Jon Moses
@jm0ses
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writer & campaigner @Right_2Roam 🌳🥾🌱 WILD SERVICE: Why Nature Needs You (Bloomsbury, 2024) 🌳🥾🌱 Order now:
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As parliament debate
#AccessToNature
today, a personal essay.
Deep in my valley is a tree so old it makes my bones ache. There are only a handful like it in the country, and its boughs harbour some of our oldest stories.
Yet almost no-one has ever seen it. 🧵
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Think about the psychology at play here.
Cycle tourer overnights on the edge of a bare field, gets up early to be on his way, leaving no trace.
This farmer *goes out of his way* to hose him, his bike & tent with excrement. No conversation, no warning.
Does that seem normal?
Moment farmer blasts camper in SLURRY after catching him sleeping in a tent on his land
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While we learn that *every single river* in England is polluted, here is the River Limmat in Switzerland. It runs through the centre of the largest city, Zürich (population: 436,000).
Water Quality: Excellent
Public Swimming Baths: 11
We have been mugged.
#WildIsles
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What the cyclist is doing would be entirely lawful in Scotland. They've not harmed crops or caused any inconvenience.
Yet in England, where wild camping is unlawful everywhere (except part of Dartmoor), the result is a completely deranged reaction to something entirely harmless.
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'Hot day in England. Maybe I'll go for a swim'.
Here are the twelve ways in twenty minutes I was told to fuck off when I tried.🧵
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Last weekend myself, four botanists and fifty Bristolians set off for a mass trespass of the 52,000 acre Badminton estate in South Gloucestershire.🧵
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We need to stop being unhinged about responsible access in the countryside.
We need access reform now.
@SteveReedMP
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Bored of the misanthropic culture of privatisation ruining the countryside? See: |
@Right_2Roam
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While we take stock of big, new losses in Dartmoor, I want to take a moment to talk about the micro enclosures happening every day around the country. They’ll never make the headlines. But they completely shape the way we live our lives.
This is mine. 🧵
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Striking to reflect that if, like me, you're a voter in your mid-30s, your entire adult life has been:
financial crisis -> austerity -> tuition fees -> Brexit -> pandemic -> Tory fin-de-siècle
Every encounter you've had with government has made you poorer and your life harder.
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Except they won't. Contrary to the signs, trespassing is not a criminal offence.
Don't damage stuff, don't obstruct lawful activity, and the rest is between you and the landowner. Leave a positive trace because it's the right thing to do. Be polite if you're challenged. Enjoy.
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Rare cinematic life moment yest as I walked past a BMW driver throwing a crisp packet out of his window. Managed to scoop it out the air & throw it back in before it hit the ground. The happy sound of "YOU LITTLE PRICK!" & a seatbelt being undone - alas, too far now! - behind me.
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UPDATE: I met the farmer doing this yesterday. The conversation we had was NUTS. He's tearing down all this amazing successional habitat, which has been naturally afforesting for about fifteen years, so that he can get paid to plant... Trees.
Pop quiz. Here's three acres of scrub / successional woodland adjacent to a well used footpath.
Which threatens its wildlife more:
a) walkers
b) the landowner tearing the whole fucking lot down with nary a whisper from
@NatResWales
, who were informed months ago. By walkers.
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"bad politics"
Illogical position from Labour
@JimfromOldham
on the Hunting Act, but more importantly it is bad politics. As
@CAupdates
Chair
@nickherbertcbe
points out “Labour is drawing battle lines in the countryside when it should be trying to unite the country”
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People have some bizarre (and sometimes, unhinged) ideas about how humans move in the landscape when they're given unrestricted access.
No, they don't trample every bluebell. Nor do they carry out search & destroy operations on every bird nest.
Here are some examples 🧵
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Exhausted & uplifted from a frenetic week organising the fightback to the Dartmoor camping ban.
From a sad, selfish gesture has spawned an exuberant, spirited movement.
So on behalf of
@Right_2Roam
I'd just like to say: thankyou, comrade Darwall.
Enjoy your useless victory.
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Trespassing is portrayed as an anti-social act. But who is really anti-social? The person who comes to reconnect with the land, or the people who took it away? Our countryside is choked under a militarised, misanthropic culture whose only language is barbed wire and Keep Out.
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WORST OF BRITAIN: My train is cancelled, because of course it is.
BEST OF BRITAIN: I can wait for the next one IN A STATION PUB THAT LOOKS LIKE THIS, with banging porter on tap, sofas your grandad finds "acceptable" & the sexiest pub windows conceivable.
This, everywhere, now.
