WHAT WE DO
A short history of the Right to Roam Campaign
Two friends, two books and a kitchen table: that was how Right to Roam began. Since then the campaign has grown faster, and achieved more, than we could have hoped. We’ve held over fifteen peaceful mass trespasses, from the Scottish border to the private estate of the Minister in charge of access to nature. We’ve landed hundreds of stories in the national press about the failings of the existing system, highlighting everything from the absurdity of our 2,500+ access islands to the relative expense of CRoW and spoken on what feels like countless podcasts, panels, videos, TV interviews, op-eds, radio shows and events. The campaign was even profiled in the New York Times.
Sometimes we’ve had to play defence: spearheading the resistance against attempts by major landowners to restrict existing freedoms, whether it's the right to wild camp on Dartmoor, or walk freely, as we’ve always done, through Cirencester Park. Local Right to Roam groups are now up and running all over the country, ready to fight this growing trend of neo-enclosure wherever it might be found. Meanwhile, we’ve looked for sympathetic voices within the farming and landowning world, keen to ensure genuine access issues are acknowledged and addressed.
From the start we’ve also been holding the government to account.
Revealing the pitiful amount it was spending on the countryside code, the burial of the promised Agnew Review, and the complete lack of substance behind its vaunted ‘fifteen minute’ access claims.
This didn’t always win us friends, with then DEFRA Secretary of State Thérèse Coffey declaring at the Tory party conference that she was “frankly fed up with the right to roam campaign.” We couldn’t have asked for a greater endorsement.
Our Trespasses
England has a rich tradition of trespass. In fact it’s fair to say that none of the limited access rights established in recent generations have been won without the willingness of ordinary people to cross the lines of property. Below are some famous historic examples which have inspired our own campaigning, and a list of our own contributions to their story!
1871-78 Epping Forest, London/Essex
Attempts to enclose land and abolish commoners rights in the forest met fierce and sustained resistance. The trespassers were condemned by the press. But public support remained strong and, in 1878, The Epping Forest Act was passed, protecting the forest from enclosure and development and enshrining a right of public access in perpetuity.
1887 Latrigg, Cumbria
Following an attempt by local landowners to close access to Latrigg Fell just outside Keswick in 1887, a mass trespass was led by travel writer Henry Jenkinson, National Trust co-founder Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley and Samual Plimsoll MP. Some 2000 people helped bring down the new fences and made their way to the summit overlooking Derwent Water. Their route is now a public Right of Way and a little over half of the fell is access land. Other paths on the wooded southern flank are open by permissive access only, and still not secure.
1896 Winter Hill, Lancashire
The biggest mass trespass in British history involved a reported 10,000 Bolton residents who took to their local landmark in protest at its closure by the landowner. The lead participants lost a later court battle with the owner, but retained huge public support. Even so, it was 100 years before the contested route became a Right of Way, and the whole hill became access land in 2000.
1932 Kinder Scout, Derbyshire
Though a smaller mess trespass in terms of numbers, the action led by Benny Rothman on 24th April 1932 has passed into history and is now celebrated – even by groups who condemned it at the time! The violence meted out by the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers, and the disproportionate punishment of several participants which followed, served to bolster public support for access reform.
These events are part of Right to Roam’s heritage. But the work they began to restore public access to land is not complete. Since 2020 our campaign has been picking up the baton and hoping to finally resolve the arbitrary and unjust exclusion of people from their land once and for all.
Here are just some of our events in the past few years:
Luckily our efforts have made political inroads elsewhere. With the help of Caroline Lucas, we have seen two hearings of a new ‘Right to Roam Bill’ in parliament (since updated to more closely mimic the rights enjoyed in Scotland). We’ve commissioned two YouGov polls demonstrating the huge public appetite for reform, and lobbied ministers and advisers to make sure that passion is heard.
The result is that in the 2024 election, just four years after the campaign was started, access reform featured in nearly all the major party manifestos – with two explicitly endorsing central calls of the campaign.
