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GLADMAN
949 posts

Re: Right to Roam - The Book of Trespass
Feb 20, 2021, 00:06
tjj wrote:
thelonious wrote:
Bit off topic I know.

Posting this link to a blog about Right to Roam in case anyone is interested. We all need access to them stones.

https://markavery.info/2020/08/17/guest-blog-right-to-roam-by-nick-hayes/

More info here

https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/


Hope you don't mind me revisiting this - I was indeed given Nick Hayes' book The Book of Trespass. I didn't open it straight away as received other books too. Now I am reading it and find myself fighting back anger. Not prehistory for sure, Nick Hayes refers back to William the Conqueror as the person who started the theft of common land from the people of our country.

'William embarked on a military campaign called the Harrying of the North, an assault on the commoners just shy of genocide. It was a sustained campaign that began in the north of England and set a precedent that was to be followed right up to the nineteenth century. It was a campaign that relied on brute force, the power of the sword and the horse cutting the ties between the people and the land.
In the words of the Conqueror himself:
In mad fury I descended the English of the north like a raging lion and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with lash of starvation and, alas! was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old of this fair people.

I had no idea.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/17/roaming-british-countryside-rights-of-way?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1utXO5Hf4aNdN_6_CAxZQGmOa8HZLOwJmXWVs9_UBr-WdJKIo0kJt7tJY


How ironic that - to take one example, Snowdonia National Park - 2020 saw a much broader cross-section of visitors (for obvious reasons) and far more litter, fires and environmental abuse. As one exasperated ranger pointed out 'Well, you got what you wished for'.

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