Landowners, walkers face off in tragicomic struggle, British style

An Englishman's home is his castle. So it has been said for 400 years, leaving few doubts that when it comes to domestic life in Britain, privacy and property are paramount.

But not any more, it would seem. For in recent years, another equally ancient right has been championed by those countryside enthusiasts who see one man's property as another man's dispossession: the right to roam.

The indisputably widespread predilection for countryside walking, or rambling as it is known here, is stirring passions in England's normally tranquil rural hinterland, particularly as the government wades in with new laws calling for every last square inch of countryside to be mapped so that everyone knows who may roam where.

The issue has become a vexed one. Ramblers in their tens of thousands insist on their right of access to open land once considered "common." Landowners frequently object, sometimes robustly. The result has been a tragicomic struggle steeped in 19th-century notions of class, land, and freedom. It sounds like a footnote to Marx, only this time it's Walkers of the World Unite.

But if history is repeating itself, then this time it is as farce. One incensed farmer attacked walkers with a motorized hedge-cutter, showering trimmings on the startled group as they crossed his plot. Another property tycoon denounced ramblers as the "great unwashed." He then blocked his estate with padlocked gates, barbed wire, and refrigerators, and threatened to shoot any "riffraff" who strayed within range.

But now the people have struck back. Walking is an overwhelmingly popular pastime here, with more than three quarters of the population estimated to take a recreational walk at least once a month. Mindful of the $10 billion that walkers bring to the rural economy each year in standard tourist fare, the government has intervened, passing "right to roam" legislation that calls for clear delineation of who can walk where.

And as the "mapping" process reaches its final stages this year and next, it appears that walkers are getting the upper hand. "For the first time we'll have the right to walk on common ground, mountain, moor, heath, and down," says Kate Ashbrook, a keen rambler and general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, a conservation group that has championed the protection of common land and public rights of way for 140 years. "There will be some landowners who object, but why should they? We have a right to walk responsibly on their land, though of course we are not allowed to interfere with their property in any way."

Landowners are, of course, no longer necessarily people with unpronounceable double-barreled surnames and ancestry dating back to 1066. Nowadays they have names like Madonna and Keith Richards, both of whom have had their own run-ins with the "great unwashed."

Page: 1 | 2