Mass trespass on Dartmoor to highlight England's 'piecemeal' right to roam laws
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Here,in Estonia, everyone can walk on anyones land unless it is someones private home or its surrounding yard (lawn, fields, etc).
You can walk, hike, collect berries and mushrooms for private use everywhere (unless it is on an industrial scale).
If your piece of land is on a sea or lake side or a river, then you must provide access to it, 5 metres from the waterline must be acessible for everyone and can't be fenced off.
I once saw a news item from the uk where someone from Latvia was collecting mushrooms, the land owner didn't like this and the mushroom gathrer had to pay a big fine. Even though nobody was stolen from since the people in the uk don't know anything about wild mushrooms and thry would just rot and go bad. Kind of absurd
You can have nice things like this till they get abused.
It appears that the laws where I live are quite similar to those in Estonia in this aspect, and I have never heard of any real abuse.
But the other problem in the US is that we don't have just one culture. Anyone who talks in public advocates the same pack-it-out approach to trash. That's the practice in the self-consciously outdoorsy subculture. But the people who leave trash in public campgrounds, I suspect anyway, live in an entirely different world with no realistic communication channels between them. Application to national politics is left as an exercise.
Really? I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's much easier for me to think of counterexamples than supporting examples. Hikers leave garbage on trails all the time. Even dog owners let their pets leave little presents for other people to take care of. I love right to roam laws, but I can see the other side too. I think we have to weigh the tradeoffs and accept that there's a cost—one that may be outweighed by the benefits, surely—not deny that any costs exist.
That can be interpreted both ways. Keeping people off the land is also a type of abuse, as is misuse of the land by a large amount of people roaming there.
Improved land had has an investment in time and money to make it productive one way or another.
Like If someone bought and put a fenced in corn field or tract house in Yosemite valley, it would be “improved land” by the usual definition
On my family’s farm, the whole place was posted: “no trespassing/no hunting” yet we’d have people out in a pasture trying to pet farm animals or horses or find deer stands and trash (mostly beer cans in the woods), or people who would help themselves to our raspberries/apples etc., not to mention the amount of trash we’d find and clean up along our road frontage. I can’t believe how much worse it would be if people felt entitled to be there.
I’m generally aligned with principle of right to roam, but I think it’d be a nightmare in practice. + I can’t even think about the associated liability when some person gets kicked by horse or gets shocked by an electrical fence etc.
[1]https://www.skyhookadventure.com/blog/scotland-right-to-roam...
[2] https://www.morton-fraser.com/insights/right-roam-scotland
“Camping is not permitted on enclosed farmland, cultivated fields, or land around houses.”
Nobody is trying to steal anyone’s land or gun collection here.
"In 2000 the Countryside and Rights of Way Act gave people a right to roam over certain landscape types, such as mountains, moorland, heathland, downland and commons.
However, the campaign group Right to Roam argues that this landscape – known as “access land” and covering about 8% of England – is often surrounded by farmed fields and other privately owned landscapes, creating inaccessible “islands” of free-to-roam land."
But irresponsible people are a general problem. Often it is just mere ignorance, though. Many people simply do not know for example how to .. go to the toilet in a forest. Even when you do not have a shovel with you, with a wooden stick or stone, one can make a hole deep enough to cover all of your buisness. And suddenly all the trees next to the major walking paths would not be covered in shit and toilet paper anymore. And that you do not drop your garbage wherever you stand, is a deep rooted sociological problem. One for me starting with the stupid smoking ad campaigns, where the cool cowboy flicks away his cigarette. And where it lands, the plastic will remain.
Sounds like one could... erm, "kill two birds with one stone" here ?
I think there's probably many reasons, but here's a few I can think of:
1. The trails and such that warrant these rights never existed in the first place. 2. The rights come from long-established customs, which again, never got the chance to get going in the United States. 3. The legal/juridical establishment in the United States tended to care more about protecting the rights of property owners than protecting the freedom to travel (in this limited respect).
There's another amusing historical accident - Blackstone.[1] Blackstone's Commentaries[2] are a self-contained four volume set on how the English legal system worked. They had a strong influence on the US legal system. Most of the drafters of the Constitution read them. There were few if any law libraries, but many copies of Blackstone.
