Shiftings
Matthew Kelly writes about Jeremy Burchardt’s Lifescapes: The Experience of Landscape in Britain, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Photograph by Guy Shrubsole. Reproduced with permission.
On 13 January 2023, the High Court in London ‘clarified’ that the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 did not establish a right to camp on the commons of Dartmoor. The case was brought by Alexander Darwell, hedge fund manager, Brexiter, and owner since 2011 of the 4,000-acre Blachford Estate, which includes a great stretch of Stall Moor common on the southern tip of Dartmoor National Park. The case was contested by Dartmoor National Park Authority, which has regulated camping on the commons of Dartmoor since the 1980s, and it turned on how the wording of the Act concerning access should be interpreted, especially the phrase ‘for the purpose of open air recreation’. The judge took a narrowly literal reading of the Act, whereas Darwell’s opponents, including counsel for the park authority, argued that the law should be interpreted in terms that reflect a broader historical understanding of the multiple ways Dartmoor has been used over many decades. At question, is what these words signify in the specific context of common land on Dartmoor. Although the park authority won leave to appeal the case, it quickly agreed with most other owners of common land that existing provisions might be continued. Activists were quick to take to social media to draw attention to what has been lost, but things could have been a whole lot worse. What was once claimed as a right was now established as permissive.
The background to the establishment of the camping regulations is opaque. The principal purpose of the Dartmoor Commons Act was to create a system of self-governance for the Dartmoor commons that would place limits on how the commons can be used. This reflected concern about the intensification of state-subsidised grazing regimes and the looming ecological threat posed by unregulated agricultural ‘improvement’. Tabled on behalf of the park authority, the bill included access clauses that made the customary access to the commons a legal right. This was a significant advance in public rights of access to land: it reflected the national park authority’s statutory obligation to enhance public access and presaged the establishment of ‘access land’ under New Labour’s Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. As for the right to camp on the open moor, some clues as to both the Act’s intention and existing practice can be found in the parliamentary debate. Ray Mawby, MP for Totnes, sponsored the first iteration of the bill, placed before parliament in 1980. In a brief exchange that seemed less significant at the time than it does now—or, indeed, when I wrote about it in 2015—Mawby explained that new bye-laws were needed to regulate camping and caravanning on the moor, distinguishing backpacking from other types of camping. ‘The camping and caravan clubs asked the Select Committee in another place to delete the park authority's byelaw-making powers to control camping on common land. While the back-pack camper causes no problems, those in caravans, Dormobiles and highly coloured frame tents do.’ Following the passage of the revised Act in 1985, the park authority did as Mawby anticipated, passing byelaws to regulate camping on access land.
My hunch is that the late Ian Mercer, the charismatic boss of the park authority and one of modern Dartmoor’s great fixers, got the right people into a room and induced them to agree camping guidelines. As such, although the Darwells are not the only Dartmoor landowners to use legal means to limit the public use of their land—the prohibition of access to Vixen Tor remains raw—as new entrants, they have successfully disrupted a broadly settled Dartmoor habitus. They made a ton of money, got themselves a country estate, and now leverage their extensive means to restrict access. A few years ago, they closed a small car park that gave walkers direct access to the common; their introduction of pheasants has also raised concerns about the consequences for southern Dartmoor’s woodland ecosystems.
The High Court case attracted much public attention. It was closely reported in The Guardian, giving the issue global reach—the New York Times ran a feature in July 2023—and was catnip for ‘Right to Roam’, an activist group established in 2019 to oppose the government’s threat to criminalise trespass. Right to Roam lobbies for primary legislation to guarantee a ‘right to roam’ in England following the example set yet by the Scottish government’s Land Reform Act 2003. The group also promotes responsible access—new access rights need to be accompanied by a public education campaign—and organises mass trespass actions to the raise the campaign’s profile and embolden a new generation of activists. Common cause is found with long-established campaigning groups like the Ramblers’ Association, which boasts its own record of wire-cutting activism, and together these groups comprise the political wing of the new ruralism.
