, ecological detachment and screen-based lifestyles, the countryside is a natural health service that can heal us.
Nature should be accessible for all. Following the successful models demonstrated in Scotland, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, our right to access nature responsibly should be the assumption not the exception. ‘Access’ should also extend beyond simply a right to walk in some places. Provided we treat the land with respect, why shouldn’t we also be allowed to camp, cycle, kayak, swim and climb amid the beauty of the natural world?
What is the Right to Roam?
The "Right to Roam" is a colloquial way of describing an ancient custom that gives anyone the freedom to wander in open countryside, whether the land is privately or publicly owned. In countries such as Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Scotland it has long existed as a common right, a defining concept of nationhood, and has only recently been codified into law. Central to all versions of it across Europe is that: 1) there are sensible, listed exceptions and modifications to this right; and 2) this right only comes with responsibilities to both the ecology and community of an area.
The Right to Roam is really just a definition of private property that is different to England. There are still major landowners in Norway, Counts in Sweden, Lords in Scotland who own many hundreds of thousands of acres. Their ownership of the land, however - while it might allow them to take rent, mine and make money from the land - does not include the right to exclude every other member of the public. In these countries, the Right to Roam is considered so important to the health and mental well-being of a nation, that it supercedes the right to exclude. Instead, every person has a right to explore these vast open spaces. They too are given the right to belong.
This right, however, is contingent on adhering to a strict set of responsibilities. These are simple, basic codes of how to behave in the countryside in such a way that you neither interrupt the function of a working, agricultural landscape, or damage the ecology of where you roam. None of these codes differ in logic from the Countryside Code of England, but they cover a larger scope, because they encompass more activities, and larger areas of land. When children grow up in these countries, experiencing nature and learning the code in practical terms, these codes become second nature, part of a wider understanding of how humans should interact with the natural world.
The combination of rights and responsibilities creates a relationship with the natural world that is entirely different from that of England. Nature is no longer presented like a museum piece, to be observed from afar behind a line of barbed wire. Instead it becomes something to be immersed in, a multi-sensory tangible experience whose smells, sounds, sightings can have profound effects upon the minds of their beholders. There is a long term effect too. Nature is no longer relegated to occasional visits, but instead becomes part of people’s daily routine, woven into our lives. The Right to Roam ensures that the government actively encourages people to go outside and supports ways for everyone to facilitate it. The Right to Roam curates a common, national consensus of an inherent connection with nature.
THE CRISIS
The majority of the English countryside is out of bounds for most of its population. 92% of the countryside has no right to roam and 97% of rivers have no uncontested rights of navigation: meaning some bankside owners feel entitled to shout at people just for going for a paddle, or a swim.
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. 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.
Our Environment
Nature is in crisis. Our wildlife has being decimated, the countryside has been emptied of the birds and bees and wildflowers that it once brimmed with. Our rivers are being clogged with plastic and poisoned with pesticide and sewage. Since the seventies, the linnet population has declined by 53%, but how many people even know what a linnet is, or could recognise one in the trees?
We have forgotten what we have lost: how can we be expected to care about the environment when for so long we have been disconnected from it? As scientist Robert Michael Pyle wrote: “People who care conserve; people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known the wren?” We need a personal connection with nature, forged from early years and maintained as part of our daily lives, in order to care; we need to reconnect with our land.
And where we do have access, we also see care: powerful campaigning from groups such as Friends of Wye (one of the 3% of rivers with statutory rights of navigation and widespread bankside access) powerfully demonstrate how long-standing rights of access can be converted into deeper cultures of connection and care.
On a wider scale, our climate is in crisis. We need to radically cut our carbon emissions; we need to stop flying so much. But with 92% of our landscape off limits, campsites are full in the holidays and the honeypot sites of National Parks and nature reserves are teeming with people at the weekends. Yet there is so much more space in England, hidden behind the stone walls of near-empty manorial estates, or the barbed wire fences of private woodlands. We need the silence, solitude and open space of the landscape as much as we need its fresh air. We need to reconnect with our land.
Our Health
Our need to experience nature is not just about recreation: more than ever it is essential to our psychological wellbeing. With our sedentary and largely urbanised lifestyles, obesity and respiratory disorders are on the rise, and heart disease and back problems plague many. We have an urgent need for exercise and for the space to do it in.
On top of this, our mental health is in crisis - as a nation we are getting steadily more depressed, and ‘nature deficit disorder’ has been cited as the cause for many developmental issues in children, such as ADHD and eating disorders. From the phytonicides released by trees in a forest, which can boost our immune systems and decrease the symptoms of stress, to the recent studies showing the correlation between kindness and sensations of the sublime, science is finally beginning to prove what we have known all along: in mind, body and soul, nature can heal us.
