Nick Hayes
Is it a bigger crime to trespass just a little – or that such a lot of open space is locked behind private gates and walls?
N THE CURRENT climate of mental and physical health crises, with depression, anxiety, ADHD and obesity all on the rise, science is telling us we need a deeper connection to nature. But unlike Scotland, Norway, Sweden and other European countries whose legal systems have enshrined ‘the right to roam’, English law still refuses us access to nature. In England, if you don’t own the land, or haven’t paid to be there, you’re almost certainly trespassing.
I began trespassing in a blithe cloud of ignorance. All my life I have gone out on rambles, sketchbook in hand, drawing whatever caught my eye. I never climbed a wall or snuck through barbed wire, but when a fence was broken, or access was denied only by a curtly worded sign, I let my curiosity take over, and slipped into the forbidden ground to draw. Only when the landowner’s representatives came to turf me off did I awaken to the politicised nature of land and access. I had been sat alone in acres of woodland or meadow, miles from any dwelling or back garden, and yet my peaceful act of sketching was
Isuddenly confronted by aggression and outrage that seemed disproportionate.
This cognitive dissonance intrigued me. I began looking into it, this law of trespass that redefines my quiet walks as acts of aggression. Tort law covers any act that is deemed to have caused harm or damage to a person – libel, defamation, negligence and trespass – and through a series of historic court cases a precedent was established that a single foot over the line of private property (whether a back garden or a 13,000 acres estate) constitutes a direct act of harm against its owner. No wonder the keepers were reacting so violently: by just being there, the law states I had struck the first blow.
I began to question the legitimacy of these walls that block us from nature. I wanted to know the legislation’s roots, and its history led me back through the enclosure acts of the Georgians and Tudors, to William the Conqueror and his ‘forest acts’, the first time ownership of land included the right to exclude all others. Forest refers not to trees, but derives from the Latin word foris meaning ‘outside of’, and a specific set of laws that set them outside of common law. These were laws created by a single person to protect his interests at the expense of everyone else. From then on, the logic of private property promoted the exclusion of the public regardless of context or scale. To climb a wall seems like an act of aggression, but when the privatisation of common land divorced people from their means of subsistence, shelter, and fuel, the real violence done to people was the wall itself.
This history led me over the walls of vast estates belonging to dukes, lords, politicians, a media magnate and the Queen herself, to places financed by West African slavery and East Indian colonialism, land where witches were hanged, and the working class evicted to make deer parks. I discovered how much open space is locked behind private walls, and also a story of how exclusive dominion of the land led to a subjugation of the society that lived upon it. That story became The Book of Trespass.