Access to the British countryside
For a nation frequently pilloried as a land of couch potatoes with an obesity rate that leaves it waddling in the slipstream of the USA, Britain boasts a remarkable number of footpaths. You could even argue that pulling on a pair of boots and heading for the hills is one of our national pastimes. Indeed, according to Natural England, more Britons walk the British coast than sun themselves on the beach.
We may be a small, crowded island, but we can find footpaths in the most diverse locations. Of course, paths drill their way to the top of Scafell Pike, and through our national parks, but they also sneak around people’s gardens and meander through the grounds of the great and good.
Natural England calculates that at least 225,000 kilometres of off-road public rights of way – footpaths, bridleways and byways that the public is free to use – are recorded on official maps in England and Wales. In Scotland, Scotways and Scottish Natural Heritage maintain a national register that includes 16,600 kilometres of claimed rights of way. Meanwhile, according to an ICM poll, 77 per cent of UK adults, or about 38 million people, say they walk for pleasure at least once a month. The Office for National Statistics says that walking is three times more popular than swimming, its nearest competitor among physical activities, and that, typically, 891 million day trips a year include a walk, hill walk or ramble.
Open season
Given such apparent vigour, it comes as a surprise to realise that access to the British countryside frequently remains uncertain and unclear. Somewhat paradoxically, while walking as a recreation has never been so popular – and Britons have never enjoyed so much access to the countryside – private landowners are guarding their property as jealously as ever.
In 2004, the Audit Commission calculated that 35 per cent of all public rights of way in England were officially difficult to use, and that there were an estimated 177,760 obstacles or obstructions on them; there were 105,000 missing signposts; and an average of 5.2 obstructions per ten kilometres. In other words, you’re likely to encounter a problem around every two kilometres. In Wales, 42 per cent of footpaths are difficult or impossible to use.
In recent years, two major pieces of legislation have tilted the balance of access in favour of the public. The first was the Countryside Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW), or the ‘Right to Roam’, which opened up access to mountains, moorland, heathland and downland. Implementation of the Act was completed in 2005 and, while it didn’t grant the right to walk anywhere you like, it permitted access on foot to 936,000 hectares of mapped, open, uncultivated countryside.
The second development, formally announced as part of a new Marine Bill in April, is coastal access. The scheme, which would knit together 4,500 kilometres of coastline, will begin
in earnest in 2010 and take ten years and £50million to complete. Coastal access won’t involve a single, linear footpath. Instead, the intention is for a ‘coastal margin’, ‘strip’, or ‘corridor’: by whatever name, it will be a clear access route, with clifftop walks complemented by ‘spreading room’ such as beaches, dunes, headlands and viewpoints, to allow people not just to plod along a linear path but to take diversions to viewpoints or have a picnic.
The Marine Bill is expected to be introduced to parliament in November and has been warmly welcomed by Natural England, which will implement coastal access. ‘The coastal path
has some of the most dramatic scenery you could hope to see,’ says Sir Martin Doughty, chairman of Natural England. ‘Connection with nature is an important part of this. There are health benefits, too. The mental uplift you get from walking cannot be underestimated.
The government has clearly marked its support for a historic right of access to the English coastline and we look forward to making this right a reality. Currently, large sections of the coast lack any secure access rights at all for the public – others just fail to join up properly with each other or are physically unusable.’
The appetite for increased access appears strong. Research commissioned by the Ramblers’ Association shows that 94 per cent of those polled wanted better access to the coast. It’s also needed: Natural England reckons that only 70 per cent of the coast has some kind of official access, and much of it is fragmented by land with no access.
Paul Johnson, principal access specialist for Natural England, points out that, for example, 30 per cent of the South West Coast Path doesn’t have any secure access. ‘That doesn’t mean that the other 70 per cent is fine,’ he says. ‘Walking the coast can be a stop–start experience, where you walk for a couple of miles and have to turn back because of an obstruction.
‘Some parts of the coast are going to be easier to mark out than others,’ he continues. ‘There will be big rural estates that take out half a mile of coastline and I’m sure they will provoke some pretty active debate.’ Reflecting general concern, John Le Carre, the spy novelist, gave almost a kilometre of coastline beneath his house near Land’s End in Cornwall to the National Trust in 2000 to protect it against future development.