The new ruralism is nebulous but tangible. Mildly countercultural, it has been buoyed by the New Nature Writing but is more than a literary phenomenon. It has slowly gathered adherents since the millennium, fuelling a flight from the city to the country, bringing an activist spirit to rural towns and villages. These developments were intensified by the importance to health and happiness of access to green space during the Covid-19 lockdowns. The old claim that people have a right to access green space, grounded in natural theology and broadly democratic claims, has been given greater potency by the current environmental crisis. Despite long-standing propaganda campaigns by the National Union of Farmers and Country Landowners’ Association, it has been conclusively proven that many landowners have not been responsible ‘custodians’ of the environment. One need only read the authoritative ‘State of Nature’ reports. The popularity of rewilding has played no small part in the development of the new ruralism. By generating new ways of seeing Britain’s most celebrated and protected landscapes—‘sheepwrecked’ according to George Monbiot—rewilding has made the destructiveness of modern agriculture legible. Many of us now see in protected landscapes loss and exhaustion rather than natural abundance. Rewilding also promotes the desire for more sensational or embodied ways of experiencing the natural world. Thanks to the Darwells, ‘wild camping’ has joined ‘wild swimming’ in the lexicon of the new ruralism, expanding the aims of an access movement whose ableist, classist, and gendered assumptions have also been challenged by minoritized groups.
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On 21 January 2023, more than 3,000 people gathered in the small village of Cornwood to walk the few miles up to Stall Moor in protest at the High Court decision. For access campaigners, this was an extraordinary moment, a mobilisation worthy of a place alongside the iconic Kinder Scout Trespass of 1932. Organised by Right to Roam and under the banner of ‘The Stars are for Everyone’, it was a festive occasion, combining a Westcountry folksiness with political intent. Speeches, dancing, and the ritualistic raising of Old Crockern was followed by a pint back in Cornwood as the evening drew in. A day that exemplified the sheer joy of outdoors communality: old and young, under a weak January sun, acting in common cause.
Or so it seemed to me. I’d resolved to stay at home in Northumberland. I couldn’t justify the long drive or the train ticket or a flight—especially a flight—to Devon. But that morning I acutely felt my absence from Stall Moor, even if nobody else did. My social media feed accentuated these feelings. I had to make my own compensatory gesture. My partner and I drove up to the Simonside Hills and did the popular walk over the craggy tops. Plenty of people were out that fine January day. A gaggle of Northumberland lads and lassies in an array of sunnies and just-about-suitable shoes had a great time slip-sliding down the scree. I felt fretful, not at all in the moment, and filmed a wobbly 360-degree panorama with my phone and tweeted something to the effect that wild camping should be allowed here too. No-one paid this pitiful gesture any attention. All eyes were on Stall Moor.
Why the inward agitation? I’m not much of an activist and have skipped plenty of protests over the years, including at least one trespass organised by Right to Roam not far from where I live. The Dartmoor gathering affected me so strongly because I grew up in Devon, have written extensively about the history and politics of the moorscape, and am nostalgic for the seminal experiences I had there in my youth. Those people purposefully tramping Devon’s sunken lanes up to the moor—the moss, the ferns, the granite—were my people, staking a collective claim over our territory. I felt a not entirely comradely envy. Like many academics, I live a job-dependent, voluntary exile, and that morning I felt especially displaced and irrationally possessive.
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If I was born in the late nineteenth century, kept a diary, and was prone to express my ruralism in prose, I’d be grist for Jeremy Burchardt’s mill. In Livescapes he revisits an earlier English ruralism through the lives of eight ordinary people who kept extensive diaries. Historians have complicated the ways ‘ordinariness’ was politically, culturally, and socially constructed in post-war Britain, but suffice it to say that Burchardt’s subjects led largely anonymous, ‘uncelebrated’ lives. They were not environmental activists, despite their gripes with the modern world, and proved largely unresponsive to the political ruralism of their day—the Council for the Preservation of Rural England was established in 1926. But like the new ruralists, they cultivated an intense feeling for nature and rural places, and felt a strong urge to write about this, generally for private satisfaction, though sometimes with literary ambitions in mind. Burchardt’s ruralists are not just the middling sort, but don’t span the class spectrum. They include an Anglican antiquarian from Exeter, a turner from Swindon, a frustrated artist from Hampshire, an iterant craftswoman from London (who eventually settled in Holford, Somerset), a doctor from Bolton, a probation officer from Dudley, a clerk from London, and a bookseller from Bristol.
