Ep. 057: Right to Roam - Who Is the Countryside Actually For? With Jon Moses

Jon Moses lives five minutes from the River Monnow. He had lived beside it for twenty years and barely knew it, because almost none of it could legally be reached. In the first lockdown he pretended for a day that he lived in Scotland, and walked up it anyway.

That walk is the whole argument of this episode. Jon is co-director of the Right to Roam campaign and co-editor of Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, and he joins Chloe and Tom to explain what the campaign is actually asking for: parity with Scotland, where a right of responsible access to land and water has been the default since 2003, rather than the roughly 8% of England that the Countryside and Rights of Way Act opened up for walking and climbing only.

Tom comes at it as the concerned landowner. Someone left a bag of poo in a bush on the project. Gates have been left open with livestock behind them. There are 100 kilogram pigs on the land that have chased people and ripped trousers, and a horse who has now tried to eat one of the pigs. So the conversation gets into the practical questions rather than the slogans: what happens to liability, how conservation land gets exempted, whether someone could camp next to the cabins, and what you do about the ten per cent of people who will never apply common sense.

Chloe brings the other side. Living in the Forest of Dean they could walk for three hours from the back door without crossing a road. From the Grange there is not a single usable footpath. And if the benefits to wellbeing are as large as the evidence suggests, is it fair to deny them to the many because of the few?

The bit that stays with you is Jon's shift from access for recreation to access for guardianship. On the River Wye, which for access purposes already works much like Scotland, it was local people who knew the river well who raised the alarm on algal blooms long before the regulators did. You look after what you know. You cannot know what you are not allowed to see.

After the interview, Chloe and Tom cover the four benefits they never got to, Rose's idea for a Right to Roam licence, and the full story of Lady the horse, two pigs, and a pair of Crocs.

Chapters:[00:06] Welcome to episode 57, and a first for Tom

[02:39] Project update: 20 jars of pickled cucumbers and a market garden in its second summer

[04:37] Community Day, Saturday 12 September, spaces still available

[06:03] Jon Moses joins: Wild Service, the Monnow Valley and a lockdown trespass

[11:11] What the campaign is actually asking for: parity with Scotland

[12:44] Why Scotland got there and England and Wales did not: devolution, the Lords and the Clearances