Take a Hike
England is ripe for walking, but it’s never been that simple.
Lila, Ruba, and Taegen on England’s South West Coast Path in 2018, heading west in the late afternoon. Photograph by Julia Holzman.
Late in June, 2018, I found myself without a car (or a driver’s license, not that it mattered) somewhere along the Jurassic Coast of southern England. But I wasn’t on the coast, exactly. I was staying about a mile inland, and rolling fields of farmland stood between me and the frigid saltwater I craved. I was with three friends from high school—Lila, Ruba, and Taegen—and we set off on foot that first day in Dorset, in search of the sea.
We wandered southward through pastures of uncaring cows, their tails swinging lazily, their owner nowhere to be seen. We made it to a set of stairs that took us down to the water’s rocky edge, and walked and swam our way up and down an empty beach, audibly in awe whenever the late afternoon sun would push its way partially through the clouds and cast raked, golden rays along the horizon.
We collapsed, delirious, into the twin beds and fold-out couches of our rental cottage later that evening, but before succumbing to my exhaustion, I scribbled observations in my journal. Somewhere in between approving notes on the prevalence of actual ice cream in seaside England (as opposed to London’s gelato tyranny), and musings about whether Britain’s North Atlantic in early summer was colder or warmer than Chicago’s Lake Michigan in late spring, I wrote:
I’m beyond ready to do another, ~longer~ walk, though the exact whereabouts of this so-called ‘South West Coast Path’ are unclear @ best. We did a bit of bush-(farm-?)whacking today, though Taegen says that it’s all public land in the U.K., or something? Which sounds vaguely right? Into it.
Alas, it isn’t all public land in the U.K.
To Taegen’s credit, as a rule, land in much of the U.K. is more public than that of the U.S., where we were both born and (mostly) raised. As of 2000, the uncultivated mountains, moor, heath, down, and historically common lands of England and Wales are largely open to off-trail recreation, where comparable activity in the U.S. would be considered trespassing. While U.S. national parks are generally subject to stricter conservation rules than those in the U.K., the latter cost nothing to enter, whereas just over a fourth of U.S. national parks charge for admission. And the “farm-whacking” that I mentioned in my journal was, indeed, completely legal, thanks to the land’s designation as part of the “coastal margin”—made public by the 2009 Marine and Coastal Access Act, and therefore open to people as well as livestock.
But still today, England and Wales lack anything close to the freedom to roam that Scotland touts just to their north, and although land-access laws all across Great Britain trump those of Northern Ireland, barriers to access continue to inspire passionate individual walkers and “rambling” organizations to carry on the good fight.
While the pandemic has boosted the status of the simple stroll the world over for the past year, we as a species—and England as a country—are by no means new to the pleasures and escapism that walking, and nature, can offer. But public land, industrialized capitalism, and colonialism don’t mix easily. So for long centuries, England has been engaged in battle with itself over the rights of its people to their land.
As England grows ever more diverse, and struggles with the myriad meanings of access and belonging, while also contending with tensions raised by divergent land policies across the four devolved countries of the U.K., this battle for the land isn’t getting resolved: It’s only getting more complicated.
In 1649, in the immediate wake of the second English Civil War and from a still-functional printing cooperative then located in the smog-black heart of London, Gerrard Winstantley published an open letter to the city; one whose title might be considered cause for alarm.
The letter was not a “letter” so much as it was a “watch-word”—more specifically, “A Watch-word to The City of London, and the Army: Wherein you may see that England’s freedom, which should be the result of all our victories, is sinking deeper under the Norman power, as appears by this relation of the unrighteous proceedings of Kingstone Court against some of the Diggers at George Hill, under color of law; but yet thereby the cause of the Diggers is more brightened and strengthened: so that everyone singly may truly say what his freedom is, and where it lies.”
