Personal reflections on April 2022: On identifying and crossing rural boundaries

It is April and early cherry and blackthorn blossoms are quickly replaced by crab apple and gorse. Horse-chestnuts unfurl their umbrella tipped buds. Thunderstorms and lighting plumbs and bleating lambs. Blink and you miss it. April the joker.

April of 2022 was no different. Despite spending most of my weekends hauling my sorry Norfolk legs over hills and along hedgerows, I still felt like life was skating along ahead of me. This ecological momentum was echoed by pollical currents, beginning with the Extinction Rebellion easter blockade and ending with the Kinder in Colour Mass Trespass and PCSC bill protests. April felt like a month of challenge but also of recognising the importance of connecting with the earth. 

On 20th April the government shelved a much-anticipated review of the ‘Right to Roam’ across England, citing the countryside as ‘a place of business’[1]. When we only have access to 8% of English land[2], the question really becomes ‘business’ for whom? I spent that same day walking through the kite topped hills of the Chilterns, circumnavigating the Wormsley Estate, something I was reminded of roughly every half a mile, with signs reasserting the boundaries of the estate and my exclusion from it. To quote Anna Lawenhaupt Tsing, ‘Privatisation is never complete; it needs shared spaces to create any value’[3]. In other words, landowners need us to know about them, both to uphold their position of power and to supress our desires to deviate from the path. Naming boundaries divides those on either side of the fence, expediting the development of inequalities which are often deeply tied to our identities. This includes factors such as race, gender and class but extends also to (the perceived) identities of those doing the enclosure such as ‘nobility’, ‘warden’ or ‘patriot’. Private land needs our attention, just like far right hatemongers, to continue to alienate and maintain a notion of stature through separation and exclusion. Such factors perhaps explain why enclosure signage is bold, big, numerous, barbed, fenced, gamed or manned. Trump wasn’t the first to build a wall and tell people about it. 

At times, the signage of private land is framed as altruistic. ‘Do not wander from the path to preserve the estate ecology’. A moral appeal makes privatisation more palatable, especially towards the liberal, white, middle class who have less to fear in terms of the law and more to fear in upholding their liberal façade. This demographic is also statistically more likely to have access to green spaces than people of colour (POC) or those from working class backgrounds, an inequality highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic[4]. Rural exclusion is also faced by LGBTQ+ people, who have historically migrated to larger cities in search of kinship. The rhetoric of ‘preserve the land by keeping off it’ not only distances us further from nature but is also ecologically false. This strategy is called ‘fortress conservation’ and fails to acknowledge humans as inherent to convivial ecological communities. Effective ecology cultivates interdependent connection between people, creatures, and place. Ecology cannot be performed remotely or when isolated from environment. It requires the kind of tangibility that can only be obtained through tactile exploration of the world. Ecology needs us to know what is there and to care enough to do something about its demise. Thus, the same structures which uphold private land enclosure also limit our ability to effectively care for, understand and identify with our planet. 

The latter runs hand in hand with the loss of biological descriptors from our vocabulary. For example, the removal of natural words such as ‘conker’ and ‘dandelion’ from the Oxford Junior Dictionary[5] or the loss of rare languages (particularly those that were not written), reduce our ability to communicate our surroundings[6]. Language loss or homogenisation, such as through anglicisation, therefore also creates barriers by downgrading the richness of our naturalistic comprehension. If we cannot name what we are missing, how do we know what we have lost?

Building a relationship with land requires the acknowledgment that we are all entitled to it. This is not a radical concept, but the lords of the land frame it as such because it threatens the power structures which uphold privatisation and the inequitable distribution of English wealth. In many ways this is similar to arguments surrounding the identification (or re-naming) of imperialist statues, concert halls and city landmarks which receive a significant amount more attention due to their increased footfall. Identifying rural ‘landmarks’ is complicated by the fact that the same fences which mark them also serve to screen their visibility. We need land access on a basal level so we can name existing boundaries and begin to poke holes in any walls we find. To access land is to foster a mutual interconnectedness between human and non-human ecosystems, dismantling systems of false human elevation which further alienate us from nature. The same elevatory systems which have contributed to unsustainable capitalist growth and the climate crisis. 