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Well, that was your fifteen minutes of public footpath folks. Hope you enjoyed your time by the river: the rest is fenced off for the sole enjoyment of private landowners.
WATER. TRESPASSERS. WILL. BE. PROSECUTED.
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Barbed wire sucks, rivers are lush and we should all have proper access to the countryside. Me for the
@guardian
.
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So this weekend we hopped the wall of the estate to begin the long, slow process of nurturing that culture back.
#BotanyUnbound
was organised by the
@Right_2Roam
campaign and we hope is the start of a whole series of education themed trespasses. (📷
@thebristolcable
/ Chris Hoare)
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But there’s something deeper in that question that I find saddening.
Because when someone asks "Why do you need more?” I want to respond with the simple, obvious question:
Why do you need less?
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Such an utterly classic example: a credulous police force (
@NorthantsPolice
) think having corporate branding and some chainsaws means you're the 'legitimate' body, regardless of the standing of the law. Members of the public saving trees? Must be criminals.
So, I find myself 30ft in the air up a tree in Wellingborough- surrounded by police, security & tree surgeons- trying to prevent an illegal tree felling. How did I end up here? Here’s an outrageous story of nature destruction & collusion between authorities & private developer 🧵
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@CAIreland
Fox hunters are not synonymous with ‘rural people’. The vast majority of ‘rural people’ object to it. If you want to make the argument for fox hunting, make the argument. But don’t pretend it represents anything other than itself.
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But while the landowning class preserves its culture at public expense, it has destroyed ours. The loss of land, access rights & affordable means to exist in the countryside means many of us have been alienated from nature, losing the knowledge, culture & care which came from it.
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Persuaded my father to let the lawn grow out this summer (on condition I did the eventual mow, fair enough 😌)
Pretty chuffed with the result! A suburban oasis.
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@timobarker
Quite. The garden point is the most common thing we hear, as though multiple-thousand acre estates are the same as the thing outside your kitchen window.
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This was the headline of the Evening Standard after the G20 protests in 2009.
They reprinted - without question! - the total fiction the Met's press team had conjured up to mask the fact that one of their officers had assaulted an uninvolved bystander, leading to his death.
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If we can't introduce beavers (a formerly native species) in Britain's largest (and arguably 'wildest') national park - specifically on a nature reserve, a rewilding project and an eco-tourism estate - ...where can we? 🤨
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Suffice to say we're all completely incensed by today's Dartmoor verdict
@Right_2Roam
- I've been quiet whilst spending all day fielding unprecedented amounts of correspondence and media interest in the case.
I think Mr Darwall is about to learn the meaning of Pyrrhic victory.
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NO PICNICING (sic)
(THIS IS A PUBLIC FOOTPATH *ONLY* DON'T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT STOPPING FOR A SANDWICH)
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When
@paulpowlesland
told me in 2017 that he was going to up-anchor, squat a fucked post-industrial river in East London & try to precipitate its ecological recovery, I thought he was as crackers as his psychedelic cat leggings.🧵(1/14) | FULL ARTICLE:
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The
@Right_2Roam
is the first step in a long journey back to rediscovering our collective culture in the face of deep, entrenched land inequality. It is a culture buried beneath a thousand fences, enclosures and petty acts of violence. But it lives.
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I traced the footpath - now a track for the keeper’s 4x4 - to the centre of the park. And there I found it: the Jack O’Kent Oak in all its gnarly splendour.
Bees had built a nest in one of its hollows. I could see the charred memento of a lightning strike in its tops.
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OOOOOH, Stopping for a SANDWICH are we? Little REPOSE while you take in the river is it? Didn't you see the sign about PICNICING (sic)?
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PHOTO ESSAY: about rivers, access rights and trespass on the river Monnow: which runs from the foot of the Black Mountains near Capel-y-ffin to join the Wye at the appropriately named town of Monmouth.
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We're outside the Royal Courts of Justice right now telling Alexander Darwall, a wealthy landowner, what we think of his attempt to ban wild camping on Dartmoor - the only place it's currently legal in England.
@Right_2Roam
@EveryonesStars
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Oh I see you've PERSISTED with the footpath anyway!
DO NOT SWIM
DO NOT BOAT
THIS IS A PRIVATE FISHING ZONE
AND POLICE ARE ON *REGULAR* PATROL
ALSO, UM... DANGER... BECAUSE... UM... WEIL'S DISEASE?
(Police encountered: 0 / Weil's disease contacted: 0)
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Badminton, owned by the Duke of Beaufort, comprises a vast chunk of South Gloucestershire. Every year the public hands over around £500k in subsidies to Swangrove Farms (the agricultural arm of the estate) but unsurprisingly, receives little in the way of access rights in return.