So it comes as little surprise that Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, Britain’s oldest conservation organisation, feels that although tremendous strides have been made in recent years, the access battle is far from won. ‘We have a long way to go,’ she says. ‘We need to get access to improved and semi-improved land (to which fertiliser or animal manure has been applied) and woodland. They were excluded from CROW and, in the southeast of England, there is a lot of it. From my house in the Chilterns, I can see a hillside, and half of it is access land and half – the semi-improved part – isn’t, and no-one can tell the difference.’
Ashbrook, who admits that her principal recreation is ‘finding illegally blocked footpaths’, also believes the nature of the battleground is changing. ‘CROW changed the balance in favour of the public, but a different person is doing the fighting now. Landowners have accepted that CROW wasn’t such a big deal, but we’re getting people moving into open countryside with big houses and electronic gates and signs saying “keep out”. It’s all very intimidating.’
Get off my land
The reasons for what outsiders must think an insanely complicated system of access in Britain dates to the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Between the early 1600s and 1860, a succession of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts fenced off half of England’s countryside, with landowners joining strips of open fields.
The first bill for freedom to roam was introduced to parliament in 1884 by James Bryce and reintroduced, unsuccessfully, every year until 1914. The situation deteriorated during the Second World War, when key coastal areas were requisitioned by the military; after the end of hostilities, many were never returned to the public. There is, a little strangely, no legal right of access to a beach in England, and the public has no statutory right to sunbathe or make sandcastles on them. Technically, such actions amount to trespass.
‘England is characterised by three existing powers when it comes to access,’ says Johnson. ‘We have CROW, Rights of Way [Act 1990] and voluntary agreements. Each of these has its strengths, but each also has its weaknesses. Our argument is that for projects such as coastal access, we are going to need to customise elements of each of these powers.’
In utilitarian terms, the case for improved access appears strong, because greater access is generally held to lead to significant conservation and economic benefits (see The path to prosperity). On their 527 million walking trips to the English countryside each year, walkers spend somewhere in the region of £6.14billion, generating income in excess of £2billion and supporting up to 245,000 full-time jobs, according to a 2003 report prepared for the Ramblers’ Association entitled The Economic and Social Value of Walking in England.
‘It’s true to say that many coastal and seaside places have been struggling in recent decades and are trying to reinvent themselves,’ says Sir Martin. ‘Coastal access offers tangible regeneration benefits in the face of the battle against cheap flights to places with guaranteed sunshine.’ Natural England is also extremely keen to use coastal access to implement agri-environment schemes, which would see, perhaps over 50 years, clifftop land revert from intensive farmland to its natural state.
Every man’s right
Given the vigour with which British campaigners fight for access, it can come as a surprise to learn that the UK is ranked somewhere in the middle of what could be described as an unofficial league table of European access. Our obsession with footpaths has, perhaps, blinded us to the fact that many countries simply don’t need them – other than for convenience – because their citizens can walk pretty much wherever they wish.
‘The problem in the UK is that things are very strict,’ says Jana Šprearòvá, general secretary of the European Ramblers’ Association (ERA), which represents 50 ramblers’ organisations from 26 European states (along with ramblers’ organisations from Israel and Morocco), with more than five million individual members. ‘You can only walk in certain areas on waymarked paths. But the situation across Europe varies hugely from country to country.’
Spain is in the process of revising its laws on access, and is seeking to decide the extent to which the public can walk or undertake other activities on private land, but in most other countries, the law is already clear. The best regions in which to walk without hindrance are Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. ‘Middle European countries such as Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary are all former Communist states, where everything was for everybody,’ explains Šprearòvá. ‘Most open spaces are still public, so access is free.’
In Finland, Norway and Sweden, the right to walk where you wish is enshrined in the principle of allemansrätt, or ‘every man’s right’. In Sweden, allemansrätt, guaranteed in the national constitution, is considered a central tenet of the national approach to tolerance, its origins stretching back in part to medieval provincial laws and customs.