Winstantley’s snappy title references the April 1649 occupation and attempted cultivation of St. George’s Hill in nearby Surrey. Led by radical anti-royalists William Everard and Winstantley himself, a group that quickly grew to about 30 had been accused of trespassing. Treating it as common land to which they had a legal (not to mention God-given) right, the protestors tilled the land, and together began planting it, but they lasted little over a week before the government decisively retaliated.
Of course, the “True Levellers,” or “Diggers,” as they came to be called, didn’t believe that their utopian experiment could be construed as trespassing, as the land was held in common.
In his 16 page–long “Watch-word,” Winstantley, a devout Protestant and religious reformer himself, accuses his prosecutors of having “burned their Bibles long ago, because they have so quite and clean forgotten that petition in the Lord's prayer, forgive us our trespassers as we forgive them; for they make this a trespass against them, for digging upon the wasteland of our mother the land of England for a livelihood, when as their law itself sayeth, That the commons and wastes belong to the poor.”
These agricultural “commons” are a fairly foreign concept in present-day England, as in today’s U.S. and, inevitably, most of the capitalist world. The word as used in this context nearly evades definition, yet is wholly unavoidable when it comes to questions of land access, particularly in England, where its history is long and fabled. Historian Allan Greer provides my favorite definition in his 2012 article “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America”—though, be warned, minds raised under capitalism might struggle with the concept anyway. Writes Greer:
The commons might be thought of both as a place—the village pasture—and as a set of access rights, such as gleaning and stubble grazing. This portion of the commons located in the tillage zone of a given community might be designated the ‘inner commons.’ ‘Outer commons’ can then be used to refer to collectively owned resources in the surrounding area beyond local croplands. This was called ‘the waste’ in England: the zone of moor, mountain, marsh, or forest that rural folk used as rough pasture for their livestock as well as for cutting wood or peat for fuel, gathering herbs, taking rushes for basketry or thatching, felling timber for construction, and so on.
And as Winstantley’s “Watch-word” highlights, in much of 17th-century England, the commons—including uncultivated wastelands—did belong to the poor. Starting in earnest halfway through the 18th century and lasting well into the 19th, those rights would be stripped away, parish by parish, through Parliament’s insidious “Inclosure Acts.” Unsurprisingly to those on both sides of the fight, the poor would become poorer; the rich, richer. For those legions of peasantry on the wrong side of enclosure, food would become scarcer, and the world would become smaller.
And even as the Industrial Revolution took hold, and England’s population was increasingly drawn from rural to urban life (at least partially in response to enclosures); from communally based subsistence to wage labor, the loss of the commons remained keenly felt across the country. As the English were pulled—and at times forced—out of their muddy farmland and onto the unforgiving, unclean pavement of larger towns and cities, their emotional attachment to their land didn’t disappear: It just shifted.
The urban proletariat of post-enclosure industrialized England no longer “required” the shared grazing rights, the foraged foods and raw materials, and perhaps even the mutuality that their agrarian forefathers had so enjoyed, but soon enough they turned back to nature in large numbers as a necessary site of escape. They were often turned away.
A sense of righteous indignation at this long-since-codified turning-away propelled “approximately 500 enthusiastic men and women … up to the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire’s Peak District” on a crisp Sunday morning in April 1932, as Sinclair McKay describes in his 2012 love letter to British walking, Ramble On. These Manchester-based walkers were very intentionally trespassing on the well-guarded grounds of the ninth Duke of Devonshire, some singing socialist anthems as they waged what would become a famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) offensive against exclusive property rights. Five were jailed in the aftermath of the action.
It was a similar communal anger—one rooted in a deep and abiding love for the land—that inspired “Diggers 350: St. George’s Hill Re-Occupation” in 1999, exactly 67 Aprils after the Kinder Scout action, and 350 after Gerrard Winstantley and his merry band of Diggers had valiantly attempted to cultivate the very same land.
The 1999 re-occupation in Surrey drew 300 marchers up St. George’s Hill, led by the nascent “This Land is Ours” movement. The protesters bore a stone memorial to the Diggers, and some carried posters, including a meters-long banner that quoted Winstantley’s own “Watch-word”: “Words and Writing were all Nothing and must Die, for Action is the Life of all and if thou dost not Act, thou dost Nothing.”