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P.S
@NatResWales
- you appear to have the time and money to massacre the riparian trees at the weir, and mow down the bushes in which I saw my first ever firecrest.
I reckon you've got the time and money to restore the access you took away. How about it? 🙂
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And at its foot: a seat.
And so I sat. Perhaps for half an hour, maybe more.
I find being with something so old yet alive does unusual things to the mind. Time stretches. There’s a reorientation of the ego, a dual sense of finitude amid infinity that's strangely comforting.
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I learned so much from the guidance of botanists like
@LeifBersweden
& herbalists like Maria Garcia () that it really drove home how deeply impoverished I - and we - really are. Not through idleness or choice but through dispossession and disempowerment.
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The public fund the family in other ways. In 2009 the good people of Swansea paid £280,000 to the late Duke just for *permission* to build a bridge over the River Tawe, simply because the family "own" the river bed.
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*EXTREME* DANGER
DO *NOT* APPROACH
DANGEROUS... Ground Holes?
(Ground holes encountered: 0)
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NO SWIMMING
DANGER
(Strong currents encountered: 0 / Hidden hazards: also 0)
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For a detailed read of our weekend, please see this
@TheBristolCable
article | for more on the Right to Roam campaign:
@Right_2Roam
/
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At Badminton, these custodians of the land keep thousands of acres of England in a state of ecologically-impoverished vanity. The grassland mown bare for horse trials, the fresh tree shoots hoovered up by the grazing pressure of deer maintained as idle ornaments.
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Was an absolute pleasure to watch
@CarolineLucas
deliver this brilliant speech in person for the second reading of the Right to Roam bill in parliament today. Access to nature is a crucial step in fixing our broken relationship with the natural world 🌱
A deeper connection with nature is vital for learning to better love, protect & restore it. Delighted my Bill on extending
#RighttoRoam
started its second reading in Parliament today
@Right_2Roam
@RamblersGB
@openspacessoc
My speech 👇
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The estate reflects its feudal roots. Much of the land is given over to an enormous deer park surrounded by walls and fences: the scenic backdrop to fox hunts, horse trials & partridge shoots. The leisure and culture of the landowning class, its aspirants -- and subservients.
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For the first time in many of the attendees lives they were given the space, time and guidance to be intimate with the wildflowers which form part of our collective cultural inheritance but about which few of us know much about at all. (📷
@thebristolcable
/ Chris Hoare)
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The archive throws that history into sharp relief. Two types of story have been written about Badminton over the past 200 years: on one hand, glorious accounts of fox hunting soirees. The other: court records of villagers fined for "stealing" wood & fruit from the estate grounds.
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So this year
@right_2roam
is going local. We want to help people across the country fight the enclosures happening because of the invisible lines dividing us, as much as the physical fences which separate us.
Get in touch at: righttoroam2020
@gmail
.com. All we have is each other.
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Inspired by
@some_yeo
last weekend I went to visit The Vile on the Gower peninsula, a rare example of a medieval open field system, now resurrected by the
@nationaltrust
.
It demonstrates how the messy complexity of pre-industrial farming was - is - beneficial for biodiversity.
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Meanwhile, the majority are priced out of the land, unable to access it, farm it in innovative, nature-friendly ways, use it for learning & healing, or set it aside for ecological recovery.
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Beautiful mass trespass of Worth Forest (Sussex) today organised by
@LandscapesofF
w/ support from
@Right_2Roam
. We called on
@CenterParcsUK
to abandon their destructive plan to build over the ancient woodland. Worth Forest should be a People's Forest, loved & accessible by all.
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Trees like this oak root religions, seed stories. They are sacred in a way that is both soft & open.
But when we enclose culture behind fences we amputate those stories from their source. The less we have these old things to anchor us, the harder it is for something new to grow.
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The further I went the more traces I found. Sunken tracks worked into the hillside by generations of feet, carts, wildlife, livestock.
Sites of movement, but also connection: linking commons, communities and their stories together.
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Occasionally though, glimpses of Merrie England still slip through the cracks... I give you the lovely headline: "Police called to duke's estate plagued by groups of dogging men dressed in PVC, fairy wings and tutus." 🐶🧚♂️
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It beats the Beaufort's own take on rustic culture, embodied in the strange 'Hermit Cell' included as a picturesque folly built in the mid 18th century. Apparently this was the home of a 'professional' hermit given the name of Irgunder: a parody of rural poverty for all to enjoy.