‘Swedes tend to regard the right of public access as part of their cultural heritage, sometimes even as a national symbol. It’s seen as a good thing and an important issue,’ says Barbro Carlberg Lindgren of the Swedish Walking Association. ‘You can walk everywhere, except into people’s gardens or in fields where crops are growing.’
The stand-offs between landowners and walkers, so prevalent in the UK, are almost unheard of. ‘I admit that the fact that we are a small country with a comparatively small population makes matters easier – our cities are a long way from each other, so we have the space,’ says Lindgren. ‘But you can pick any berries you like, even if someone else owns them. The only problems we have are with foreigners who visit and don’t bother to take their rubbish home with them. Allemansrätt is a unique institution. It gives us all the freedom to roam the countryside.’
The situation is similar in neighbouring Norway, where a law cementing the principle of allemansrätt was passed in 1957. ‘It’s very central to being Norwegian,’ explains Kari Horne of Den Norske Turistforening, the Norwegian Trekking Association. ‘You can walk pretty much anywhere. It has led to problems and conflicts with landowners, but the key is that the law backs those seeking recreation; that is why it’s so important.’
At the other end of the access spectrum lies Italy, where entering private land is much more restricted. In June, the ERA will host a conference in Malaga, Spain, specifically dedicated to the issue of access, and at which member associations will, for the first time, exchange information on the rules of access in their countries. ‘It is the sort of information that will be really useful,’ says Šprearòvá. ‘We’ve never had this before, and it will mean that everyone can take the best examples as benchmarks.’
Getting the message across
Back in the UK, Ashbrook feels a change of mindset is necessary if Britons are ever to enjoy the access of the Nordic countries. ‘I suspect the British public don’t really realise how important access is, and that’s partly the fault of people such as myself and the Ramblers’ for failing to get the message across,’ she says.
‘We’re generally a very cautious nation. We’re very polite, we don’t want to do the wrong thing and are still prone to tugging our forelocks. There’s a lovely path in the village where I live, but there is a gate along it. Even though there are waymarkers and signposts, people still halt there and dither.
‘We need to realise that access is so important. It’s a wonderful thing to have and people really gain from it. Why should a few people have absolute control over land that should be freely available to everybody?’
Just how definitive is the ‘definitive map’?
Those who suspect that the British are sticklers for pedantry are likely to have their preconceptions confirmed by the notion of the ‘definitive map’. Described by one access campaigner as ‘the equivalent of an ID card scheme for footpaths’, the definitive map has been fundamental in protecting the rights-of-way network in the UK. It provides legal proof of the position of the path on the ground and what highway rights are in existence on the path – for example, whether it’s a footpath or a bridleway. This allows the highway authority to know what land is its responsibility, and also what type of use is permitted. The definitive statement, which accompanies the definitive map, gives information such as the width of the path and whether there are any gates or stiles on it, enabling the highway authority to keep a check on illegal obstructions.
However, the map is far from ‘definitive’; rather, it’s a work in progress. Created more than 50 years ago, it’s constantly under review and is modified when rights of way are created, diverted and extinguished. Many rights of way have yet to make it onto the map.
In an attempt to join the dots, the government set up the Discovering Lost Ways project, which was designed to research the thousands of paths that should be on the map. However, according to the Ramblers’ Association, the ‘laudable’ project was poorly funded, with not a single path added as a result of it; and the deadline of 2026 meant that Britain would lose many of the paths the public has a right to use, should they not be recorded by then. The project was abandoned in March this year, and the association hopes that the cut-off date will also be repealed.
The path to prosperity
The economic benefits of improved access to the countryside can be seen in the impact that the South West Coast Path (SWCP) has had on the local economies of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.
The SWCP is the longest national trail in the UK and runs for 1,014 kilometres from Minehead in Somerset to Poole Harbour in Dorset. In 2003, a study conducted by the University of Exeter found that the path creates £300million a year for the region’s economy – enough to support more than 7,500 jobs.
The study found that more than a quarter of the region’s visitors are drawn to the area purely because of the SWCP, and these visitors alone spend around £136million a year; residents of the four counties crossed by the route take some 23 million walks along the SWCP each year, spending £116million; and local people often take their visiting friends and relatives for coast path walks, bringing in a further £48million.