Burchardt’s concern is not with their writing qua writing. What literary judgements he makes are secondary to his use of the diaries to construct lightly functional accounts of how their experience of the countryside was integral to their lives. His diarists were ‘adherers’, ‘withdrawers’, ‘restorers’, and ‘explorers’; respectively, they found in the countryside a source of stability and security, of refuge (not just from the urban, but also sometimes from family), of psychological and physical renewal (often from the restrictions of demanding work), and of adventure and self-discovery. Coldly summarised like this, this typology appears schematic, for us ruralists, old and new, surely find something of ourselves in all four types, but this questioning quickly fades away in the face of the extraordinary fellow feeling Burchardt brings to his task. The close yet tactful attention he pays to ‘the apparently quotidian details’ of the lives of Beatrix, William, Katherine, Violet, John, Bert, Sadie, and Fred constitutes a deeply affecting act of care, renewing that old ethical commitment to enlarge the field of those considered the proper subjects of historical writing. Lifescapes is a tremendous act of historical recovery.
Burchardt critiques a strain of writing about interwar ruralism that posits ‘the rural idyll’ as the mythic construct of cultural elites, to which it is supposed the wider society was susceptible. Burchardt admits that in earlier work he too was guilty of the tendency to assume that the sensibilities and experiences of non-elite groups were shaped by broadly literary or artistic phenomena that rendered ‘the countryside’ a discursive phenomenon little connected to the day-to-day, material realities of the rural. Rather than challenge this thinking by focusing on the labour that produced the countryside, a task long undertaken by agricultural historians, Burchardt instead focuses on the attentiveness of his diarists to the rural and their experience of it. Crucially, their attentiveness to the noumenal—to things as they are—was turned in on the self and turned out onto world itself and as attentive as any student of natural history.
Over the course of their lives, the diarists rendered this attentiveness into words, often in sensory or spiritual terms that reified the somatic agency of nature with a capital-N. The recitation of botanical or ornithological knowledge did not energise them most, but instead the desire to recognise the vitality of the natural world, especially its capacity for renewal, and to record how this vitality acted on them. They sought to capture in prose the pleasurable sensations occasioned by encounters with flowers, streams, and woodland, especially during the warmth of spring and summer. It’s now almost shocking to read about how readily people once gathered wildflowers, and these diaries can be read as a record of a lost abundance. In any case, this adrenal ruralism, serotonin-enhanced by physical exertion—by cycling and hiking—or the good company of friends or the luxury of solitariness—was almost invariably bound up with notions of freedom, liberty, and independence. To recognise the agency of nature was to experience a heightened sense of self.
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Little suggests the diarists were troubled by questions of access. Beatrice Cresswell (1862-1940), a committed spinster, cycled the lanes of the South West seeking churches and other sites of antiquarian or topographical interest. She certainly experienced the joy of a solitary freedom, pursuing her antiquarian and topographical interests unfettered by the demands of others. The countryside was a source of security, evoking happy childhood memories, and she was most content when ‘her constitutive attachments to religion and rurality resonated with each other’. Her modest bungalow in Exeter was the secure base she needed to write the regionalist books that paid for her independence. And like many early-twentieth-century literary ruralists—modern but not modernist—the logics of the county or regional study was the basis of a prolific if not particularly lucrative or celebrated literary career. Exeter was the settled civilisation that made the writing possible, Dartmoor the wilderness, and there were all the hilly intimacies that lay between. Her subjects ‘and their surroundings’ included westcountry towns and areas like Exeter, Bideford, Newton Abbot, Teignmouth, the north coast of Cornwall, the Quantocks, and Dartmoor. As the author of a history of modern Dartmoor that did not trouble the bestseller lists, I couldn’t but identify with Beatrice’s fascination with the storied ground of Britain’s south-west peninsula.