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Not to dunk on one ill-advised tweet but this is much like when water companies lecture us about leaving the tap on while they dump sewage in the rivers and fail to fix massive leakage across their system. We did not lose 97% of our meadows because of walkers!
Meadows are an important habitat for
#biodiversity
, but sadly they are in decline.
You can help protect wildflower meadows by sticking to marked paths in the countryside.
Grow wildflowers in your garden with
@KewGarden
's tips
#NationalMeadowsDay
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Sorry but I can't help roll my eyes at the tea-towel sepia with which the Kinder mass trespass is commemorated.
Organisations which wouldn't dream of supporting mass trespass themselves, let alone a trespass led by overt communists, claiming it as their heritage now it's safe.
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Update on this a month on. The ragwort and self-heal has EXPLODED and the whole garden is now *fizzing* with pollinators, butterflies and crickets. It makes me so happy every time I visit. Way better than a sterile grass lawn! Can't recommend doing this enough.
Persuaded my father to let the lawn grow out this summer (on condition I did the eventual mow, fair enough 😌)
Pretty chuffed with the result! A suburban oasis.
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As I headed home, I glanced down at a shape in the silty residue.
A footprint.
A naked footprint. Must be a swimmer – in January! Must be brazen. They had found a way through fences, chains and cameras to maintain possibility.
Somewhere, in my wee rural suburb, is a friend.
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Step over the barbed wire and be punished with some forest therapy.
Today, from the 78% of Wales you're excluded from.
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Old maps show a public footpath crosses the estate, connecting the village below to the common above.
Yet at some point in the mid 20th century, it “disappeared” from the Ordnance Survey.
It passes right by the tree.
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Yet the value of such places are rarely registered by the state.
Kids don’t write feedback forms, or respond to public consultations. “I want a place to get the fuck away from my parents” is not considered a legitimate metric of public wellbeing (though it should be).
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I don’t know how the path got magicked off the map.
But Kentchurch is not alone in being a large estate with a spectral footpath. Many used their power to redesign the Definitive Map in their interests. And if the cut-off deadline is not removed, they could be lost forever.
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…But it soon cleared up. And, as I dropped off the common at Garway Hill, I started to notice hints of what had once been.
Like this stile: now obscured by barbed wire.
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I realise I didn't include any pictures of the tree in leaf in my thread yesterday (and some people anxiously asked if it was, in fact, dead).
So here's the Jack O'Kent Oak two weeks ago, happily alive and green, with a bonus
@rosiehuz
for scale.
As parliament debate
#AccessToNature
today, a personal essay.
Deep in my valley is a tree so old it makes my bones ache. There are only a handful like it in the country, and its boughs harbour some of our oldest stories.
Yet almost no-one has ever seen it. 🧵
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So I set off to document the old path. ‘Trespassing’ the line where old rights still glimmer if you know where to look; connecting a heritage once held by everyone – and now by no one at all.
Initially, the weather was... unfavourable.
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Now, there was no one.
I scrambled over the deer fence and took in the view. Ravens cronked above, a Great Tit kicked off in the nearby scrub. Otherwise, silence.
Later, I’d stumble across an old cottage in the adjacent wood, long abandoned too.
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Most good habitat is naturally defensive.
This wood has open access: you can theoretically go anywhere you like. In practice, when paths make sense - people use them.
Note how the relatively healthy, scrappy understory negotiates a natural relationship with human presence.
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Local to me. Not a right of way, just a popular informal desire line linking the suburb to a nearby footpath (sections of our Right of Way network are only functional *because* of such informal paths).
I'll repeat: not an official footpath. Yet look how disciplined the line is.
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Spaces like these are important. They're part of a constellation of possibility. They facilitate different thoughts, enable other kinds of conversation.
With each enclosure we lose alternative ways of being. They don't exist in government designations. But they matter.
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Think about it. You've just walked into this field a little off the beaten track. There's no official path as such, but a handful of people have gone before you.
Do you:
a) follow in the route they've already taken
b) pioneer a completely fresh route through the cow parsley?
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That’s because it resides on a 5,000 acre private estate at the border of England & Wales.
The estate is old: Norman Conquest old. With the same family, the Scudamores, holding it since the 11th century.
But the tree is older still...
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When campaigning for
@Right_2Roam
I’m often asked: “you already have 140,000 miles of footpath! Why do you need more?”
And there are many practical answers: the fate of Kentchurch’s footpath illustrates one.
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Heading deeper into the park, I searched for the great oak.