Seventy per cent of accommodation providers along the route say that the coastal path is their main draw. ‘It has a huge influence on the local economy,’ says Justin Cooke, head of freedom to roam at the Ramblers’ Association. ‘A lot of work has been put into the SWCP, and greater coastal access will enable other towns and cities elsewhere in the UK to benefit too.’
The conflict over Defence land
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Defence Estates – the executive agency that manages MoD land – owns or is licensed to use land in nine of our 14 national parks. These parks, in turn, represent 30 per cent of the land on which the military trains. Activity ranges from RAF manoeuvres over the Lake District and heavy artillery training in Northumbria to the gruelling SAS selection course, which takes place across the Brecon Beacons.
For many access campaigners, military land is a contentious battleground. ‘The national parks and the military presence are uncomfortable bedfellows,’ says David Murray, policy officer and military campaigner for the Council for National Parks (CNP). ‘Sometimes they rub along well – the MoD’s conservation efforts are a gold standard within the government. But there’s a fundamental conflict.’
The issue of access appears to be coming to a head in Dartmoor, where the Army trains on 9,911 hectares leased by the Duchy of Cornwall, and large parts of the moor can be off-limits to walkers at any time. The Dartmoor Preservation Association, together with the Ramblers’ Association and the CNP, have called for an independent inquiry to establish the need for MoD training, citing Dartmoor as a prime example of poor, wasteful and superfluous military practice.
Nevertheless, Defence Estates has, over the past five years, taken several steps to improve access. It has launched a public-friendly website, full of information and walking suggestions; opened up new routes, such as a 13-kilometre trail through the previously closed Kirkudbright Training Area on the west coast of Scotland; and enabled wheelchair access to the coast at Lulworth Bay, Dorset.
‘Historically, we’ve had a very different approach to public access,’ admits Richard Brooks, head of access for Defence Estates. ‘We would put a fence up with a sign that says “MoD, keep out”. But life has changed dramatically. When we put those fences up, public access wasn’t really a big issue. We need to follow the ethos of the way that access has been going.’
At Otterburn training range in Northumberland National Park, up to 30,000 British and NATO troops gather each year, and the range is subjected to some extremely intense training, from air-to-ground firing to the heavy-duty AS-90 artillery. All of this on a landscape that is home to 19 Sites of Special Scientific Interest and three Special Areas of Conservation. At the same time, Defence Estates has developed 12 new local walks, all of which are available on the range’s website, and points to the 204 kilometres of footpaths and bridleways in the dry training area (where no live ammunition is used) and 177 kilometres of MoD roads in the Danger Area on which the public can walk when training isn’t taking place.
Risk, rather than hostility, now seems to govern the MoD’s approach to access. ‘Some walkers say they are prepared to accept slight risks,’ says Brooks. ‘But as a government department, that isn’t good enough for us. The risk is for us to assess.’
Land access in the Land of the Long White Cloud
The UK isn’t alone in experiencing vigorous and contentious debates about access on foot. This year sees the creation of a new walking access agency in New Zealand, a country popularly regarded as boasting the definitive ‘outdoors’ culture – a perception that forms a major plank of its tourism industry.
The move follows several years of consultation after the New Zealand government declared that access rights were essentially built on ‘foundations of sand’ and based on social convention and informal arrangements rather than legal rights.
The government agency is being established following a review of walking access, in turn prompted by a general recognition of a need for clear and enduring rules around access to the outdoors amid changing values and patterns of rural land ownership in New Zealand. The review highlighted a trend whereby open spaces, particularly those adjacent to bodies of water, are being replaced by small properties whose owners seek privacy.
The agency will help local groups with access issues and be responsible for mediation of disputes. Its first tasks include the drawing up of a code of conduct for walkers and a national access strategy, and the creation of a mapping database.
Damien O’Connor, the rural affairs minister, described providing access to outdoors areas as an ‘important and complex issue’. Under the new plans, all new walking access over private land, including Maori land, is to be by negotiation and agreement with the landholder. The intention is that landowners will be compensated for providing access. ‘There is no one-size-fits-all solution as each issue is likely to have a distinct history and set of circumstances,’ O’Connor says.