If Beatrice was Edwardian, Sadie Barmes (b.1907) was interwar, and beguiling for it. Her gregarious personality made her rurality intrinsically sociable, and she was drawn to organised fun, whether as a Girl Guide in her youth or in the left-wing rambling clubs and camping trips that in young adulthood led her to communist political commitments. As a Jewish Londoner, Sadie’s ruralism was possibly assimilationist, but the awe she felt when confronted with a spectacular landscape or sites freighted with meaning like Chanctonbury Ring on the South Downs seems pre-political. Indeed, for all that English landscapes are sometimes associated with cloying national sentiment, there was little of this in Burchardt’s diarists. Mild physical effort and adversity added to Sadie’s sensational experiences, bringing ‘an exhilarating liberation from the padded prison of urban “mod cons”’. Communality also carried an erotic charge, another way her ruralism was embodied, and her unaffected diary entries capture her open, optimistic encounter with the world. There were ‘[l]ong days of back aching climb to those glorious heights, of exciting meals cooked in magic copses, of weary, happy shiftings back to camp.’
Sadie did not gravitate to familiar places but thrived on novelty, including long hikes in the foothills of the Alps, where she ‘fed on beauty’ and whose ‘moods’ she expressed through a domesticated sublime: ‘those dear heights tower into threatening blackness.’ By contrast, other ruralists were drawn to easily accessible sites familiar to them but uncelebrated in the annals of the romantic, the picturesque or the sublime. For William Hallam (b. 1868), life as an industrial worker in Swindon was a long and painful recessional from an idyllic childhood in the Berkshire village of East Lockringe, where his father was stud groom to Lord Wantage. A man of powerful attachments but whose alienation prevented him from fitting in easily with his workmates, Hallam’s yearning for East Lockringe was as much a commitment to the social structures and the long stability he thought produced the village as it was to its rustic charm. By reading Country Life in the Swindon Mechanics’ Institute he helped maintain his connection to this ruralism. Long walks with old friends could still the conflict between his inner Marxism—he condemned the First World War as ‘damnably capitalist’—and his outward High Church Toryism, a commitment inseparable from a ruralism predicated on the supposed pre-industrial harmony of human and more-than-human nature.
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In iconic, carefully managed landscapes, an invisible hand can be felt in the small of your back, gently guiding you this way rather than that. Think of the subtle work done by rusticised fingerposts, or the enabling yet confining agency of an officially designated Long Distance Footpath, or the more obvious distinction between a Right of Way and a Permissive Footpath. Although access infrastructure was little developed before the social democratic politics and automobilities of the post-war years got to work on policymakers, Burchardt’s diarists nonetheless were able to develop personal connections to private places. Fred Catley (b. 1911), a bookseller from Bristol with literary ambitions but a limited formal education, derived a deep satisfaction from his private knowledge of the Chew Valley, an area southwest of the city. Today, a desirable place to live boasting a reservoir branded as a lake (the river was dammed in the 1950s), in the interwar years Chew Valley was Catley’s free-to-view private domain. He frequently cycled there, pausing at the bridge over the weir at Chewton Keynsham to contemplate the scene and register a shift in his own sense of self. Here he became the author of copious diaries shaped by the literary ruralism of his time: Richard Jefferies’ embattled narratives of self-discovery were a touchstone.
We can only speculate why Fred the Obscure wrote so remorselessly, why he felt compelled to evaluate in prose the qualities of rural landscapes. The need to be somehow in the literary game, to hone technical skills, was perhaps reason enough, though he'd read enough to know that descriptive evocation to weak narrative intent can rapidly pall. A contemporary might have said that he lacked the strength of character to make more of himself, and promotion at work after years of conscientious work induced stress rather than satisfaction. As he grew older, his cantankerous dislike of the blandishments of modern consumerism grew as his literary ambitions faded away. Ghastly advertising hoardings symbolised all that polluted his purist sense of the rural.
