THE BOOK OF TRESPASS CROSSING THE LINES THAT DIVIDE US

NICK HAYES Bloomsbury Circus, 464pp, £20

Nick Hayes’s barricade-storming book on roaming rights threw up some startling statistics. Boyd Tonkin laid them out in the Arts Desk: ‘Even with recent, grudging adjustments to the law, people in England have the “right to roam” over only 10 per cent or so of their native country, and to boat down a mere 3 per cent of its waters. The length of public footpaths has actually halved, to around 118,000 miles, since the 19th century. Hereditary aristocrats still own “a third of Britain”, even though foreign corporations now run them close. Hayes wants to understand how this theft of access happened, how the old shared culture of the “commons” gave way to absolute rights of ownership.’

William Atkins in the Guardian thrilled to Hayes’s adventures, in the thoroughly English spirit of Cobbett: ‘Chapter by chapter, we follow him over walls and through hedges into the private landholdings of England, including Arundel Castle, Boughton House (the Dukes of Buccleuch), Highclere Castle– and the Sussex estate of Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail.’

Reviewers piled in with their experiences. In the TLS, Sara Hudston kicked off with a meandering anecdote about being out riding with her posh friend Amanda. Tonkin dropped that he had lunched twice with the Duke of Buccleuch (‘genial, generous, green-minded’) and Bradley Garrett in the Literary Review came clean: ‘As an explorer who writes about urban infrastructure and spends a lot of time underground, I always enjoy the immersion of the outdoors but lack the vocabulary, and perhaps imagination, to record my experiences in convincing prose. Hayes has no such problem – his writings, whether on wild woods or manicured estates, are honey for connoisseurs of adventure.’