Private – No Public Right of Way – image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay
BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast a number of programmes focusing on the ‘right to roam’ that people in England still don’t have – as we saw in January, with the court ruling in favour of the Dartmoor landowner who wanted to ban wild camping from ‘his’ land. The programmes were all engaging in their own way, and I hope this review will encourage you to listen to some – or all – of them. And check out The Right To Roam website: https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/.
Radio 4, One to One, Trespass and the Right to Roam, first broadcast 10th January 2023
Matthew Parris travels to the Thames to talk to Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, about issues such as the right to roam.
Parris sets out his stall early on: Hayes’ book is about the “breaking of boundaries rather than about having an adult, responsible conversation” about land ownership and rights of way. Language such as city people messing up the countryside during their lockdown walks, and not letting people “trample” the ground follows. Hayes counters with statistics going back centuries – from the hanging of ‘trespassers’ in the 1600s to the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, where a number of ramblers were arrested, and about which participant and folk singer Euan MacColl wrote The Manchester Rambler. Worth a listen – but try not to shake your fist at the radio!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gwyk
Radio 4, Open Country, Folk on the Hills, first broadcast 4th January 2023
We join Jez Lowe and folk musician Johnny Campbell, who is recording an album of songs from the “summits and industrial hotspots of northern England”, at a snow-covered Kinder Scout to explore the Peak District’s traditional songs. Local singer Bella Hardy explains how Edale has inspired her work and how place is very important for folk music. The dichotomy between local people being able to see the landscape but not being ‘allowed’ to walk on it is highlighted, and class history and identity are linked to the landscape: there would have been no mills without the water running off the hills to power them, for example. It was interesting (and disheartening) to learn that negotiations for the right to roam had been going on without progress for 100 years before the mass trespass, and the fact that this was once common land makes the contrast even starker. Even now, in England we apparently have fewer rights to roam than anywhere else in Europe, and this is one reason why the protests are continuing. This was illustrated when the group singing mentioned that the National Trust had not allowed them to record their version of The Manchester Rambler on Kinder Scout! As the lyrics say, “I’ll walk where I will over mountain and hill/And I’ll lie where the bracken is deep” – maybe one day, Euan.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gl6x
Radio 4, Edward Thomas and the Song of the Path, first broadcast 18th December 2022
Euan MacColl and The Manchester Rambler appear here as well, as Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane set off to walk in the footsteps of Edward Thomas, writer, poet and lover of song, with his copy of The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air in their… er… pockets, and the desire to create a new song. They explain that the path was a symbol of Thomas’s life, and an inspiration for his poems, and observe that “Poetry can hardly avoid the open air”, which as nature writers I’m sure we’ll agree. They also make a fascinating point about the heart, footfall and breath being the three oldest beats of the human body and central to rhyme in poetry.
The weather becomes a third – or should that be fourth? – presence on the walk, as they battle the wind and the rain on the exposed hills and are forced down into an amazing and eerie yew forest, where they are inspired to recite Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Eventually, they take shelter in a pub where they inspect Thomas’s rather worse-for-wear tankard, and compose their beautiful, haunting song – encompassing the breath, walking, the rain and the one who walked before them and the one who walks beside them. This, perhaps unintentionally, reminded me of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: V. What the Thunder Said:
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?”
Eliot’s note to this part explains that he was thinking of (possibly) Shackleton’s Antarctic exploration where, at the limits of their strength, they thought there was an additional member walking alongside them. And, of course, it echoes the Gospel of Luke, where the resurrected Christ is the third figure, which links to the death of Thomas, killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday in 1917. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it – but can a song ever be ‘just’ a song?!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001g8nx
Original version first published in the January 2023 Naturewrights Newsletter.