John Johnston, a Scottish-born Bolton doctor, wrote to meet private commitments rather than literary ambitions. He was the only diarist to regularly read and write en plein air, and through sensory immersion in the natural world and a disciplined writing practice he sought unity with nature as ‘a conscious, ideological ruralism’. He walked, he ‘loafed’, he languished, he did not ‘hike’. He found landscapes of the sublime off-putting and was most rewarded by tranquil farmed landscapes and quiet, little-noticed places. His private domain was Raikes Wood on the outskirts of Bolton, a woodland now much reduced by urbanisation but managed by the Woodland Trust. Here, as life events demanded, he convalesced, mourned, or took refuge from the hard job that daily exposed him to the degradations of urban modernity. His mindfulness, let us call it, did not make him a man of mild opinions but someone whose deliberately meditative engagement with the natural world gave him the means to achieve mental wellbeing amid the stress and anxiety of everyday life.
The painter Katherine Spear Smith (b. 1884) found her purist sense of rural at Titchfield Haven near Southampton in Hampshire. A wetland sustained by the Moen estuary and since enclosed by improved agricultural land and the housing estates of Stubbington, it is now a National Nature Reserve with seven bird-watching hides and an admission fee. It takes some effort to imagine an individual having a ‘private’ relationship with such a managed place. At Titchfield, Smith tended to figure other human presences as intrusion, particularly if the people were ‘common’. Smith’s life was troubled by repeated emotional upheaval, and these grisly comments were more a flailing towards middle-class norms than truly snobbish, but still her natural Titchfield registers a sharp contrast with Hallam’s social East Lockringe or Cresswell’s historical Devon.
Burchardt asks whether Smith’s encounter with nature was gendered. She wrote of Skiddaw’s ‘majestic solitude’, a mountain she learned to ‘love ... dearly’ during her time in Lake District, and she was delighted when her painting was judged the work of a ‘Lover of Nature’. Conditioned by these experiences, she came to Snowdonia prepared to be smitten, but Snowdon / Yr Wyddfa ‘seemed to disdain’ her ‘love, rising up stern and bare, all sufficient in themselves, and wrapped in an impenetrable sublimity.’ Smith could rhapsodise with the best about the affective power of magnificent landscapes, even when that magnificence constituted rejection, or adopt an evaluative, distanced mode of writing, but as striking in her diaries and commonplace books was the overwhelming empathy she felt for the trials of life faced by birds and small mammals. To make sense of Smith, Burchardt cautiously contrasts accounts of the self as ‘unitary, self-sufficient, stable and enduring’, coded as male, with ‘relational, multiple and contingent’ accounts of the female self, as described in Regenia Gagnier’s feminist work on women’s life writing. Perhaps the weather had simply been inhospitable in Snowdonia (those contingencies), but it is tempting to code Smith’s attachment to the quiet intimacies of Titchfield—a lowland of common, cool waterways, shaded paths and migrating waterfowl—and empathy for animal life as female. Kathleen Jamie’s canonical if now dated critique of the New Nature Writing as reifying ‘the lone, enraptured male’ comes to mind as does Nan Shepherd’s mid-twentieth-century quest to know the mountain rather than conquer its peaks, and indeed one thinks of current attempts to police responses to environmental crisis. What are the appropriate political, psychological, and emotional responses to the environmental catastrophe threatening to engulf us all, especially the world’s most vulnerable and largely blameless communities? Recent work on ‘ecological grief’ or ‘solastalgia’, the distress caused by environmental change to familiar places, comes to mind. Hostile responses to the Just Stop Oil protests can bring out powerful notions of propriety even among the most environmentally committed.