That early April day in 1999 was a typically gray and drizzly one in southeast England, but there was an unusual electricity in the air—palpable even 22 years on, infectiously apparent in the 10 minutes of low-resolution footage still available on YouTube. Small children marched hand in hand with their parents, and tentative half-smiles at the camera bubbled into jubilance and swaggering confidence as the walkers—raincoats and sweaters tied around waists—made their way from overcast suburban streets on to and up the hill.
A skinny young man with glasses and an orange acoustic guitar around his neck attracted a small crowd with a spirited rendition of Leon Rosselon’s 1975 tribute to the Diggers, “The World Turned Upside Down,” as popularized later by Billy Bragg:
All things in common
All people one
‘We come in peace—’
The orders came to shut them down
The man finished the song with a triumphant strum of his guitar, and shouted, “We come in peace, and we come BACK!” and his audience cheered and whooped along.
The same crowd was likely cheering a year and a half later, in late November of 2000, when Parliament ushered in the new millennium with the landmark Countryside and Rights of Way Act. CRoW, sometimes known as England and Wales’ “right to roam,” was a major victory, returning to the English and Welsh public a significant amount of what had been taken during previous centuries’ enclosures.
That legislative victory was hard-won, and it hasn’t been easily accepted by all—notably, pedestrian-wary landowners—in the years since.
Of course, there’s a bitter irony to this ongoing epic struggle over land in England: Its imperial past and present. But really, it makes perfect sense. That England, the preeminent metropole of world history, should forever be engaged in a fight for agency over its own land is only natural. That the very same landed class whose economic and political might has been, for centuries, derived from the exploitation of foreign lands and peoples, should wish to maintain that power at home at least in part through strict proprietorship, is unlikely to raise many eyebrows.
Even before English colonizers reached and colonized foreign soil, enclosures on the home front gave rise to the conditions that bred colonization. In The Many-Headed Hydra, socialist historian Peter Linebaugh offers the Virginia Company as an early example of this phenomenon, writing that the endeavor, like capitalism writ large, was brought about by a series of drastic socioeconomic changes in late 16th-century and early 17th-century England. Linebaugh in turn assigns these developments “[A] profound and far-reaching cause: the enclosure of land and the removal of thousands of people from the commons, who were then redeployed to the country, town, and sea.”
And so began the reign of the English in the Americas: with mass expropriation on one side of the Atlantic bringing about the reproduction of those conditions on the other.
But depending on contemporary agricultural norms in the different parts of England that colonists hailed from, once “New World” land had been taken from its Indigenous residents and forced into an essentially English brand of (English) ownership, colonized regions for a brief time exhibited either open-field tendencies (i.e. with more held in common), or closed-field systems (i.e. with more hardline private ownership), according to William Cronon’s 1983 Changes in the Land. “In the long run, it was this latter conception of land—as private commodity rather than public commons—that came to typify New England towns,” explains Cronon. “More than anything else, it was the treatment of land and property as commodities traded at market that distinguished English conceptions of ownership from [American] Indian ones.”
Well-known British labor historian E.P. Thompson writes in his 1980 book Customs in Common about the capitalist obsession with exclusive property rights sweeping England as enclosures reached a fever pitch in the late 18th century. “The concept of exclusive property in land, as a norm to which other practices must be adjusted, was now extending across the whole globe,” Thompson writes. “The concept was carried across the Atlantic, to the Indian sub-continent, and into the South Pacific, by British colonists, administrators, and lawyers, who, while not unaware of the force of local customs and land systems, struggled to construe these within their own measure of property.” Indeed, English imperialists were consistently just as hell-bent on “improving” (privatizing) land in Asia, the Americas, and Ireland, as they were on enclosing the pastures and woodlands surrounding London.