After some initial enthusiasm, the new Labour government has proved more cagey. Still, the manifesto promise to “improve responsible access to nature” is there. And we will be ramping up the pressure to make sure it is a promise kept.
All this has been driven by you, our supporters, whose donations, fundraisers, letters, petitions, songs, poems, artworks, meetings, logistics, tweets, posts, blogs, WhatsApps, conversations and heroic individual acts of private trespass have all helped take the campaign forward.
Changing the law in the face of powerful opposition is a gruelling business. But the dial is shifting, and the arguments against establishing a true right to roam across the UK are falling one by one.
At the start of 2023 we heard the shock ruling of a long-running legal dispute brought by a wealthy Dartmoor landowner against the customary right to wild camp on the moor – the last place in England it was considered legal.
The landowner won: this final, measly scrap of our remaining right to sleep under the stars was now to be extinguished too. Perhaps because it was the last flicker of a much-dimmed flame. Perhaps because the outrage of it all was so laughably Dickensian. Either way: it caught the public imagination. Alongside our partners The Stars Are For Everyone, the campaign rallied to action to organise one of the largest land protests in the 20th century.the campaign rallied to action to organise one of the largest land protests in the 20th century, as over 3,000 people assembled on Stall Moor, which forms part of the estate of the landowner. There we summoned Old Crockern: a legendary granite spirit famed for taking unkindly to avaricious landowners…
The public opposition helped drive a legal appeal, which overturned the ruling – only for the landowner to take matters all the way to the supreme court. We will hear the verdict sometime in early 2025…
There was a huge amount of coverage of the Dartmoor protests but some of our favourites include this account in the Financial Times, this epic long read - which covers the campaign more broadly - in the New York Times, and this video report from Joe Politics.
Dartmoor
In 2022 Right to Roam brought hundreds of dancers, creatures, green men, folk musicians and other spirits of the commons to assemble on the grounds of the Englefield Estate – a 12,000 acre chunk of mostly private parkland in West Berkshire which happens to be owned by the then government Minister in charge of… access to nature. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that plans for a groundbreaking review on access had been quashed on his watch? We held a ceremony at the Englefield Oak in the heart of the estate to remember the old commons which the Estate enclosed and replaced, and the diversity of rural culture which was lost when it happened.
You can read more about the Dance of the Commons here, or listen to this Folk on Foot podcast about it here.
Dance of the Commons
You’ve inherited thousands of acres of land from your distant 18th century ancestors on one condition: your park must remain open to the local townspeople. For centuries the Bathurst family honoured this arrangement, and Cirencester’s primary green space remained open to all visitors, free of charge.
In 2024 all that changed: access to the park, around which the town had grown for centuries - and took many sacrifices to preserve - was to be put behind a paywall. Adding to the outrage was the Estate’s origins: its true price paid over four hundred years earlier by the 100,000 slaves traded by the Royal African Company, of which Benjamin Bathurst was the deputy director.
Right to Roam worked with Cirencester locals to organise a mass protest against the paywalling of the park and transform the local dispute into a national issue. It received extensive coverage across the national press, and provided another powerful illustration of why so-called ‘permissive access’ arrangements will never be enough. It also demonstrated just how much of our ‘national landscapes’ are out of bounds to the nation.
You can read a lengthy report of our action here, our organiser Jon’s take on it here, and the editorial it inspired here.
See also Cirencester Park - A Short History by David Watts here.
Cirencester Park
In 2023 we took to the border between England and Scotland to hokey-cokey along the Scots Dyke, one foot “trespassing” under England’s miserly access laws, the other freely exercising its right of access under Scotland’s Land Reform Act.
There we met some of Scotland’s great land activists: Andy Wightman, Dave Morris and Nick Kempe, who were central to the LRA being drafted and passed in 2003. Over the border we held a ceremony in the Glinger Burn – exchanging offerings of gaelic whisky and Newcastle Brown Ale and unveiled our very own Right to Roam bill for England.
You can watch Channel 4’s feature on our Borderlands event here. And read about it in the Guardian here.