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Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

Thing is, nobody in the right mind back in 1850 or whathaveyou would have thought of "walking across private land to get somewhere" as some sort of civil or criminal trespass.

That's... how you got places.

If you actually damaged something -- broke a fence, stole a horse, dug a ditch, whatever -- then, yeah, you'd get in trouble if you got caught.

I heard from a friend that moved out to a rural area that especially the newcomers moving in from cities are super-sensitive about "their property". His neighbor -- from NYC -- threatened a lawsuit because my buddy's truck broke off some branches that extended out into the common road.

Folks that have been living out there awhile are cautious with outsiders, but overall a lot more neighborly, just because you have to be.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam:

“The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam".

[…]

The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently fundamental that it was not formalised in law until modern times.”

Very pleasingly, the "Land Reform Act 2003" in Scotland formalised this fundamental right: https://www.apidura.com/journal/freedom-to-roam-in-scotland-...

In Bavaria we have the problem, people like the country side, so idylic and romantic. Then they move, and all of a sudden the cows and church bells become a nuissance, not to speak of all the actual farm work going on.

To be fair, attaching a bell to a cow is animal cruelty and quite unnecessary nowadays. For the outrageous price of one cow bell you can also get RFID trackers for the whole herd. Or at least a handful of GPS trackers. And that also easily fixes the annoyance of cow bells.

Also, cows themselves are not annoying. What is annoying is their owners herding them over public roads and lands, having them shit everywhere without cleaning up. And that is pervasive in rural Bavaria, far more than in the reset of Germany.

You are not from Munich by any chance?

No? What would that have to do with anything?

I just wanted to check whether or not a beaten to death cliche was true or not.

Which one?

That it is usually people from Munich that complain about smells and noises in the, their words, pitoresque countryside.

That's also a problem in cities: people love the idea of living downtown in the old city center, close to cafes and stuff, and once they live there, they complain about the noise from those cafes.

Just think a minute about where you're moving to.

It's possible to install very-thick sound dampening curtains and various other sound proofing measures.

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