Our Society
The recent coronavirus lockdown has brought the issue of access to open space to the foreground of public consciousness. Those with gardens were privileged over those without, those with access to green space (whether living in the country, or near a public park in the city) were able to access nature and open air, whilst those without were literally confined within the walls of their homes. During lockdown, crowded parks and honeypot sites received a lot of attention. Yet they also demonstrated the obvious: we are being crammed into a tiny percentage of available green space; which we experience as visitors rather than protectors, with no deeper culture to defend against disregard.
Just as coronavirus split England along the same old fault-lines of class and race, so access to land is deeply biased against large sections of our society. Two hundred years ago, the working class were still intrinsically connected to the countryside. Even as late as the 1930s, rambling and cycling were seen primarily as working class hobbies, accompanied by a strong understanding that nature was needed as a salve to counteract the hard, cramped lifestyles of urban dwelling. Only very recently has the countryside become the preserve of mostly privileged classes. From National Trust memberships, to outdoor recreation shops, the leisure industry dominates our access to the countryside. Now even the experience of nature has become something you can purchase, a commodity for those that can afford it.
Similarly, for Black and People of Colour (BPOC) communities, who are disproportionately affected by lack of access to nature, there are many more barriers to nature than simply the walls of private estates. The English landscape is filled with manorial estates built from the profits of enslaving and trading African people, of West Indian Sugar plantations and East Indian colonialism. The legacy of these brutal systems survives in the landscape, as strong as it is unacknowledged, contributing to a deep sense that many BPOC people feel that they remain unwelcome in the countryside.
Our Land
At the end of the Second World War, the Attlee government looked into granting a full Right to Roam in England, similar to that of Scotland today. Alongside the welfare state, state pensions and the National Health Service, full access to the countryside was proposed as a corollary to the NHS, to offer the English a way to prevent illness before the need for the cure. Of all the proposals for this post-war new order, the Right to Roam was deemed a step too far by the landowners in the House of Lords, and rejected in favour of the National Parks plan.
In today’s post-lockdown society, now, more than ever, the time is right to renew that initial vision and open up more of the English countryside to the public. We need to alleviate the pressure on the National Health Service by opening up the Natural Health Service, by giving people access to the natural healing properties of the countryside, the health benefits that come with the visceral experience of nature, with access to open space.
THE SOLUTION
We need greater access rights to the land and waterways of England. The CRoW act needs to spread its wings over the land an include activities other than walking. What about kayaking, paddleboarding, wild swimming, wild camping? Across the border in Scotland we have seen the default of exclusion replaced with a default of access, and a definition of recreation which allows for all kinds of different ways to be in the land, whether you're a walker or not. Why can England not enjoy these rights too?
With new rights should, yes, come, new responsibilities. We should create an English Outdoor Access Code, akin to that in Scotland, which makes clear, through democratic discussion, rather than landowner edict, how we should be in nature. How to enjoy it, protect it and yes, mitigate our impact on it too. Equally: the responsibilities of landowners should be made clear: accommodating the right of people to enjoy the countryside that is our collective inheritance, not merely the preserve of the few.
Here are just four examples of areas we're excluded from:
RIVERS
There is an ongoing debate concerning access rights to England’s rivers. Many countries across the world allow full or partial access to their rivers and lakes. Finland, France, Sweden, Norway, Bulgaria, Hungary and Belgium allow a general right of navigation on all rivers, with specific, seasonal arrangements made to accommodate other users such as fishermen. Australia and America, whose legal system was built on English Common law, allow free access to all rivers that can be navigated. There is a
strong legal argument that public access to all rivers was enshrined by the Magna Carta. But this is heavily contested by the angling community, for whom a lucrative industry depends on the exclusive use of rivers, and so in England only 3% of rivers are open to a legal right of access.
The Environment Agency has stated conclusively that kayaking causes no harm to the environment of the river, and has even been shown to benefit the ecosystem. But still kayakers are thrown off waterways by fishing bailiffs whose agencies have rented exclusive access to the waters. Similarly, whilst swimmers in Scotland can access all inland waters (as long as they follow the outdoor access code) in England swimmers are limited to small stretches along common land, or the rare spaces where rights of way lead into the water. River banks and their courses are dominated by a single leisure group, the anglers, while other pursuits and people are banned. We must be given full right of access to all rivers and work in close harmony with the angling clubs so that the rivers can be a shared resource, not just for fishing, but for us all.
