Land, Access, Right?
Image one: Kintail
I grew up in England, in an unlovely corner of a sometimes-beautiful county. It was too far from Birmingham to take much advantage of everything a vibrant and dynamic city has to offer, but close enough to suffer from some of the disadvantages that come from living at the edge of the post-industrial hinterland that often encircles such a city.
As no one in my family had much interest in the outdoors, walking or landscape I didn’t know then that, being English, I only had legal access to around 8% of the countryside I lived near. For me ‘No Trespassing!’ signs were normal, and being both afraid of authority figures and ignorant about these matters, I would not have known how to access what little land was open to me. I certainly did not know that I was being penned in, or perhaps out, by England’s land access laws.
Much later, having gone to university for an excessive number of years in which I discovered not just literature but walking, hills and a new sense of self that deeply needed connection with land and landscape, I moved to Scotland. For all the learning I had acquired I found myself once again deeply ignorant, this time of the country I’d decided quite abruptly to make my new home.
Image two: Beinn a’Bheithir, Ballachulish
A lecturer at a Scottish university, proud at last to have my first permanent academic position, I unpacked my belongings in an eccentric castle-cum-holiday apartment building in Killearn, north of Glasgow. I was renting a flat constructed out of a laird’s old billiards room located on the edge of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park and the whole place was beautiful in a way I had never experienced before. I was determined to find some good walks with which to get to know my new home.
Having by now developed some sense of how to safely access the outdoors – and that it was reasonable to want to – I bought the OS map for my area from the village shop. I opened my new prized possession excitedly on my kitchen table where I eased the crisp folds and spread the pristine sheets, looking for the ideal first walk. Bands of tight red contours were everywhere, meaning I’d opened the map on the page covering the area a few miles to the south, where the Campsie Hills rise steeply above Killearn. I shifted my glance northwards and, yes, there was ‘my’ castle, there was the river. Excellent. But where were the paths? Assuming that they were absent because I was looking at private land I looked for dotted lines to the east, then the west, then further away still. Nothing. I flicked back to the scary contour-heavy part of the sheet. Only now I knew it was the map that was wrong because I had seen routes criss-crossing the hills. I remember exclaiming, with disgust and frustration at the stack of mute, unpacked packing boxes, ‘Why do the maps here have no paths?!’
Image three: Peebles
Of course, the reason why there were no paths marked on my map is because there are no ‘rights of way’ in Scotland. There is no need. Pretty much everywhere can be walked on, so there are no rights of way for the map to mark. As long as I treated the land I crossed with respect, I gradually learned, I had a presumed right to be there. This was an entirely new way of thinking, and for a while I missed being penned. I missed being clearly told where I might be and where I might go. There was something reassuring in having my options limited to a single thin line, blazed clearly across both land and map; in being instructed by an unseen authority what I could be trusted to manage. It was comforting to have my ambitions managed, my route planned out for me.
It took a while for me to grow comfortable with just wandering where I pleased, to ease myself out of being pre-emptively sorry for walking somewhere without a finger post to approve and direct. Gradually, though, I learned to manage without the approval of authority, to become in fact my own authority. I came to relish the responsibilities imposed upon me by the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Act, first of which was to care for the land I wished to use. I liked the reciprocity of it – that both myself and the landowner had a duty of care towards the land and towards each other. I felt more connected to the places I walked: while I was there I had to look after the land and make sure I brought it no harm. If I fulfilled my responsibilities I earned enormous freedom, something I appreciated the most on the occasions when walks went wrong, which they often did in my early days of walking in Scotland, and I needed to escape quickly and directly. On such occasions there was no need to mull route choices or risk assess trespassing in order to reach safety. I could just go where I needed to. I enjoyed feeling trusted and treated like an adult with good intentions.
Image four: Buchaille Etive Mòr, Glencoe
Because that’s what I was, as most of us are who walk and enjoy the British landscape. The Right to Roam campaign is doing extremely important work to raise awareness of the limitations imposed on land access in England and Wales and their deleterious effects on people’s sense of protectiveness towards the land: it is hard to truly care about somewhere your presence is, at best, merely tolerated. I hope everyone in Britain will one day – soon – have the right to wander at will, respectfully and responsibly, trusted and trusting about the land’s care. It’ll likely be a bit discombulating to start with, having all that space to play with. But I’m confident we can learn to live without the pens that laws and custom have made us used to. I did.
Kerri Andrews is a writer, freelancer and academic. She is the author of the bestselling Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, and the editor of Nan Shepherd’s letters as well as the first ever anthology of women’s writing about walking, Way Makers. Her next book, Pathfinding, is due out in March 2025.