June 2008
We may be a small, crowded island, but we can find footpaths in the most diverse locations. Of course, paths drill their way to the top of Scafell Pike, and through our national parks, but they also sneak around people’s gardens and meander through the grounds of the great and good.
Natural England calculates that at least 225,000 kilometres of off-road public rights of way – footpaths, bridleways and byways that the public is free to use – are recorded on official maps in England and Wales. In Scotland, Scotways and Scottish Natural Heritage maintain a national register that includes 16,600 kilometres of claimed rights of way. Meanwhile, according to an ICM poll, 77 per cent of UK adults, or about 38 million people, say they walk for pleasure at least once a month. The Office for National Statistics says that walking is three times more popular than swimming, its nearest competitor among physical activities, and that, typically, 891 million day trips a year include a walk, hill walk or ramble.
Open season
Given such apparent vigour, it comes as a surprise to realise that access to the British countryside frequently remains uncertain and unclear. Somewhat paradoxically, while walking as a recreation has never been so popular – and Britons have never enjoyed so much access to the countryside – private landowners are guarding their property as jealously as ever.
In 2004, the Audit Commission calculated that 35 per cent of all public rights of way in England were officially difficult to use, and that there were an estimated 177,760 obstacles or obstructions on them; there were 105,000 missing signposts; and an average of 5.2 obstructions per ten kilometres. In other words, you’re likely to encounter a problem around every two kilometres. In Wales, 42 per cent of footpaths are difficult or impossible to use.
In recent years, two major pieces of legislation have tilted the balance of access in favour of the public. The first was the Countryside Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW), or the ‘Right to Roam’, which opened up access to mountains, moorland, heathland and downland. Implementation of the Act was completed in 2005 and, while it didn’t grant the right to walk anywhere you like, it permitted access on foot to 936,000 hectares of mapped, open, uncultivated countryside.
The second development, formally announced as part of a new Marine Bill in April, is coastal access. The scheme, which would knit together 4,500 kilometres of coastline, will begin
in earnest in 2010 and take ten years and £50million to complete. Coastal access won’t involve a single, linear footpath. Instead, the intention is for a ‘coastal margin’, ‘strip’, or ‘corridor’: by whatever name, it will be a clear access route, with clifftop walks complemented by ‘spreading room’ such as beaches, dunes, headlands and viewpoints, to allow people not just to plod along a linear path but to take diversions to viewpoints or have a picnic.
The Marine Bill is expected to be introduced to parliament in November and has been warmly welcomed by Natural England, which will implement coastal access. ‘The coastal path
has some of the most dramatic scenery you could hope to see,’ says Sir Martin Doughty, chairman of Natural England. ‘Connection with nature is an important part of this. There are health benefits, too. The mental uplift you get from walking cannot be underestimated.
The government has clearly marked its support for a historic right of access to the English coastline and we look forward to making this right a reality. Currently, large sections of the coast lack any secure access rights at all for the public – others just fail to join up properly with each other or are physically unusable.’
The appetite for increased access appears strong. Research commissioned by the Ramblers’ Association shows that 94 per cent of those polled wanted better access to the coast. It’s also needed: Natural England reckons that only 70 per cent of the coast has some kind of official access, and much of it is fragmented by land with no access.
Paul Johnson, principal access specialist for Natural England, points out that, for example, 30 per cent of the South West Coast Path doesn’t have any secure access. ‘That doesn’t mean that the other 70 per cent is fine,’ he says. ‘Walking the coast can be a stop–start experience, where you walk for a couple of miles and have to turn back because of an obstruction.
‘Some parts of the coast are going to be easier to mark out than others,’ he continues. ‘There will be big rural estates that take out half a mile of coastline and I’m sure they will provoke some pretty active debate.’ Reflecting general concern, John Le Carre, the spy novelist, gave almost a kilometre of coastline beneath his house near Land’s End in Cornwall to the National Trust in 2000 to protect it against future development.