The more people that have access to blue space in England, the better they will be safe-guarded against pollution. As British Canoeing’s ‘Clear Waters, Clear Access’ campaign asks, why shouldn’t visitors to our rivers be persuaded to care for them as they use them? For example, kayakers on the Derwent have been operating a scheme where they take an empty bag with them on trips, returning with rubbish they have collected along the way. With more people out on the rivers, there will be more eyes to pick up on spillages or pollution, more people to clear the rivers of litter and obstructions, so improving the ecology of our most vital resources.
WOODLAND
In England, the half-million acres of woodland that are owned by the Forestry Commission are already open to public access. However, more often that not, this woodland is a monoculture crop of pine, and a world apart from the brimming life of deciduous woodland. The public are banned from the majority of the woods in England largely so as not to disturb the pheasants that are imported in crates from France, and reared in the woods to be shot in their millions.
But woodlands are perhaps the healthiest environment for the public. The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, has for thousands of years been used to improve mental and physical health, and now science has shown that immersion in woodlands can reduce stress and boost the immune system for days afterwards. Most of these woodlands have benefited from public subsidies in the past, so if we are paying for their upkeep, why are we banned from experiencing their health benefits?
GREEN BELT
Green Belts take up only 13% of England, and yet are perhaps the most important area of open space to the public, because so many of us live within easy access of them. If Green Belts were opened up to responsible public access, the 30 million people living near them would have more easy access to open air, and the mental and physical health benefits that come with this.
Much of this land is agricultural, pasture and cultivated land, but that doesn’t mean we can’t access its open space. Why can’t we follow
Scotland’s example, where under the Land Reform Act, people are allowed to walk the verges of fields, avoiding crops and machinery and livestock, taking care to leave the land as they found it? The verges of fields, supplemented with support for new access infrastructure, would give people access to the open air whilst keeping the farmland safe. If it works in Scotland, why not just over the border in England?
DOWNLAND
Downland describes a landscape of open chalk hills - in its natural state, home to many species of wildflowers and insects, from orchids to the Adonis blue butterfly. Downland is already covered by the CRoW Act, but there's a problem. Because so much of our downland was ploughed up during and after World War Two, what we have left includes lots of small fragments. That has led to a very odd access situation. There are many open access 'islands'
of downland in the South Downs and in Dorset, where we have the Right to Roam on the remaining fragments, but we have to trespass over non-access land to get to them. This is clearly ridiculous. To help fix the situation, we're calling for an extension of the definition of downland to include semi-improved grassland, which could help connect these 'islands' to points of access.
THE COUNTRYSIDE CODE
THE CAMPAIGN
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WHO ARE WE?
Right to Roam was founded in 2020 by Nick Hayes and Guy Shrubsole and has since grown into a small and feisty organisation of campaigners, writers, artists and ecologists and nature connectors.
We have local groups all around the country and are part of a growing alliance of ramblers, wild swimmers, paddle-boarders, kayakers, authors, artists and activists who want to see our exclusionary laws of access changed.
EQUALITY OF ACCESS
One thing about rambling is that it abhors a fence. For this reason, we will present a campaign than actively eschews partisan divisions. A full Right to Roam will benefit everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Just as importantly, we will actively pursue a non-exclusionary campaign, and seek to engage with as many people as possible, from all backgrounds. Equal access to land is interwoven with racial equality, class equality, and gender equality. When the land is opened up to all, it is for everyone. We recognise that the walls of private estates are not the only barriers to feeling comfortable in the countryside, and our campaign will seek to reach out to members of society who are not currently engaged.
We’re campaigning for default right of responsible access, like that enjoyed in Scotland and Scandinavia, where any exclusions are justified rather than arbitrary and most types of activity can be enjoyed in the countryside - not just the interests of climbers and walkers.
This campaign is about sharing. We want to share the countryside with each other, and with its owners. And it is sharing that will spread the message. Please follow us on Twitter and Instagram, please share our videos and posters amongst your friends, and please sign up to this website to receive more information on how you can help share the message that nature should be open for public access.
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THE DEBATE
Scotland has had a comprehensive right of responsible access for over twenty years. In other words, the results are in; and the consensus is that it has worked well. But we fully acknowledge that for some landowners and managers, it might still seem a frightening prospect. Below we address some of the genuine concerns raised about extending access to the countryside, as well as rebutting some of the myths told about Right to Roam.
MEDIA
Before we can share the countryside, we must share the message.
Please download our PDF documents which go into more detail about various aspects of this campaign. Please share them with people you know who might be interested, and on your social media.
And please watch our collection of films, which tell the story of the campaign. Please also share these with people you know, and on your social media.
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