Furthermore, says Thompson, “The notion of absolute property in land which triumphed in England in the late eighteenth century had both a legal and a political aspect. Property in land required a landowner, improving the land required labour, and therefore subduing the land required also subduing the labouring poor.” That same century, advocates for enclosure argued often and unabashedly in favor of creating such a wage labor–dependent underclass. In her authoritative 1993 book, Commoners, J.M. Neeson writes that “[P]roletarianization, instead of damning enclosure and the disappearance of common right, justified it.”
All across England and the world that it seized, the poor were put to work for the benefit of landowners and colonizers, and the alienation of people from land was well underway.
Rachel wandering the site of the disused Botallack Mine on Cornwall’s “Tin Coast” in mid-December, 2019. Photograph by Julia Holzman.
Tracking the downfall of the English commons is relatively simple. Tides began turning against the system in the 1600s, and two major waves of acts of enclosure had largely eliminated England’s commons by the end of the 1800s. But it’s much more difficult to identify when the system took hold.
The commons were not, as one might assume, a given throughout all of pre-Victorian English history; therefore, they require a start date. This date is not so much “contested” as it is defined completely differently by everyone whose work alludes to it—or so I’ve surmised from my research.
Many, including Karl Marx in Capital, suggest that the system of English commons truly began in the 15th century. Oliver Rackham’s comprehensive History of the Countryside instead posits the commons’ extended “start date” as located sometime after the eighth century, firmly in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Roman Britain.
The Romans, partial to an ultra-precise field-division system known as “centuriation,” had arrived in a Britain already divided into individual holdings, if somewhat haphazardly. Most of this land remained enclosed until the dawn of the second millennium, A.D. “In what is now Planned Countryside, much of the enclosed landscape was effaced when medieval open fields developed,” writes Rackham. “By [the 1086] Domesday Book, as we used to be taught, the arable parts of England were covered with immensely complex systems of cultivation in strips, which were to last until the Parliamentary Enclosures.”
Open-field, or “strip” cultivation, was defined differently in each parish (or perhaps more accurately, by each manorial estate, as manors owned the lands to which commoners enjoyed rights). General hallmarks of the system included organized methods of land division by crop, grazing rights shared by all participants at once, and regular commoners’ meetings to ensure effective self-governance—but open-field cultivation often also included other distinctive features, such as neighborly labor-sharing across crops.
But England’s commons encompassed so much more than the (already diverse) array of agricultural and pastoral land access rights they’re known for. The commons dictated how entire communities lived, gathered, and provided for one another. Their existence often meant, too, an economy in which employment and wage labor did not define people’s lives. As Neeson writes in Commoners, “[I]t was customary to make a living first out of the materials on hand… Looking for regular, constant employment was unnecessary where commons were rich reserves.” The commons also meant public “highways” and footpaths; access to recreational walking; a communal sense of appreciation for natural beauty. The emotional importance of the commoners’ rights to their local landscape cannot be overstated.
John Clare, a preeminent anti-Enclosure poet writing in the first half of the 19th century, reminisces fondly about common access to land made for wandering in his poem “The Mores”:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky.
Clare ends his poem “Remembrances” with this chilling stanza, mourning the loss of human joy in the wake of enclosure:
O had I known as then joy had left the paths of men
I had watched her night and day besure and never slept agen
And when she turned to go O I’d caught her mantle then
And wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay
Aye knelt and worshipped on as love in beautys bower
And clung upon her smiles as a bee upon her flower
And gave her heart my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour
As keepsakes and pledges to fade away
But love never heeded to treasure up the may
So it went the common road with decay.
It’s worth noting that access to the commons—to grazing and agricultural rights, especially—was not simply a matter of English birthright, even in the commons’ heyday.
In her 1985 paper “No Tragedy on the Commons,” which uses England’s commons as a case study to rebuke Garret Hardin’s infamous, eugenicist-leaning 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Susan Cox explains that the use of the commons, especially for grazing, was actually subject to many (productive) restrictions. She hails as a victory the prolonged success of community-led land management until its Industrial Revolution–era downfall.
