Right to Roam
Today the Supreme Court will decide whether the cherished freedom to wild camp on Dartmoor will continue.
This right has been long enjoyed informally, but it was enshrined in law in 1985.
Now it faces a challenge from Alexander Darwall, who bought a 4,000-acre estate in southern Dartmoor (to go alongside the 16,000 acres he owns in Scotland.).
Mr Darwall is arguing that wild camping should now be banned on his massive Dartmoor estate, and that it cannot be considered open-air recreation.
A 2023 court ruling banned wild camping (and just think for a minute about what a tiny, inconsequential act he’s trying to get banned - this is not talking about idiots turning up in vans to sleep in a tent and leave all their rubbish behind: that is FLY camping, not wild camping which takes pride in leaving no trace and treating the land and other people with respect.).
Thankfully, a public appeal restored this right.
But Darwall wasn’t done with his mission, and he appealed against the ruling, escalating the case to the Supreme Court.
And so today, the court’s final verdict will determine the future of wild camping on Dartmoor.
On the one hand, this is just about a few outdoors lovers wanting to sleep under the stars as people have always done. It’s not a big deal.
But on the other hand, it’s an alarm bell, a canary in a coalmine, about a country where less than 1% of the population owns 50% of the land, where 92% of the English countryside has no right to roam, where Only 3% of rivers in England are open to a legal right of access. A country where children spend less time outdoors than prisoners,
One in nine children have not set foot in a natural environment in over a year. We end up with rivers, hills, woods that are nice to look at out of the window but are no longer a meaningful part of our lives.
Children’s roaming distance has shrunk by 90% compared to their parents’ generation.
And the implications for all this is huge. The mental and physical benefits of being active in nature are well known.
But the issues grow bigger than that.
As our society becomes ever more disconnected from the wild world, we don’t notice the shifting baselines as our wild places are eroded and species plummet.
People dropping litter is annoying, and needs to be addressed, of course - as do dogs chasing livestock and prats hanging dog poo bags on fences. But the real environmental damage is caused every day by illegal sewage dumping, soil and nutrient run-off, pesticide use, overgrazing and habitat destruction – much of which goes entirely unnoticed. No one is there to witness it.
We are so separated from the natural world that we don’t pay attention to the catastrophic impact on the land, the waterways and the climate that our food choices have. And we are sleepwalking into a sad and silent spring.
So, yes, the people gathered today at the supreme court object to a millionaire telling us that we can’t walk over the moors to sleep under the stars. But more than that, this challenge has ignited a new land rights movement, To challenge the notion that our right to belong should remain the luxury of a narrow elite of landowners.
It is An argument revealing the fragility of our access to land and the very broad and serious implications of that slippery slope.