So it comes as little surprise that Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, Britain’s oldest conservation organisation, feels that although tremendous strides have been made in recent years, the access battle is far from won. ‘We have a long way to go,’ she says. ‘We need to get access to improved and semi-improved land (to which fertiliser or animal manure has been applied) and woodland. They were excluded from CROW and, in the southeast of England, there is a lot of it. From my house in the Chilterns, I can see a hillside, and half of it is access land and half – the semi-improved part – isn’t, and no-one can tell the difference.’
Ashbrook, who admits that her principal recreation is ‘finding illegally blocked footpaths’, also believes the nature of the battleground is changing. ‘CROW changed the balance in favour of the public, but a different person is doing the fighting now. Landowners have accepted that CROW wasn’t such a big deal, but we’re getting people moving into open countryside with big houses and electronic gates and signs saying “keep out”. It’s all very intimidating.’
Get off my land
The reasons for what outsiders must think an insanely complicated system of access in Britain dates to the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Between the early 1600s and 1860, a succession of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts fenced off half of England’s countryside, with landowners joining strips of open fields.
The first bill for freedom to roam was introduced to parliament in 1884 by James Bryce and reintroduced, unsuccessfully, every year until 1914. The situation deteriorated during the Second World War, when key coastal areas were requisitioned by the military; after the end of hostilities, many were never returned to the public. There is, a little strangely, no legal right of access to a beach in England, and the public has no statutory right to sunbathe or make sandcastles on them. Technically, such actions amount to trespass.
‘England is characterised by three existing powers when it comes to access,’ says Johnson. ‘We have CROW, Rights of Way [Act 1990] and voluntary agreements. Each of these has its strengths, but each also has its weaknesses. Our argument is that for projects such as coastal access, we are going to need to customise elements of each of these powers.’
In utilitarian terms, the case for improved access appears strong, because greater access is generally held to lead to significant conservation and economic benefits (see The path to prosperity). On their 527 million walking trips to the English countryside each year, walkers spend somewhere in the region of £6.14billion, generating income in excess of £2billion and supporting up to 245,000 full-time jobs, according to a 2003 report prepared for the Ramblers’ Association entitled The Economic and Social Value of Walking in England.
‘It’s true to say that many coastal and seaside places have been struggling in recent decades and are trying to reinvent themselves,’ says Sir Martin. ‘Coastal access offers tangible regeneration benefits in the face of the battle against cheap flights to places with guaranteed sunshine.’ Natural England is also extremely keen to use coastal access to implement agri-environment schemes, which would see, perhaps over 50 years, clifftop land revert from intensive farmland to its natural state.
Start the slideshow (6 pictures)
Every man’s right
Given the vigour with which British campaigners fight for access, it can come as a surprise to learn that the UK is ranked somewhere in the middle of what could be described as an unofficial league table of European access. Our obsession with footpaths has, perhaps, blinded us to the fact that many countries simply don’t need them – other than for convenience – because their citizens can walk pretty much wherever they wish.
‘The problem in the UK is that things are very strict,’ says Jana Šprearòvá, general secretary of the European Ramblers’ Association (ERA), which represents 50 ramblers’ organisations from 26 European states (along with ramblers’ organisations from Israel and Morocco), with more than five million individual members. ‘You can only walk in certain areas on waymarked paths. But the situation across Europe varies hugely from country to country.’
Spain is in the process of revising its laws on access, and is seeking to decide the extent to which the public can walk or undertake other activities on private land, but in most other countries, the law is already clear. The best regions in which to walk without hindrance are Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. ‘Middle European countries such as Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary are all former Communist states, where everything was for everybody,’ explains Šprearòvá. ‘Most open spaces are still public, so access is free.’
In Finland, Norway and Sweden, the right to walk where you wish is enshrined in the principle of allemansrätt, or ‘every man’s right’. In Sweden, allemansrätt, guaranteed in the national constitution, is considered a central tenet of the national approach to tolerance, its origins stretching back in part to medieval provincial laws and customs.
‘Swedes tend to regard the right of public access as part of their cultural heritage, sometimes even as a national symbol. It’s seen as a good thing and an important issue,’ says Barbro Carlberg Lindgren of the Swedish Walking Association. ‘You can walk everywhere, except into people’s gardens or in fields where crops are growing.’
