We have been made aware of a book published by William Collins about the Right to Roam campaign and access to the countryside. 

 

Having reviewed the contents of the book we have identified many factual inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and breaches of privacy and confidence. These apply not just to Right to Roam campaigners but to a number of other parties cited in the book.

The campaign has issued a formal complaint to the publisher. In the meantime, we provide the following corrections for the press and public record. 
 

Violations of privacy & manipulation of quotations

 

Many conversations, including direct quotations, reported in Patrick’s book are lifted from informal social settings, casual DM conversations, or private email exchanges where the speaker was not on record, had no knowledge their words would be used in a book, did not consent for their words to be used in the book, and were not being recorded at the time of speaking. 

This practice is a violation of basic journalistic ethics, personally duplicitous, and, in our view, legally unsound. But it is also liable to produce inaccurate quotations and distort the intended meaning of those speaking. In certain incidences, Patrick has manipulated how comments appear in the text to suggest something contrary to their original meaning.

Based on our own experiences, and conversations we’ve since undertaken with other affected parties, it has become clear that such practices (in particular, quoting casual conversations without the participant's consent or awareness) are endemic to Patrick’s journalism. We strongly advise scepticism towards quoted or paraphrased materials in the book, especially those occurring in casual settings, or which are included in the book solely in an attempt to portray others in a negative light. 

 

8% rights of access

Patrick describes a statistic used by the campaign, that we only have a ‘right to roam’ on 8% of land in England, as “a sham”, “simply untrue”, “the great myth”, “the magic 8 per cent figure”, “that fabled 8 per cent”. He claims this figure does not include beaches, woodland and permissive access. 

 

This is false. The figure is accurate. It includes all woodland designated as open access. Beaches do not have a right of access (though the Crown Estate may tolerate access). Permissive access is, by definition, not a right of access, and can be withdrawn at any time. Due to its impermanence, permissive access provision has not been mapped, but it is not extensive.

Patrick has misunderstood the difference between any form of potential access (e.g. access by consent, or implied consent) and the concept of a ‘right of access’.

The significance of such rights are addressed below. Suffice to say the numerous campaign events Patrick attends in the book make their importance clear (well known recent examples include the Dartmoor wild camping case or the loss of permissive access arrangements at Cirencester Park after three hundred years). 

 

“Free for All” / Unfettered Access

 

Throughout the book Patrick states, implies, or cites without correction that access campaigners are calling for a “free for all”, or “to allow everyone unfettered access to the countryside”, a right to “camp where they like[d], whenever they like[d]”, and “being able to camp and wander where you like”. He states, incorrectly, that access rights in Scotland, (which campaigns like Right to Roam point to as an example) permit the right to “wander where you like” or “go where you like.”

This is false. The campaign supports an adaptation of the Scottish model of access but this is a qualified right, not a “free for all”: it is contingent on responsible conduct and contains exemptions to protect things like privacy, livelihoods and public safety. These are outlined in the Scottish Outdoor Access Code.

The campaign believes we should seek to end arbitrary exclusion from land and water but supports the principle that there are justified exclusions which should be respected and based on socially agreed values (privacy, conservation need etc).
 

Access Exclusion for At-Risk Species

 

Throughout the book Patrick raises the potential threat of public access for at-risk species such as capercaillie and black grouse. He indicates that Right to Roam seeks unrestricted public access to all areas containing these species and that its campaigners show little regard for the issue.

 

This is false. Right to Roam supports exclusion for at-risk species where public access poses a genuine threat and alternative solutions are not available. It views this as a form of ‘justified exclusion’. Patrick was made aware of this position, which is clear on our website and via publicly available policy documents, long before the publication of his book. Yet he omits it from the text.

 

It is true that Right to Roam believes disturbance from public access can be used as a convenient distraction from the primary drivers of species decline. This is strongly supported by the evidence, which demonstrates that habitat loss, pollution, and prevailing land management practices are the overwhelming causes of biodiversity loss. Patrick provides no evidence to counter this view.

Patrick appears to have no issue with recreational disturbance when it relates to hobbies he approves of, such as wildfowling and fox hunting. This is despite the fact both activities can involve running dogs through sensitive habitat, or shooting at things with toxic lead shot. Right to Roam has no formal position on either activity. But we do note the hypocrisy.

 

Dogs

Throughout the book Patrick raises the issue of dogs and their potential impact on livestock and wildlife. He (incorrectly) cites Right to Roam’s response to this issue as “a press release suggesting that the next government should introduce measures to control dogs, alongside introducing a ‘Right to Roam’”. This seems to be in an effort to dismiss the campaign’s substantial policy work on the issue.

