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.
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?
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.