The stand-offs between landowners and walkers, so prevalent in the UK, are almost unheard of. ‘I admit that the fact that we are a small country with a comparatively small population makes matters easier – our cities are a long way from each other, so we have the space,’ says Lindgren. ‘But you can pick any berries you like, even if someone else owns them. The only problems we have are with foreigners who visit and don’t bother to take their rubbish home with them. Allemansrätt is a unique institution. It gives us all the freedom to roam the countryside.’
The situation is similar in neighbouring Norway, where a law cementing the principle of allemansrätt was passed in 1957. ‘It’s very central to being Norwegian,’ explains Kari Horne of Den Norske Turistforening, the Norwegian Trekking Association. ‘You can walk pretty much anywhere. It has led to problems and conflicts with landowners, but the key is that the law backs those seeking recreation; that is why it’s so important.’
At the other end of the access spectrum lies Italy, where entering private land is much more restricted. In June, the ERA will host a conference in Malaga, Spain, specifically dedicated to the issue of access, and at which member associations will, for the first time, exchange information on the rules of access in their countries. ‘It is the sort of information that will be really useful,’ says Šprearòvá. ‘We’ve never had this before, and it will mean that everyone can take the best examples as benchmarks.’
Getting the message across
Back in the UK, Ashbrook feels a change of mindset is necessary if Britons are ever to enjoy the access of the Nordic countries. ‘I suspect the British public don’t really realise how important access is, and that’s partly the fault of people such as myself and the Ramblers’ for failing to get the message across,’ she says.
‘We’re generally a very cautious nation. We’re very polite, we don’t want to do the wrong thing and are still prone to tugging our forelocks. There’s a lovely path in the village where I live, but there is a gate along it. Even though there are waymarkers and signposts, people still halt there and dither.
‘We need to realise that access is so important. It’s a wonderful thing to have and people really gain from it. Why should a few people have absolute control over land that should be freely available to everybody?’
Just how definitive is the ‘definitive map’?
Those who suspect that the British are sticklers for pedantry are likely to have their preconceptions confirmed by the notion of the ‘definitive map’. Described by one access campaigner as ‘the equivalent of an ID card scheme for footpaths’, the definitive map has been fundamental in protecting the rights-of-way network in the UK. It provides legal proof of the position of the path on the ground and what highway rights are in existence on the path – for example, whether it’s a footpath or a bridleway. This allows the highway authority to know what land is its responsibility, and also what type of use is permitted. The definitive statement, which accompanies the definitive map, gives information such as the width of the path and whether there are any gates or stiles on it, enabling the highway authority to keep a check on illegal obstructions.
However, the map is far from ‘definitive’; rather, it’s a work in progress. Created more than 50 years ago, it’s constantly under review and is modified when rights of way are created, diverted and extinguished. Many rights of way have yet to make it onto the map.
In an attempt to join the dots, the government set up the Discovering Lost Ways project, which was designed to research the thousands of paths that should be on the map. However, according to the Ramblers’ Association, the ‘laudable’ project was poorly funded, with not a single path added as a result of it; and the deadline of 2026 meant that Britain would lose many of the paths the public has a right to use, should they not be recorded by then. The project was abandoned in March this year, and the association hopes that the cut-off date will also be repealed.
The path to prosperity
The economic benefits of improved access to the countryside can be seen in the impact that the South West Coast Path (SWCP) has had on the local economies of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.
The SWCP is the longest national trail in the UK and runs for 1,014 kilometres from Minehead in Somerset to Poole Harbour in Dorset. In 2003, a study conducted by the University of Exeter found that the path creates £300million a year for the region’s economy – enough to support more than 7,500 jobs.
The study found that more than a quarter of the region’s visitors are drawn to the area purely because of the SWCP, and these visitors alone spend around £136million a year; residents of the four counties crossed by the route take some 23 million walks along the SWCP each year, spending £116million; and local people often take their visiting friends and relatives for coast path walks, bringing in a further £48million.