In fact, Right to Roam has developed detailed policy proposals to address problems associated with dogs, which it takes seriously, in tandem with its group of access friendly farmers and land owners, experts from the National Trust, and input from other specialist organisations. These proposals have since led to debate in the national, regional and trade press.

Access is not the sole source of issues such as livestock worrying (though it does contribute). The issue is not well researched. But one report, which drew on police data from five rural constituencies, found as many as 2/3rds of overall attacks on livestock resulted from unaccompanied dogs (escaped from houses, gardens or nearby farms). Addressing the issue properly requires a holistic approach, not just inhibiting public access.

“Ecological Destruction” & Arundel

 

Patrick claims that Right to Roam put out a message associating the Arundel Estate in West Sussex with “ecological destruction”.

This is false. The campaign issued no such message. The words derive from a poster made by a third party organisation on a collaborative Instagram post shared by a local group. The estate is not referred to on the poster. To avoid any confusion Right to Roam spoke to the local group and asked them not to use those words about the estate in question. They agreed. Patrick omits this information despite being party to it at the time. He repeats versions of this claim three times.
 

Toxicity

 

Throughout the book Patrick attempts to characterise the Right to Roam movement as “needlessly toxic”. Specifically he implicates the campaign in “terrifying the 76-year old gamekeeper” and “verbally abusing” estate employees. He cites an “activist” who he claims was sending “hate mail” to Alexander Darwall (the landowner behind the court case).

These claims are false. The campaign had no involvement in any such acts. The claim is also undermined by Patrick’s own text. A handful of pages earlier he quotes the same 76-year old gamekeeper noting that they were “expecting aggro” on the day of a peaceful protest organised by Right to Roam in response to the Dartmoor wild camping ban, and that he was frightened about the notion of a demonstration but that these impressions changed the moment he actually encountered it: “there wasn’t a bad one among them [the protesters]”. The same gamekeeper later repeats the statement “there wasn’t a bad person among them.” Paraphrasing the gamekeeper, Patrick writes “At the end of the day he [the keeper] drove up there in his mule and they had [the protesters] all, apparently, been absolutely fine.”

Right to Roam is a strictly peaceful campaign organisation and has firm principles opposing abusive behaviour. These are clearly stated on its website and reinforced throughout the campaign’s actions, materials and events. Of our five principles, the fifth is “be polite” and states the following:

 

“Regardless of how landowners behave towards you, we advocate always remaining calm and de-escalating wherever possible. Private property has become so wrapped up in people’s sense of self that any perceived infringement can feel like a personal attack, even if it’s just a peaceful countryside wander. It’s our job to defuse that feeling. Be mindful that farmers and land managers are people with stresses and anxieties of their own and may have had negative experiences with the public in the past. Remember: you came to enjoy nature, not have an argument.”

​

Trust and bipartisan outreach 

 

Given the previously cited incidents concerning Patrick's journalistic practices, it is perhaps ironic that Patrick accuses Right to Roam of destroying trust in the countryside.

To evidence this, Patrick cites his friend, the hedgelayer and writer, Richard Negus. He claims Richard had invited access campaigners to see his hedgelaying and that he subsequently told Patrick, “quite apologetically” that the offer was now withdrawn.

Mr Negus has previously referred to Right to Roam campaigners as “bell ends” and has compared the campaign with interwar fascist sympathisers and the Hitler Youth. He justified this by reference to its belief that access to the countryside has physical and mental health benefits "echoed" such fascist sentiments. In fact it is an uncontroversial, widely held, and well-evidenced belief.

The campaign has pursued more promising avenues of bipartisan dialogue. One example of that was, in fact, Patrick Galbraith, who for a time posed as a sympathiser with Right to Roam's aims. It is now clear this was simply in order to gather material for his book and we regret extending him our trust.

More positive initiatives have included our Access Friendly Farmer and Landowner group, which we regularly meet with to discuss a range of access issues. Patrick omits its existence from his account, presumably because it contradicts his narrative.

 

Middlewick Firing Range

 

Patrick cites the abundance of nightingales on the MoD’s Middlewick Firing Range as an example of nature thriving as a result of a lack of “unfettered” [see above] public access, referencing an anonymous ecologist.

There is long-standing public access through Middlewick on non-firing days. The range became an accidental nature reserve due to the absence of extractive forms of land management, not because of restrictions on public access.

Public access both on and off the path at Middlewick was an essential factor in the successful recent campaign to save the habitat from development. It is an almost exact counter example of Patrick’s specific claim, as well as his broader argument that connecting people with nature through access plays no role in protecting wildlife.

Nightingale declines are overwhelmingly due to the loss of their preferred scrub habitat. The birds reside deep within these naturally defensive thickets.

