Camping in our common treasury

You poor take courage

You rich take care

This earth was made a common treasury

For everyone to share

Billy Bragg – The World Turned Upside Down

Photograph by Rob on Flickr

It may surprise you to learn this about me, but I frequently do something illegal and thoroughly enjoy doing it. I do it as much as I can, particularly in the warmer months. And I’m not alone, one of Britain’s best selling authors wrote an extremely moving and beautiful book about it. I am of course referring to wild camping, the practice of pitching a tent or tarp somewhere other than an authorised campsite and spending the night there.

Unlike the situation in Scotland, and indeed most other Northern European countries, wild camping is currently illegal in most of England and Wales. The one place that it was, until today, actually legal was on around half of Dartmoor, where local byelaws were interpreted as us the right to camp in a tent or bivvi anywhere that isn’t within 100m of a road or a specifically sensitive site (listed in schedule 2 at the end) for two consecutive nights (section 6), to use camping stoves but not start fires on the ground (section 8). And as if everything else in the world wasn’t bad enough right now, we now have a couple of supervillain caricatures who decided to put an end that.

Enter Alexander Darwall, a millionaire hedge fund manager and UKIP and Conservative party donor, who bought the Blachford Estate on Southern Dartmoor in 2011 and in December last year brought a court case arguing that the right to wild camp without first seeking the landowner’s permission was never explicitly made clear legally and therefore shouldn’t exist.

Today, he won.

Sir Julian Flaux, the chancellor of the high court, ruled: “In my judgment, on the first issue set out at [14] above, the claimants are entitled to the declaration they seek that, on its true construction, section 10(1) of the 1985 Act does not confer on the public any right to pitch tents or otherwise make camp overnight on Dartmoor Commons. Any such camping requires the consent of the landowner.” This removes the assumption that camping is one of the activities included under the term “outdoor recreation” that all visitors to the moor have a right to, and opens to door to other landowners forbidding camping on their land if permission isn’t sought in advance, a requirement that is impossible to comply with as it’s almost impossible to find out who owns any given patch of land you may be standing on in England.

Needless to say the Right to Roam Campaign isn’t taking this lying down and has organised a organised a protest on the 21st of January – details are available here.

Alexander Darwall justifies his actions as protecting nature. He is quoted as saying that “increasing numbers of people are camping on the moor, with some lighting fires, which could burn many acres of moorland. He also says they have left behind litter, including camping equipment and human waste. He adds there has been antisocial behaviour, with parties causing noise and light pollution, as well as people poaching fish.“Irresponsible behaviour associated with camping, including wild camping, is the biggest single problem for us as landowners, and, from the increase in recent years, it seems only likely to get worse,” he writes.”

A fire scar I photographed on the South Downs. Own image.

There was certainly an increase in irresponsible behaviour outdoors during lockdown, with littering, fires and open defecation becoming a problem in many beauty spots throughout the country as people who didn’t normally hike or camp and didn’t know how to behave outdoors found it to be one of the few recreational activities permitted. But Dartmoor’s byelaws already prohibit activities that would cause damage to the land or prevent other people from enjoying it, like taking vehicles off the roads, leaving gates open and playing amplified music. A blanket ban on responsible wild camping is not the solution.

One positive to come out of lockdown does seem to be an increased interest in nature and our local landscapes. Anecdotally I’ve seen far more people coming to the bushcraft school I help out at or on the foraging walks I lead who have never done any sort of outdoor activities before than I ever did pre-covid. A fair number of women have discreetly approached me aside from the main instruction sessions and asked me how to pee, poo or menstruate outdoors, and I’ve had to explain to quite a few city dwellers that it’s important to close gates after you to keep livestock away from crops and roads and dogs away from livestock. According to The Book of Trespass, prior to lockdown the government was spending a mere £2000 a year promoting the Countryside Code. That wasn’t per person, or per area, but £2,000 for the whole country. While the situation has improved slightly since lockdown the Countryside Code remains a short and cursory document, unlike Scotland’s extensive and user friendly Outdoor Access Code. There are a lot of people out there who genuinely don’t know how to behave in the countryside, so surely we should be teaching them how to do so instead of banning them from it? While there will always be a small and malicious minority of vandals (I can’t believe that people who dump whole campsites worth of litter and burnt cans genuinely don’t know that it won’t biodegrade) I do genuinely believe that the majority of the damage we see from novices, particularly with respect to fires, is down to ignorance.

The evidence keeps rolling in of time spent in nature being beneficial to both our mental and physical health, and certainly for me wild camping is crucial in allowing me to do so. I don’t drive, and many of England’s most beautiful places are hard to reach by public transport. Once you’ve done a four hour train journey, usually involving a fifty minute wait on a station platform due to an inconveniently timed connection and at least two hours on a train with no functional toilet, and slogged through a grotty industrial estate on the way to the pretty bit you’re in no hurry to turn around and do it all again. Being able to stealthily bed down under a hedge allows you to get a lot more walking in in the morning, and also gives you a lot more flexibility – if you’re not making for a particular campsite by a particular time you can take a detour to investigate some interesting ruins you spot on the horizon, brew a cup of tea by the riverbank in the dappled shade of an especially beautiful willow or stop to watch some ants extending a nest.

Frankly, whatever happens I’m going to continue to wild camp anyway. I know this comes with risks, of fines and potential criminal records, and I know too that my privilege as a white woman means if I were to be caught the legal system would treat me more leniently than other groups who already have less access to nature.

My wild camping gear is a contradictory mess of choices for both visibility and invisibility, a camo tarp for stealth with fluorescent yellow pegs to be more easily spotted in the gloom of dusk and predawn. I have two outdoor jackets, a dark green one for concealment and a bright yellow one for visibility should I ever get in trouble in bad weather, and an excellent reversible hat that is bright orange on one side and dark blue on the other. It would be nice if these contradictions could be resolved, nice too if the legally imposed need for stealth didn’t require making slight compromises with personal safety.

We need to decide as a country whether the benefits of permitting the responsible majority of people, who would treat the natural world respectfully if empowered to do so, to wild camp are more important than preventing the selfish majority from doing so. Unfortunately in this country we do have quite a track record of deciding it’s better to deprive everyone of something beneficial than risk its misuse by an antisocial minority – fear of drug use in public toilets has seen so many of them closed down that disabled and pregnant people may struggle to get about for example. Much of the rest of Northern Europe seems to have gone in the opposite direction, with wild camping not just legal but encouraged in Scotland and most of the Nordic countries, and a system of wild campsites designated by poles in place in the Netherlands and Germany. We should be expanding the right to roam in England, not restricting it further. And in response to the argument that we have so few natural open spaces that allowing access to them would be too damaging, surely the solution is to protect more of them?

It’s not a viable restoration strategy to wall them all off and hope that no one ever visits them. The solution to honeypot sites being overwhelmed is ultimately to create more of these amazing habitats.

Guy Shrubsole

I leave you with a reminder of next week’s protest, and the words of Billy Bragg.

The sin of property we do disdain

No man has any right to buy and sell the Earth for private gain

By theft and murder they took the land

Now everywhere the walls spring up at their command

Billy Bragg – The World Turned Upside Down