Blackstone was a property rights absolutist. He wrote:
"So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community. If a new road, for instance, were to be made through the grounds of a private person, it might perhaps be extensively beneficial to the public; but the law permits no man, or set of men, to do this without consent of the owner of the land. In vain may it be urged, that the good of the individual ought to yield to that of the community; for it would be dangerous to allow any private man, or even any public tribunal, to be the judge of this common good, and to decide whether it be expedient or no."[3]
This is further than English law goes. US law arose from that interpretation. That's the power of writing the most widely read book on the subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Laws_of_En...
[3] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s5....
"(Trespass) signifies no more than an entry on another man’s ground without a lawful authority, and doing some damage, however inconsiderable, to his real property. For the right of meum and tuum, or property, in lands being once established, it follows as a necessary consequence, that this right must be exclusive; that is, that the owner may retain to himself the sole use and occupation of his soil: every entry therefore thereon without the owner’s leave, and especially if contrary to his express order, is a trespass or transgression. The Roman law seem to have made a direct prohibition necessary, in order to constitute this injury: “qui alienum fundum ingreditur, potest a domino, si is praeviderit, prohiberi ne ingrediatur.” But the law of England, justly considering that much inconvenience may happen to the owner, before he has an opportunity to forbid the entry, has carried the point much farther, and has treated every entry upon another’s lands, (unless by the owner’s leave, or in some very particular cases) as an injury or wrong, for satisfaction of which an action of trespass will lie; but determines the quantum of that satisfaction, by considering how far the offense was willful or inadvertent, and by estimating the value of the actual damage sustained."[1]
Except for the carve-out for fox-hunting: "In like manner the common law warrants the hunting of ravenous beasts of prey, as badgers and foxes, in another man’s land; because the destroying such creatures is profitable to the public."
[1] https://lonang.com/library/reference/tucker-blackstone-notes...
For good reason, one can suppose. Wealth flows downstream from the concept of private property whose rights are strongly guarded by law. An "ideal" amount of property rights, if one exists at all, is likely much closer to absolute than zero.
or you can make it a national park and put a surveyor's mark for people to come and visit.
TIL this is a real thing. I thought it was a HN thought experiment.
Per another comment, some of it at least is that many people really don't want hunting (or destructive off-road vehicles) on their land but have no problem with the occasional person taking a walk on a more-or-less established path.
Even in the UK, I've had an issue with something basically identified as an item of interest on an OS map and getting yelled at for sticking my nose in a gate.
WA also has easements by traditional access, but it seemed pretty limited and easy for property owners to avoid, when I was looking into it.
[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=8.24&full=true
If you can show that you've been using a specific path for years the owner of that path can lose rights to block access. This is why you see some land owners putting up no-trespassing signs and jealously guarding their land and access. They don't want to lose the ability to effectively control their paths. IIRC, this is a common law thing. It's a bit like trademarks in the sense that land owners need to guard their land otherwise they lose a chunk of it.
The squishiness here is I don't think there's a specified amount of time before the public easement is granted.
With private, the agreement is by - or between - private landowner(s).
With public, it's between every applicable private landowner, and the governing authority.
All thanks to the hunting lobby, I expect.
Edit: I'd love to hear from anyone elsewhere that offers such incentives as to how they are structured.
For large swaths of the Americas, these are all different groups, many of which seized the land through violence.
It's something people like to throw out as an argument, but it falls on its face under the most basic of scrutiny. The entire earth was "stolen" many, many times by this definition, making it nonsensical.
https://www.history.com/news/native-american-broken-treaties
Because that would have been at odds with colonists' goals of seizing the land from the people whom it previously belonged to, and who were using it.
And in the winters of 200 years ago, the lakes became frozen roads.
Yet part of it may also be, that land wss apportioned in large, organized chunks in many cases. Given to settlers, with spaces for roads as part of the plan.
Europe had many places where there was no way to get around, for there were no roads!
Is it really true that nobody in Germany is allowed to fence their property?
Oh, and you're not allowed to build any cabins either, even if you own that piece of forest.
However, I'm not certain that that's the case everywhere in Germany or only in some states.
There is property where you can build a proper house and live there (requirement is, that there is infrastructure, like water and electricity). Then there are gardens, where maybe a small cabin is allowed (but you may not officially live there). And then there is everything else, where you normally cannot build anything.