Scotland 

 

Patrick claims that although access campaigns like Right to Roam draw heavily on the example of Scottish access laws they are ignorant of their reality. He states that concluding “Scotland is a faraway land of which they [access campaigners] know nothing” wouldn’t be “totally wide off the mark” and that “If you knock around with land access campaigners in England for much more than five minutes, you’ll be told by somebody, often somebody who has been to Scotland all of three times, that land access works brilliantly north of the border.”

Nadia, the campaign’s co-director, lives in Scotland. Jon, the other co-director, has travelled extensively in Scotland for over twenty years. The campaign’s policy positions are based on many interviews with access experts in Scotland as well as former critics of its access laws. There is no mainstream view that Scottish access laws have been a failure: groups like Scottish Land and Estates have sought updates to the Scottish Outdoor Access Code but continue to support its fundamental principles.
 

Wild Service

 

Patrick accuses a book published by the campaign called Wild Service of being “egregiously inaccurate" and full of “egregious errors”. It is not. Patrick accurately identified an error pertaining to the presence of a small ‘community woodland’ near the main body of the Englefield Estate, which has been corrected for the forthcoming paperback. His dispute refers to a single paragraph in the prologue (the book totals 271 pages). Jon discusses the nature of access on this estate, which became significant because it is owned by the government minister formerly in charge of access to nature, and Patrick’s broader arguments about it, here.

Wild Service is in fact full of arguments which seem to at least partly complement Patrick’s professed hope: that we should see access as about something more than simply recreation, that landowners might give up exclusivity in exchange for ecological reciprocity, and that we should seek to develop a deeper culture of ecological guardianship and community-led restoration of the natural world. Patrick engages with none of the many examples of this cited throughout the book.

“They stole the land”

Patrick makes heavy work of the idea that the gentry did not “steal the land” from the common people because landscapes such as commons, wastes, and the open field system were not historically owned in title by the commoners themselves (rather, they held various rights to its use, which were subsequently removed by enclosure).

He misses the obvious point that the statement is a comment on long-standing land inequality and its exacerbation by the removal of those rights. It is not a comment on the transfer of title deeds. It is still the case that half the land in England is owned by less than 1% of its population, and that well over a third (though likely more) belongs to the aristocracy.

That is not the personal fault of those who inherit such landholdings but it is clearly an issue of relevant social concern. How land is utilised affects everyone in society and such pre-democratic inequalities are legitimate grounds for critique. It is a critique Patrick himself makes (p.152 – “It is, on many levels, grotesque that some people own millions of pounds worth of land they’ve never set foot on while other people in Britain starve”) yet he considers it “absurd” when campaigners do the same.

 

Access Rights Don’t Matter

 

Patrick’s central argument is that access rights are not important and we should focus on opportunities for engagement and education. His proposals include paying farmers for educational visits and supporting the (now confirmed) GCSE in Natural History.

There is nothing wrong with such initiatives. We strongly support the GCSE in Natural History too. But they are not an either / or. Children need opportunities for unscripted experiences in nature which occur on their own terms. You cannot easily form a deep relationship with a place you are only able to visit once a year.

Patrick’s book unwittingly demonstrates many examples of why access rights do, in fact, matter hugely. He visits the Dartmoor wild camping protest organised by the campaign, which took place when the last right to wild camp in England was stripped away by a wealthy landowner, who took the National Park Authority to court over the issue. Because of the lack of clear, explicit statutory rights, this last redoubt of camping was vulnerable to legal challenge. The issue is now with the Supreme Court but costing hundreds of thousands of pounds to resolve: all of which could have been spent on things like engagement and education. 

He visits Cirencester Park, where the campaign protested the removal of permissive access after three hundred years (and many sacrifices by the town to preserve the park). It now costs £10 for a family to visit, despite previously serving as one of the most accessible green spaces in the area.

He visits a woodland in North Yorkshire, long treasured by the local community, but recently blocked off by fences, hostile signage, and CCTV. He appears content with the fact that the local rope swing now sits between barbed wire and anti-climb paint.

He visits the Kinder reservoir, where Right to Roam and The Outdoor Swimming Society were drawing attention to the lack of clear statutory rights to swim, meaning people are chased out of the reservoirs for no apparent reason, or face obstacles accessing their local rivers for a swim.

The list goes on. All of these situations require access law to change to address them. Yet Patrick provides no proposals for how to achieve it, and does not appear to understand the basics of those that do.

His view is that the access campaigns fought over a hundred years ago are acceptable, now that they’re safely in the distant past (“People were kept off Winter Hill [site of a mass trespass in 1896] and that was a great injustice, but they no longer are.”) Access campaigning was good and right and just back then. It’s only today, where a new status quo confronts us, that it is apparently to be condemned. We are glad the public are not so gullible.