So what can be done to rattle the chandeliers of privatisation? How do we break the ‘continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement[7]’ created by private land enclosure? Time to mess with continuity and journey to Snowdonia.

After a week of concerningly warm April weather, I found myself stood outside a half-pitched minibus, at 1 am, in the snow, somewhere near Llanberis. Micro-manoeuvres aside, after a few hours’ sleep I woke up to whitened mountain tops and soon-to-be friends huddled around a porridge pot like witches to the cauldron. We were taking part in a navigation and map reading course run by members of the local mountain rescue team. Clad in a strange combination of waterproof trousers, sunglasses, and peanut butter we anxiously discussed the day ahead. Most of us had limited map reading skills, reliant on apps which do not show the mountain paths. For some, it was their first time in Wales. 

Needless to say, our worries quickly disintegrated, as we learnt how to use a compass, take bearings and translate page onto the world around us. Over three days we navigated our way along Welsh hillsides, across Snowdon and over Tryfan, guided by newly found confidence and wonder. Skill sharing is an essential part of breaking down barriers for countryside access, especially for POC and working-class peoples who worked to forge the land they were subsequently excluded from. On a fundamental level it also equipped people with the ability to identify land divisions; be it via grouse moors, reservoirs, or walled estates. Ultimately the weekend was about giving people the tools to navigate the land, to see the paths where others have walked before, and to choose whether to follow them or not. Empowerment through navigational autonomy.

Three key elements separated Snowdonia from the division I experienced in the Chilterns: knowledge, community, and conversation. We are being deliberately and consequentially alienated from the land at a time when, more than ever, we must be close to it to truly understand how to prevent its destruction. Exploring the land and, by extension, the complex ways our identities intersect with it, opens the door to mutual healing. Wales brought home to me the power of the collective for mobilising this change. But it’s one thing to know where boundaries lie, it’s another to cross them.

Cue trespass. On 24th April around 500 people descended on Edale and made their way up Kinder Scout to mark 90 years since the Kinder Mass Trespass. The original 1932 trespass was organised by members of the Young Communist League who, frustrated with lack of access to the surrounding countryside, faced off gamekeepers to climb Derbyshire’s highest peak. While some protesters were arrested upon their descent, the trespass eventually led to the creation of the first National Park, the Peak District. The 2022 anniversary, organised by Kinder in Colour[8], was designed to highlight the ongoing difficulties surrounding rural access for black people and people of colour. Powerful speeches from academic Maxwell Ayamba, journalist Anita Sethi, conservationist Nadia Shaikh and Sam Siva the founder of Land in Our Names, set the tone of the walk by spotlighting the ongoing colonial legacies of English land use. They also emphasised the importance of spiritual grounding and healing by reconnecting with the earth. Here, the intersection between racial and class identities are framed within a restorative narrative. To heal is to acknowledge the historic trauma of rural occupation, and recognise what it means to reassert ones identity within the land. After successfully climbing Kinder, participants took part in an Iftar meal before reboarding buses back to surrounding cities, with full hearts and glowing faces from a day well spent in the hills.  

In conclusion, trespass is about much more than whatever visions of well-equipped, white, ramblers it may conjure. To manifest the Right to Roam means understanding the histories of the British empire that forged an unequal access to land. It means using your body to occupy space and for white people, like myself, questioning in what capacity we do so. Sometimes it may mean leaving the land if that gives others a chance to breath and heal themselves. It means centring often overlooked acts of resistance like skill-sharing, education, outreach, and community building. But mostly it means showing up, with our whole selves, with our friends and families and loving our land. 

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/22/uk-minister-defends-shelving-of-right-to-roam-report-ahead-of-kinder-scout-trespass

[2] https://www.righttoroam.org.uk

[3] The Mushroom at the End of the World, On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 

[4] https://www.goparks.london/articles/why-parks-matter-to-racial-justice/

[5] The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

[6] The 9th Revolution: Transforming Food systems for Good, Sayed Azam-Ali 

[7] The Mushroom at the End of the World, On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 

[8] https://kinderincolour.land