It’s claimed Britain has so many ancient trees due to the preservation of estates like this. On the continent, revolution came, & erstwhile estate woodlands were converted into forestry, their veteran trees hacked down.
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Dartmoor should be a turning point, not an exception.
1. We need a Right to Roam Act to expand precarious freedoms & convert them into statutory guarantees.
2. Wild camping is inseparable from open-air recreation: it must be permitted beyond Dartmoor.
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TEN TOOLS FOR LAND JUSTICE. 🧵
The environment is in regulatory collapse. Who can access land & who owns it is back on the agenda.
Here are ten online tools to empower ordinary people to act for nature & tell new stories about the land.
FULL GUIDE:
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Hard to convey how vast Cirencester Park is, where people will be charged for access for the first time since its creation 326 years ago.
This is just a snapshot, yet it encompasses the entire horizon.
All purchased with slave money. The chutzpah is absolutely extraordinary.
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In isolated communities it can feel like you're the only one who cares about such things - or willing to do something about them.
Enclosure happens where resistance is low. Customary rights are stripped away not because they're just, but because they can go unchallenged.
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Use of arable field margins is one of the more controversial elements of the Scottish style access rights. And I'm not saying crop encroachment never happens, especially when paths are overused.
But a lot of the time.. it just looks something like this.
Nice buffer strip too.
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Despite that, it must be said that large parts of this estate were in much better condition than the land around them.
No industrial farming here, and some gorgeous messy habitat outside of the deer fence, where nature is abundant. Here's a vid from a trip with my friend Rosie.
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Possibility vs reality: the state of access in England & Wales distilled in a single image.
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Pop quiz. Here's three acres of scrub / successional woodland adjacent to a well used footpath.
Which threatens its wildlife more:
a) walkers
b) the landowner tearing the whole fucking lot down with nary a whisper from
@NatResWales
, who were informed months ago. By walkers.
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PSA: DOCK LEAVES DON'T HEAL NETTLE STINGS.
I spoke to
@LeifBersweden
& Maria Fernandez Garcia () about everything we get wrong about plants and why 'plant blindness' could be at the root of our ecological crisis.
FULL ARTICLE:
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"Devon and Somerset fire and rescue service recorded only one fire caused by a camping stove in the 12 months to May. However, the data compiled for the authority suggests six fires were caused by swaling – controlled fires started by landowners."
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Worse than lost footpaths, across the country, whole villages were moved or destroyed to make space for estate parklands; all to create a picturesque of confected isolation.
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I spent a day trespassing the private estates of Sussex with the legendary Dave Bangs, founder of
@LandscapesofF
& guerrilla botanist extraordinaire. We discover the eco-crimes occurring behind the fences of the 92% of land the public is excluded from.
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Silver linings, perhaps? Except, of course, many estates in Britain did the same thing.
And as I walked through the park, it seemed the superabundance of fallow deer was steadily killing off much of the medieval wood pasture, converting it to heathland.
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The Jack O’Kent Oak is named after a folk trickster of the border country, famed for outwitting the devil. Jack is said to have tied his hounds to the tree’s trunk, and discoursed with the devil from its branches.
He is our valley’s Twm Siôn Cati. Our poundshop Doctor Faustus.
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So if most people naturally make, and adhere, to good paths when they've got them, why campaign for wider access rights?
Firstly you need the access rights in order to make the paths. The majority of the countryside is off-limits with no available paths, or rights to be there.
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And so, the little enclosures began. A padlocked gate went up.
Now, instead of walking across an open bridge on public land, you had to vault this wooden threshold.
And so went the access of anyone old or infirm.
And so too the access of anyone not brazen enough to cross.
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@liziwake
@Lucy_Lapwing
@guyshrubsole
@AmyJaneBeer
@nickhayesillus1
@Right_2Roam
@paulpowlesland
@LeifBersweden
We actually have some of the worst biodiversity rankings in the world, in part due to how prevailing systems of land ownership have treated the countryside.
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Most of all, it was beloved by the young.
Sliding down the weirfall has been a rite of passage for decades. It is that ideal, interim space teenagers love best: somewhere you can sense you maybe aren’t *officially* allowed. But where there is nobody to stop you either. Utopia.
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Dear Anyone Who Needs to Hear It,
If we're going to restrict public access to nature because, sometimes, teenagers abandon tents, might we confiscate land when its owners turn important habitat into giant illegal dumps?
You know, just till we work out what's going on
Thanks.
I’ve never encountered a more perfect example of how screwed up our conversation about land access & responsibility is, & how leniently we view environmental crime by landowners, than this scene I encountered on the River Roding today
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