Seventy per cent of accommodation providers along the route say that the coastal path is their main draw. ‘It has a huge influence on the local economy,’ says Justin Cooke, head of freedom to roam at the Ramblers’ Association. ‘A lot of work has been put into the SWCP, and greater coastal access will enable other towns and cities elsewhere in the UK to benefit too.’
The conflict over Defence land
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Defence Estates – the executive agency that manages MoD land – owns or is licensed to use land in nine of our 14 national parks. These parks, in turn, represent 30 per cent of the land on which the military trains. Activity ranges from RAF manoeuvres over the Lake District and heavy artillery training in Northumbria to the gruelling SAS selection course, which takes place across the Brecon Beacons.
For many access campaigners, military land is a contentious battleground. ‘The national parks and the military presence are uncomfortable bedfellows,’ says David Murray, policy officer and military campaigner for the Council for National Parks (CNP). ‘Sometimes they rub along well – the MoD’s conservation efforts are a gold standard within the government. But there’s a fundamental conflict.’
The issue of access appears to be coming to a head in Dartmoor, where the Army trains on 9,911 hectares leased by the Duchy of Cornwall, and large parts of the moor can be off-limits to walkers at any time. The Dartmoor Preservation Association, together with the Ramblers’ Association and the CNP, have called for an independent inquiry to establish the need for MoD training, citing Dartmoor as a prime example of poor, wasteful and superfluous military practice.
Nevertheless, Defence Estates has, over the past five years, taken several steps to improve access. It has launched a public-friendly website, full of information and walking suggestions; opened up new routes, such as a 13-kilometre trail through the previously closed Kirkudbright Training Area on the west coast of Scotland; and enabled wheelchair access to the coast at Lulworth Bay, Dorset.
‘Historically, we’ve had a very different approach to public access,’ admits Richard Brooks, head of access for Defence Estates. ‘We would put a fence up with a sign that says “MoD, keep out”. But life has changed dramatically. When we put those fences up, public access wasn’t really a big issue. We need to follow the ethos of the way that access has been going.’
At Otterburn training range in Northumberland National Park, up to 30,000 British and NATO troops gather each year, and the range is subjected to some extremely intense training, from air-to-ground firing to the heavy-duty AS-90 artillery. All of this on a landscape that is home to 19 Sites of Special Scientific Interest and three Special Areas of Conservation. At the same time, Defence Estates has developed 12 new local walks, all of which are available on the range’s website, and points to the 204 kilometres of footpaths and bridleways in the dry training area (where no live ammunition is used) and 177 kilometres of MoD roads in the Danger Area on which the public can walk when training isn’t taking place.
Risk, rather than hostility, now seems to govern the MoD’s approach to access. ‘Some walkers say they are prepared to accept slight risks,’ says Brooks. ‘But as a government department, that isn’t good enough for us. The risk is for us to assess.’
Land access in the Land of the Long White Cloud
The UK isn’t alone in experiencing vigorous and contentious debates about access on foot. This year sees the creation of a new walking access agency in New Zealand, a country popularly regarded as boasting the definitive ‘outdoors’ culture – a perception that forms a major plank of its tourism industry.
The move follows several years of consultation after the New Zealand government declared that access rights were essentially built on ‘foundations of sand’ and based on social convention and informal arrangements rather than legal rights.
The government agency is being established following a review of walking access, in turn prompted by a general recognition of a need for clear and enduring rules around access to the outdoors amid changing values and patterns of rural land ownership in New Zealand. The review highlighted a trend whereby open spaces, particularly those adjacent to bodies of water, are being replaced by small properties whose owners seek privacy.
The agency will help local groups with access issues and be responsible for mediation of disputes. Its first tasks include the drawing up of a code of conduct for walkers and a national access strategy, and the creation of a mapping database.
Damien O’Connor, the rural affairs minister, described providing access to outdoors areas as an ‘important and complex issue’. Under the new plans, all new walking access over private land, including Maori land, is to be by negotiation and agreement with the landholder. The intention is that landowners will be compensated for providing access. ‘There is no one-size-fits-all solution as each issue is likely to have a distinct history and set of circumstances,’ O’Connor says.
June 2008
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