“The commons were carefully and painstakingly regulated,” Cox writes, “and those instances in which the common[s] deteriorated were most often due to lawbreaking and to oppression of the poorer tenant rather than to egoistic abuse of a common resource.”
Neeson would agree, similarly praising commoners’ ability to self-regulate so effectively, maintaining workable, grazable land for thousands of years. She describes a number of different possible statuses held by commoners: There were those whose rights of pasture came with the land they worked, and those whose rights were attached to their cottages, as well as all of the “landless” (or simply “land poor”) commoners. Neeson tells us that, “Of all the complaints against enclosure, the loss of the commons by the poorest commoners is heard the loudest.”
Despite their loud anger, as history would have it, the poorest were ignored, and were pushed further into poverty. Not only was a class that had previously subsisted mostly on the fruits of the land forced into wage labor—often, Neeson claims, the local encloser-in-chief became the area’s primary employer—but, as John Clare’s poems exemplify, a sort of emotional, or spiritual poverty also accompanied loss of the landscape and permission to walk it.
As Jerry L. Anderson explains in “Britain’s Right to Roam: Redefining the Landowner’s Bundle of Sticks,” English enclosures did preserve a number of public footpaths over private land, but “the public’s access to many areas over which they previously enjoyed a general right to roam was summarily extinguished.” Anderson specifies that a “right to roam” allows access to general wandering over private lands, whereas a footpath—though usually useful and often still scenic—confines its users to a predetermined route.
As former commoners’ labor became commodified, so became their landscape, and it slipped from their fingers (and toes) into the exclusive clutches of the upper class.
Anderson argues, too, that Britain’s commitment to its countryside is uniquely rooted in the beauty of its landscape; that “While many Americans find bucolic scenes pleasant, Britain’s reverence for its rural scenery rises to a much higher level,” and that “While Americans may lament the loss of the family farm and attack urban sprawl, there is no similar national commitment to the countryside.”
But of course, such a sweeping claim is hard to prove, and perhaps finds a counterweight in the U.S.’s reverence for its most striking “wilderness” areas. (The term “wilderness,” though, is misleading: It remains in common parlance as well as in official use under U.S. land management, but it tends to obscure the long history of Indigenous groups shaping and preserving the lands that only look untouched today.)
The U.S.’s long-time pursuit of the dramatic as opposed to the bucolic is apparent in the timeline of the two countries’ establishment of national parks. Yellowstone became the U.S.’s first in 1872, nearly eight decades before England’s Peak District was accorded the equivalent distinction in the U.K. It’s evidenced, too, by the U.S.’s literary tradition of mythologizing the great American outdoors in all of its grandeur. A canon like that comprising Thoreau’s Walden, Muir’s writings on the American West, McPhee’s Coming into the Country, Strayed’s Wild, and even recent cinema like Free Solo and 127 Hours does not, and arguably cannot, exist in the U.K.—where the scale is simply smaller, visibly uninhabited land scant, and the spotlight still on the pastoral.
In the U.S., though, much of the land—revered, under-appreciated, or neither—is owned and managed by the federal government: 28 percent of U.S. land was federally managed as of 2020. It’s trickier to identify just how much of Britain’s land is government-owned, but an oft-cited 2019 report estimates that the figure is only around 8 percent, with the other 92 percent owned primarily by corporations, and members of the aristocracy.
So while Britain’s landscape remains nominally private, just as it was three centuries ago, the government is (somewhat) intent on maintaining its value for human recreation, as well as its ecological and climatic health, and is quick to regulate private development to these ends. Natural England, a body responsible for conservation and sustainable development oversight, was created by the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act of 2006, half a decade after the CRoW Act returned to England and Wales’ people a portion of their long-lost roaming rights.