I just want to note that even with these annoying carveouts, the US has far more federal land than other European countries. There's not really an equivalent to the vast national forests in the US west in Europe. Those countries are essentially 100% allocated and settled.
But also, the corner crossing thing is really dumb. Why did the federal government establish a checkerboard pattern? Either way, they should just eminent domain 20 feet off the corners and call it a day.
It basically worked, except in wooded areas where the value came from the timber rather than the land.
In California, "Adverse possession" requires a lot: You have to occupy a place continuously for 5 years, like how an owner would. You have to pay all taxes on the land for that time. You have to be clearly occupying the land, so it's obvious to all (including the owner). You have to be acting like you are the owner of the land: Getting & paying for electric, water, internet, trash pickup, etc..
So, there's a high bar that has to be met.
I don't know what would happen if I owned a piece of property that I didn't live on, and both I and the adverse posessor tried to pay. Maybe they'd take both payments? Maybe it's a race condition? No idea.
Maybe there's a legal mechanism for carving off a piece of a larger property that you've been "openly and notoriously" squatting for the requisite amount of time. If so, you'd pay the tax bill post facto.
But... I don't really know anything, let alone cross-jurisdictionally. Those are educated guesses.
This makes it impossible for this problem to happen in the first place.
To respond, I've just bought a drone that dissuades people from tresspassing, loitering, and lining the roadway in front of my house at night, but tech is just a temporary measure. These roaming and public space laws are at the cusp of the conflict of demographic change. Rural life is viable because of the norms around space and privacy, and if we introduce urban security issues to rural communities without also adapting the laws to mitigate their effects, it will destroy that way of life completely.
Let alone some of the city activists literally bussing kids out of cities to cover rural areas in crappy graffiti. I have it on drone footage and even spoke with them directly. It's very much a thing. Some nonsense about "being present."
Everybody knows there is change afoot and it just needs to be managed effectively.
But thats just conjecture.
It's not about race, it's about numbers, and whether they are residents or part of the communities whose space they occupy because they don't see consequences here, whereas there are consequences for them in their own communities where people know them.
In unrelated news, I’m currently looking for investors to purchase a surplus LCAC[1] for midnight beach outings.
[0] https://www.kqed.org/science/1955623/the-neverending-battle-...
you can't throw reasons away by labelling them historic, the same historic reasons still apply today, call them Chesterton's reasons. They need to be balanced against other reasons, and your reasons and my reasons might be different, but that's what our govts do for us, and when enough people are unhappy we change govts.
Edit - what I mean to be clearer is that when it comes to land access, "historical" (i.e. what's on paper) is the only reason that counts - as in, property rights which span both private property, and the one that many love to forget - public land. Courts consistently hold this up.
Those seeking to limit public land access for more or less greed often attempt to wave away those historical records via "well it's historical, what else is there to consider today," as if their private property rights are not also protected for the same reason.
I appreciate that an intensely "conservative" cultural form is used here to make a pro-populist argument for "liberal" rights.
This lines up well with the kind of stances that the Anglican Church ended up taking in theology. That Church follows both Scripture and Tradition. (By contrast, and generalizing a bit, I think an extreme Protestant stance would tend to value only Scripture.) This feels like a more secular version of same.
To put it more concretely: a written document from a thousand years ago is almost unintelligible to all but specialist linguists, and its accurate interpretation difficult for all but specialist social historians. Yet the customs displayed by a people that long ago would still seem very familiar today. Which would you trust to form the basis of your community's sense of justice - the faded old document in a strange language, or the equally ancient tradition passed down habitually across generations?
We are essentially excluded from land through centuries old stitch ups intended to exclude the common man. It's stuff that goes back to the Norman conquest when the elite essentially carved up hunting lands for their own benefit, with subsequent enclosure after enclosure that destroyed commons rights.
The intent of the Right to Roam movement is to reclaim some of what was taken from us as a whole.
And because land ownership is a right created by the government, the government can define the terms and change them.
The fact humanity has formalised that dominance into our own bureaucratic forms is merely stylistic.
But I suppose there is some philosophical difference, as to whether or not human actions are part of the natural world.