Protestors demand the right to wild camping on Dartmoor!

 

Protestors on Dartmoor

In Scotland, people have the right roam and the right to go wild camping. In England, where people are treated like feudal peasants, by landowners, you can only pitch your tent if you get permission from the landowner. Unless you do so, you're committing trespass and can be removed.

Until recently, one of last places which allowed wild camping in England, was the Dartmoor National Park. Alexander Darwall, a Dartmoor land owner and hedge-fund dealer, brought a legal case in the High Court. Darwall, owns the 4,000 acre Blachford estate on Dartmoor, which offers pheasant shoots and deerstalking to wealthy clients. He argued in court, that there never had been a right to go wild camping on Dartmoor and won his case.

This legal case brought by a wealthy landowner and businessman, has effectively put an end to wild camping in one of the last places in England, where it was allowed without asking the permission of the landowner. On Saturday, hundreds of protestors from the Right to Roam campaign marched to Darwall's land in protest at having their right to wild camp taken away. In bringing this legal case, Darwall, may well have opened up Pandora's Box. The case will almost certainly lead to protest actions on Dartmoor and intensify the campaign for a right to roam law in England and a right to go wild camping.

It was mass trespass and direct action by ramblers in the Peak District in the 1930s, on land owned by the Duke of Devonshire, that opened up the countryside to walkers and paved the way for the UK's first National Park in the Peak District, in 1951. Many of these brave men and women who campaigned for the right to ramble in the English countryside, faced imprisonment and beatings from the Dukes gamekeeper's. What we now need is another peasants revolt. What's good for the Scots is good for the English.