Still, England’s most passionate walkers retain an air of collective resentment about all the access still denied. The Ramblers Association, founded in 1935, initially aimed to build on the momentum of the Kinder Scout trespass in the campaign for improved public access, and has tirelessly continued that fight for the past 86 years. Within a year of their founding, the Ramblers had amassed 1,200 members spread across hundreds of affiliated clubs—but their membership has since jumped by 8000 percent. Today, they boast nearly 100,000 members across three branches. (Wales’ “Ramblers Cymru” split off from the original, England-based branch in 1974, and Ramblers Scotland split in 1985, though the three groups remain closely connected.)
Today, the Ramblers promote not only access to land for walking, but the activity itself. Through a combination of national, partnered campaigns and over 500 affiliated local clubs, the Ramblers Association has increasingly aimed to improve British health of mind and body through walking since the 1990s.
The Ramblers’ primary campaign at the moment, called “Don’t Lose Your Way,” is a crowd-sourced attempt to identify and save tens of thousands of miles of historical pathways, which, if not officially entered into the public domain by 2026, risk being handed back over to private landowners—a frightening provision of the CRoW Act.
Mya-Rose Craig goes by “Birdgirl.” (Or “Dr Mya-Rose Birdgirl Craig,” on Twitter.) She’s 18, British Bangladeshi, and, indeed, a Doctor of Science—an honorary degree conferred upon her by the University of Bristol last year, in recognition of her impressive, multifaceted work in addressing climate change, as well as racism in the outdoors.
Craig is also a lifelong birder. In 2015, she organized a short bird-watching camp in her home county of Somerset, England, and tells me via email that the first time she did, “[I]t was all white boys that signed up.” Then she began realizing that whenever she was out walking, “[T]here was no one else who looked like me. I realized I was doing it wrong, and needed to aim to give VME [Visible Minority Ethnic] people this opportunity.”
So in 2016, Craig founded Black2Nature, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to “Entice VME communities to engage with their natural environment in order to better reflect the ethnic diversity of the UK in nature.”
Craig contends that people of color face significant barriers to accessing nature as compared to their white counterparts, and she’s not alone. Research conducted by Natural England in 2009 and 2016 shows that white adults are considerably more likely to frequent the “natural environment” (any public green space, including that abroad) than non-white adults, with nearly 60 percent of the former claiming to have spent time outdoors at least weekly in the year prior to their being surveyed, compared to only about 40 percent of the latter.
Part of this discrepancy might be chalked up to population demographics. The most recent U.K. census, taken in 2011, determined that 83 percent of the country’s urban population was white, whereas nearly 98 percent of its rural population was white. (Both of those percentages are growing steadily smaller, as the forthcoming 2021 census is sure to show.)
But the simple fact of living in an English city should not be—is not—a determining factor in whether one has access to its bountiful outdoors. The U.K.’s Department for Environmental, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) published a comprehensive “Landscapes Review” in 2019, which in part examines the disproportionate whiteness of British nature, highlighting at one point the idea that even when cities are well-linked to national parks by public transport, “[U]nderstanding can [still] be a barrier.”
The Landscapes Review cites interviews conducted by a government body called the Policy Lab; conversations with young people and people of color who view themselves as outsiders to nature. “It is as if access to the countryside involves joining a club,” the report states. “Those on the inside get the benefits. Those on the outside need ways in which to join.”
At the root of these problems, DEFRA finds a generally tepid, surface-level “interest” in diversity, “rather than a burning desire to change.” But this dispassion should come as no great surprise: DEFRA points out that “[T]hose governing the bodies looking after our national landscapes … are almost all white, almost all male and many are retired.”
Londoners in early January, on the eve of the U.K.’s first lockdown of 2021, atop Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath. Photograph by Julia Holzman.
Much of what drew me so immediately to northwest London when my family moved there from New Jersey in 2015 was Hampstead Heath. The park’s sprawling borders were draped around our extended neighborhood to the north and east. I hadn’t been familiar with the concept of the “heath” before moving to England, but quickly grew intimately so.
