Uncommon Ground  by Patrick Galbraith: Everything wrong with Right to Roam

Right to Roam is a vociferous pressure group that demands far greater access to the countryside for ‘the ordinary people of Britain’.

This demand depends upon a very particular narrative: at some point in the past, rich aristocrats stole the land from the people and shut us out. We must take it back. It’s a matter of social justice.

Does any of this make sense, asks Patrick Galbraith? What effect would it have on our precious, beleaguered countryside if Right to Roam triumphed?

After all, one of their leading lights recently tweeted a demand for ‘the People’ to be allowed to wander freely anywhere along field margins. It caused uproar.

Field margins are some of the most precious wildlife habitats of all, where our rarest birds nest.

Yet what makes Uncommon Ground such a superb read is Galbraith’s generous even-handedness, his endless curiosity and his energetic research among all sorts of people, including the Right to Roamers themselves.

They like to dress as Morris dancers or woodland sprites, wear face paint, play ukuleles and sing folk songs. He likes their eccentricity but despairs of their ignorance.

It isn’t true we are excluded anyway. We enjoy an amazing 140,000 miles of rights of way across England and Wales.

Some open-access campaigners, meanwhile, are bluntly destructive. They destroy crow traps, even though control of corvid numbers is crucial to bird conservation. An old Devon gamekeeper tells Galbraith about one activist who tore down a lot of fencing as a protest.

Yet it wasn’t put up by some greedy landowner but Natural England. ‘It was to stop the sheep getting in the ancient woodland.’

Other problems created by careless or selfish ‘human access’ include Scottish mountain bikers disrupting capercaillie breeding grounds and jet skiers terrorising wintering birds on the coast.

Still, he enjoys his wild swim with a mass trespass group in a reservoir owned by United Utilities. Galbraith never argues puritanically, like some militant eco-warriors, that his fellow humans should be excluded from swathes of the countryside to protect wildlife. In fact he wants far more engagement between people and nature.

In his ceaseless quest for a truly 3D, multi-faceted portrait of our country, he goes walking with the British Naturist Ramblers in a bluebell wood, appropriately attired (ie boots and socks, no more.)

They’re an amiable bunch, harmless and nature-loving, but rather lacking in female members, he notes.

He meets the Earl of Leicester, proud proprietor of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, just the sort of toff that the Roamers despise. Yet fully one fifth of his 25,000 acres is superbly managed nature reserve. Public footpaths thread across the other 20,000, and Holkham also hosts a regular 5k Parkrun, which the earl joins in with!

This is the kind of aristo we can warm to. Especially when he tells Galbraith, while rolling a cigarette, that it gives him ‘great pleasure to beat farmers on the estate who are half his age’.

The idea that ‘they’ are to blame – that is, rich landowners and aristos – is a hopeless oversimplification. ‘Landowners and farmers aren’t the cause, but they could be part of the solution.’

In the end, lack of access isn’t the problem, it’s lack of understanding. Millions go to the seaside every year, he points out, yet how many know there are two different species of seal in the UK? If only more people did country things in the country.

Our countryside is changing fast. Could the solution be a win-win for all concerned? With commitment and imagination, yes, says Galbraith.