There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
-Woodie Guthrie

A few weeks ago, in a total chance encounter, I met someone who, more than 75 years ago, had been a resident of the village in which I live. She had been visiting the former site of her house, which had since fallen into disrepair and vanished.

But aside from the fact that her former house no longer existed (something she luckily already knew), one thing that truly stood out to her was how you couldn't go anywhere, anymore. The huge sycamore tree that she and her friends once climbed was still there, but imprisoned behind a fence to somebody's land. The endless routes through the grand old deer park had been closed off until there was just one circular tarmac path. The great old oak tree, centuries old, that she had once played around is now no longer visible to the public, let alone approachable. Electric fences now line many fields in order to contain livestock, and clearly designated footpaths (constantly under threat) are the only legal routes.

There is one extra important detail; the place that we met was called The Common. Why is that? It is not common land and I am not entitled to walk there. The answer is not taught in schools, but it was one of the most significant processes in English history. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, thousands of enclosure acts took public land and, often illegally, sold it to the highest bidder. Common land, so carefully tended by communities who lived adjacent to it for generations, now fell into the hands of wealthy landowners, many of whom were absentee landlords with the sole incentive of extracting profit. It is this process that bears the greatest responsibility for the crisis of access we find ourselves in today.

And it is a dire, convoluted predicament indeed. A recent report by Natural England showed how the ‘range’ of children had shrunk generation by generation; a child in 1919 Sheffield was able to walk six miles to go fishing, whilst his grandson was only allowed to walk 300 yards to the end of his street. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Making things even more miserable, many families do not have access to a garden, let alone a sizable one, and visiting nature requires getting in the car and driving miles in order to walk around strictly-defined paths. In total, 92% of the countryside is now off-limits to us. It is no surprise then, that although the countryside is often a point of pride for British people, studies have shown they also have some of the poorest connections to nature in Europe. When the acts of enclosure were passed, the poor masses migrated by necessity to the industrialising cities, where they could be better controlled and have their labour more efficiently exploited. Their descendants might consider themselves better off, but they now suffer from sedentary, urbanised lifestyles; notoriously poor for health, both mental and physical.

Nick Hayes’ new book The Trespasser’s Companion has a solution, and in the immortal words of Super Hans, the secret ingredient is crime. Not mindless crime, of course, but targeted direct action. Whether mass trespasses with hundreds or even thousands of people, or individual acts of defiance, all can be a part of the process of taking back what is rightfully ours.

Is trespass necessary? As one might expect, the answer put forward by the book is yes. If, like most people, you have enjoyed a national park, you have walked on land that was taken back after years of protest and mass trespass (in many cases, fights are still going on in existing national parks). Most famously, the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, which saw numerous arrests and prison sentences, facilitated the creation of the UK’s first national park, the Peak District. Conservative lawmakers, often landowners themselves, cannot be trusted to “do the right thing”.

Trespass is not simply a means to gain access for walking routes. It is also necessary to help nature. Landowners often like to designate themselves “custodians of the land”, their barbed wire and signs warning others to KEEP OUT are supposedly righteous defences against a marauding public. Unfortunately, many landowners often like to lie and deceive. A great amount preside over heinous ecological destruction, using the cover of private land to hide their actions. One needs only to roam around a recently ploughed field to find detritus dumped by the more careless farmers; sheeting, old machine parts, bags and other bits of plastic. But the actions committed by landowners are often far worse, ranging from using ancient woodland as a dump, to raptor persecution, illegal grouse moor burning, and illegal use of chemicals around sensitive ecological sites. It is trespassers, probably more than anyone else, who bring these crimes to light, the more dedicated ones documenting them to create a basis for legal action.

Just how commonplace these incidents are does not bring much confidence in the common argument that the right to roam would wreak havoc upon the countryside. Landowners like to whine that people would trash the place, but they seem to be doing a fine job of that themselves. Nevertheless, such reservations are worth taking into account. The Companion places responsibility at the heart of its manifesto, offering actionable paths to educate people, change their habits, and provide better infrastructure to ensure the countryside is made pristine. It is worth noting as well that the Companion does not advocate allowing anyone to go anywhere at any time. It is totally legitimate to plant a large KEEP OUT sign in front of a shooting range or sensitive cropland. But when the footpath nearby has been illegally blocked off by signs declaring “private land”, such warnings become meaningless.

Other countries have done it. Scotland is the most notable country to have ensured the public’s right to roam and – shockingly – it has not resulted in the countryside being destroyed. Austria, Belarus, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland all are notable European countries to have specifically passed right to roam laws. Will England, or perhaps the UK as a whole, be the next country to do so? It seems unlikely. But such hopelessness faced the trespassers at Kinder Scout almost a century ago. It is only by repeatedly and assuredly asserting our rights that we can begin to to push back the wrongs that the acts of enclosure did. I hope that The Trespasser’s Companion becomes a valuable weapon in this fight.

Thomas Bachrach has recently completed a Masters in History at the University of Exeter.