Titchfield Haven. Photograph by Andrew Colenutt (1999). © Channel Coastal Observatory
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Some months after the High Court decision, I took the train from Newcastle to Okehampton, changing first in London and then at Exeter. The branch-line to Okehampton, serviced by some of the oldest rolling stock on the network, was closed by Beeching and re-opened in November 2021. The case for re-opening rested in part on the provision of easier access to Exeter College for the young people of Okehampton and its neighbouring rural hamlets. It has also enabled easier access by public transport to the rugged terrains of Dartmoor’s Northern Quarter. That fretful day on the Simonside Hills seemed distant. Perhaps I’d learned something from Burchardt, who asks of Katherine Spear Smith whether her personal commitments provided ‘comfort, sustenance and perhaps even liberation’ or served ‘to reinforce or validate emotional structures that trapped her in an emotional cul-de-sac’. In any case, I was off to tackle the two-day north-south hike from Okehampton to Ivybridge, a journey from Dartmoor’s northern sublime to its southern pastoral, a route partly enabled by the military roads of the north and the disused tramway of the south. I’m grateful middle age has yet to reduce my capacity to undertake hikes like this: as Burchardt’s diarists make clear, growing infirmity alters how we can engage with the natural world, just as aging—or perhaps just the trials of life—can numb us to its affective power. It is instructive to note that Hallam never did retire to a cottage in the country but learned to appreciate the pockets of rurality he found in and around Swindon. Worries and concerns lifted as I made my up to the moor. Two days of flowering gorse and lark song were ahead of me—plus a conversation over a pint and a pasty in the Forest Inn about Carl Cox and the Exeter clubbing scene in the early 1990s. My fizzy euphoria was only a little dulled on the second day by rudimentary signs erected by one or two landowners keen to assert the new prohibitions against wild camping.
Photograph by Adrian Colston. Reproduced with permission.
Had I my wits about me, I’d have known this was Dartmoor’s busiest weekend. Several thousand Haribo-fuelled teenagers were participating in the Ten Tors challenge, an event organised by the military on the Spring Bank Holiday. Teams of teenagers follow prescribed routes of up to 55 miles, camping out for the night on the moor. Each team leader now carries a tracker with an emergency button, allowing anxious parents holed up in Okehampton cafés to know the exact whereabouts of their kids. For some participants the event is pure drudgery, but for others it’s the best thing ever. They’ll be back, and thanks to the unanimous decision made by the judges of the Court of Appeal on 31 July 2023, they will have the right to camp on the open moor. Such is the nature of legal dispute, the argument in the Court of Appeal came down to semantics rather than high principle. As Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, explained: ‘In my judgment, on its true construction, section 10(1) of the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985 confers on members of the public the right to rest or sleep on the Dartmoor commons, whether by day or night and whether in a tent or otherwise’. Who knows whether their lordships were influenced by the groundswell of popular opinion, but sight should not be lost of the fact that the legal process had pitted a private individual against a public body pursuing its statutory responsibilities. For a brief period, the Labour Party responded to popular pressure and committed to apply Scotland’s right to roam to England and Wales. In October 2023, Labour dropped the commitment but appears open to extending rights by other means, perhaps by using or adapting existing statutory instruments to designate Access Land.
A few weeks before the decision of the Court of Appeal, the Rothbury Estate, some 9,500 acres of Northumberland upland, was put on the market for an asking price of £35,000,000. The estate is part of Northumberland National Park, and includes sites designated by Natural England as a SAC (Special Area of Conservation) or a SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). According to Tatler, Lord Max Percy (33), inheritor of the estate, wants to sell so he can pursue a career and family life in the south. The estate has been in the Percy family since 1332. The sale could see the estate, which includes the Simonside Hills, pass into the hands of the global corporation, a sovereign wealth fund or an investor keen to take advantage of environmental tax breaks. So much for noblesse oblige. According to the Northumberland Gazette, Queen’s Brian May has viewed the property, and the BBC reported in October 2023 that four bids had been placed. The risk to public access is probably more imagined than real, but local concerns about further afforestation or the introduction of a windfarm should not be casually dismissed. In any case, the future of such a large tract of land should be a matter of public interest. So far, the lifescapes of England’s North East have failed to attract as much attention as the more gentrified lifescapes of Dartmoor and its environs. That’s telling, and attention has once again turned to Dartmoor. In January 2024, the Supreme Court granted the Darwells the right to appeal the High Court’s January 2023 decision. The right to camp on Dartmoor Access Land according to local byelaws is threatened once again.
Matthew Kelly is Professor of Modern History at Northumbria University and the author of The Women Who Saved the English Countryside (London: Yale University Press, 2022).