Britons have access to just 8% of the English countryside, which
sounds paltry, especially when you consider the dearth of wild
camping in England and Wales. However, the day rambler has no
shortage of footpaths to choose from, which are excluded from the 8%
figure. These footpaths intersect England and Wales for some 140,000
miles. In practice, one can easily go off-piste without friction. Any
kid who grew up in the countryside (me) can attest to that. Rich
twits may own swathes of Britain, but one could spend lifetimes along
our byways and beyond. Still, replicating Scotland’s Land Reform Act
in England and Wales would be welcome. Will littering and other
destruction increase? Yes, naturally, but certainly not
catastrophically, no matter what Francis Fulford says.
Fulford is a toothy landowner straight from central casting who has
made numerous TV appearances over the years. We see him on his
sprawling Devon estate as he boasts of his countless acres. This is
the kind of legacy posho who says ‘what?’ and ‘fuck’, no matter the
company. It reminds you of the bell curve meme showing a pleb, a
mid-wit and an ‘elite’ of some kind. A pleb says ‘wot’ and ‘fuck’
much like a landed posho because they both operate without
constraints; the former is too crass to care, and the latter too
superior. The mid-wit, meanwhile, agonises over status. I digress.
Fulford is easy to scoff at and mock, unlike Hugh
Inge-Innes-Lillingston, owner of the Thorpe Estate in Staffordshire,
and John Mildmay-White, inheritor of the paradisiacal Flete Estate in
Devon. Both men are agreeable, measured, and far less pompous than
Nadia Sheikh, the Right to Roam movement’s septum-piercee in chief.
Sheikh is prone to victimhood waffle, diluting the cause with
‘intersectional’ monologues. She claims, for example, that pheasant
shooting is for the ‘privileged few’. It’s not. Right to Roam
co-founder Nick Hayes is generally more grounded, emphasising his
wish for Scottish-style land reform without the facile hot takes on
colonial legacy (although, regrettably, he’s more than capable of
them).
With these figures established, filmmaker Orban Wallace pitches
shaved temples against mustard corduroy, although it never gets ugly.
We see a mass protest on the 20,000-acre Englefield Estate in
Berkshire. A cohort arrives in an ensemble of papier-mâché masks and
leafy trinkets. There are clarinets, guitars and morris dancers, too.
Yawn. Like the woke babble and bastardised history, these am-dram
theatrics are not persuasive and appeal only to the ‘joy and love’
protestor class.
As with any culture war, each side of the Right to Roam debate has
legitimate points, half-truths, narrative spin and more than a few
stock characters. Wallace’s documentary captures them well and
photographs the landscape even better. My two penn’orth is that
England and Wales would do well to follow Scotland’s example and
develop a firm understanding of American “Leave No Trace” principles.
