The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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But it offers a sharp-eyed, muddy-booted guide to the process that left the English “simultaneously hedged out of their land and hemmed into a new ideology”. Take it along next time you plan to jump any wall. For all its exuberance and erudition, The Book of Trespass is unlikely to cross our culture-war fences. For me, this book is a bit too long for the amount of substance it contains. Nevertheless the author makes lots of good points in discussions on a series of topics such as the ending of slavery and the financial bonus to former slave owners, the enclosure of common land, the anti nuclear protest at Greenham Common, and the restrictions on access to rivers in England. However there is a lot of padding around these discussions in the form of descriptions of the author’s trespasses. His intention is of course to open our eyes to the amount of England that is closed to the public. However, I found some of that a bit tedious, and skipped quite a lot of it. However, I was stimulated to make a donation to the latest Ramblers appeal! We can’t do much about the injustices that have led to the enclosure of so much of England, but at least we can support those who are defending what we have. Laced in with his inch-deep dive into breadths of pop culture were his boring accounts of trespass where he intermittently described the tranquility of lying in the grass. How can the reader expect to be immersed in those moments when they’re only given a paragraph at a time, and then their mind is taken to some Anglo-Saxon folklore they’ve never heard of. The range of figures and events on the index says it all, no book should have that many different name drops side-by-side. Most cultures in the world have at some point held the notion that land cannot belong exclusively to individuals.’

Seeks to challenge and expose the mesmerising power that landownership exerts on this country, and to show how we can challenge its presumptions . . . The Book of Trespass is massively researched but lightly delivered, a remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths and stunningly illustrated by the author -- George Monbiot * Guardian *adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments. Nationalism suits the landowning classes because it gives people a sense of ownership without their actually owning anything at all.’ Rivers and their banks, meadows and woods also do not count as “open access”. In Oxfordshire alone, the public is barred from 90 per cent of woodland. Originally a royal hunting ground listed in the Domesday Book, Cornbury’s 5,000 acres of ancient forest and farmland and its 16th-century manor house are today a green and pleasant land of private profit. I am so glad I did because it turned out to be a brilliant read. There are so many new things about England and the land around us that I knew nothing about that. It was fascinating reading about how certain aristocrats and other such people came to own their lands (not in a fair way!).

Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements. Content highlighting – users can choose to emphasize important elements such as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered elements only. As long as what happens on the land is governed by a select few there will never be a society that reflects the values of its constituents, there will never be an England that reflects the values of anything but a tiny minority of its citizens. If we are truly to discover what we have in common, we must be allowed to gather on common ground."

Seeks to challenge and expose the mesmerising power that landownership exerts on this country, and to show how we can challenge its presumptions . . . The Book of Trespass is massively researched but lightly delivered, a remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths and stunningly illustrated by the author Otto Ecroyd on his Northbound and Down journey: ‘I left a top job in the city to cycle 5,000 miles’ Meandering. Fascinating. Thought-provoking. In this part polemic, part wanderer’s journal, part history lesson, Hayes organises chapters loosely around particular trespasses he has committed, exploring the history of the land he seeks to access, the beauty of nature and the way words and laws are used to guard land that, arguably, should be common land. Crucially, and ambitiously, he argues that “Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in columns of hot air to the landless”: our old friend, nationalism as false consciousness. Globally, an imperial machinery of slavery and conquest both bankrolled and legitimised the “cult of exclusion” that kept the English off their own turf. At home, the “magical architecture” and seductive contours of the great estates lent that dogma a patina of beauty and grace. Meanwhile, poachers swung from gibbets, plantation slaves toiled and died, proud commoners became a cowed rural proletariat and, in post-industrial mass society, the heritage industry served up centuries of mass uprooting and intimidation as a glorious aristocratic legacy. Land became a “commodity alone”, “partitioned from the web of social ties” that truly gives it value.

Scots have the right to buy land as a community interest. This is a law we need in England immediately, Communities have a right to have a say in the land they inhabit. What a brilliant, passionate and political book this is, by a young writer-walker-activist who is also a dazzlingly gifted artist. It tells - through story, exploration, evocation - the history of trespass (and therefore of freedom) in Britain and beyond, while also making a powerful case for future change. It is bold and brave, as well as beautiful; Hayes's voice is warm, funny, smart and inspiring. The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently -- Robert Macfarlane Fundamentally, Hayes urges us all to consider whether the way we currently treat land – as a purely commercial entity, with its commercial value prioritised above all other potential value – needs to be revised and how this could be done. He notes that: This desire really resonates with me. Our local landowners are United Utilities, and much more so the Lowther family, or Lonsdale Estates as they are known. On a snowy day recently I had a run in with the new Forest Manager. I was 'trespassing', quite intentionally, on a favourite bit of ground doing of course, no harm to anyone or anything. Fences, wall and divisions of all kinds run through Hayes’s book – a gorgeously written, deeply researched and merrily provocative tour of English landscape, history and culture through the eyes of the trespassers who have always scaled, dodged or broken the barriers that scar our land. 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. In global terms, that’s an almost-unique dearth of entitlement. 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 (and have colonised the iconic Wind in the Willows villages by the Thames). Hayes wants to understand not just how this theft of access happened, how the old shared culture of the “commons” gave way to absolute rights of ownership, but “why we allow ourselves to be fenced off in this way”.The book ends with a call to extend the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in England, expanding our Right to Roam , no matter who owns the land. This is obviously a worthwhile endeavour as long as it is a part of a much wider movement that also looks to challenge the power of the vested landed interests of this country, dismantle the lines that divide us and repair the deep wounds those lines have caused. The Book of Trespass is a beautiful, powerful call to know our many histories, the struggles that have gone before, and offers a powerful awakening from the spell of ‘ownership’. Read it, let it galvanise you.