Indeed, heathland—while by no means uniquely English—has a deep English history, being both a partial product of ancient human intervention, and a traditional landscape of the commons, according to Rackham’s History of the Countryside chapter on the subject. “[Heathland] destruction has curtailed the Englishman’s already meagre right to explore his own country,” Rackham writes, and he claims that protecting what’s left of it is “a special responsibility of England: the Dutch, Danes, and Swedes have been even more single-minded in destroying their heaths, and most of what is left in Europe is [England’s].”
But Hampstead Heath, for me, is not classified ecologically, by its particular makeup of undershrub plants in the way that it might be for Rackham. Instead, the Heath is known to me emotionally, as treasured grounds for exploring a country I can barely claim as a home.
Hampstead Heath, which is run by the City of London Corporation, is far more expansive and unmanicured than its Royal Parks–managed sisters to the south. Where central London’s Hyde Park/St. James’s Park/Green Park/Regent’s Park quartet can boast close proximity to royal residences, ornate fountains, and immaculately landscaped lawns and gardens intersected at each turn by purposeful, lamppost-lined concrete footpaths, Hampstead Heath offers tucked-away patches of dense woodland interspersed seemingly (though not actually) at nature’s will with picnic-perfect clearings, and a series of muddy-bottomed bathing ponds that house a diehard year-round fandom.
I cherish Hampstead Heath so dearly—despite only sharing a continent with it for at most a few months each year, ever since returning to the U.S. for college—that I often forget others’ capacity to feel the same.
But it’s also why it’s so thrilling to see unfettered Hampstead Heath adoration crop up consistently in the brilliant works of northwest London–bred writer Zadie Smith. The Heath meanders into the lives of Smith’s characters when one leasts expects it—or, rather, they into it.
In her 2005 novel, On Beauty, Smith describes the Heath as magnificently as I’ve ever seen it described:
A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city’s highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy.
And while its treatment is less ecstatically reverent in her nonfiction, Hampstead Heath leaves its mark on Smith’s body of cultural criticism, too.
In her 2013 essay “Love in the Gardens,” Smith, whose mother Yvonne was a Jamaican immigrant to the U.K., and whose father Harvey was white and English, takes trips to Europe with the latter as a vantage point from which to explore so much else. Smith explains soon into the essay why she and her father—an odd couple, in the eyes of strangers—naturally gravitated toward parks and gardens above all else on their initial trips to Europe: “In public parks it is a little easier to feel you belong. I felt this instinctively as a teenager (and, thinking back, as a child on Hampstead Heath).”
Later in the same essay, Smith considers the privilege of believing in the openness of public green space through the lens of her late mother’s experiences:
Harvey and I knew from experience that it takes a while for immigrants to believe a park is truly public and open to them: my mother always used to complain, exaggerating somewhat (and not without a little pride), that she was the only black woman to be seen pushing a stroller through St James’s Park in 1975. Sometimes a generation of habitation is needed to create the necessary confidence; to believe that this gate will open for you, too.
Oge Ejizu became London’s regional leader for Black Girls Hike U.K. this past April. The group, originally based out of Manchester, was only founded by Rhiane Fatinikun in 2019 but has already gained a sizable following, online and outside alike.
Ejizu was interviewed by Liv Bolton this past December on The Outdoors Fix podcast, and muses toward the start of the conversation, “I didn’t really grow up with the outdoors; I didn’t really think it was something for me.” Ejizu’s family was never interested in hiking, and it took some repeated coercion from a best friend to get her hiking as an adult. One day, something changed. “I don’t really know what turned,” she says, “but I just really started to take it all in, and really enjoyed being outdoors, and being able to see the landscape. I was able to … clear my head, think more, and just kind of slow down the pace of life.”
But much like Mya-Rose Craig, as soon as Ejizu began hiking in earnest, she was struck and saddened by the dearth of people who looked like her among the outdoor crowd. “So I just went on Instagram and was like, ‘Black girls hiking,’ and typed it in, and yeah, that profile came up!” Ejizu says in the interview, explaining how she first came to follow Black Girls Hike, which in turn led to her helping to expand the group’s presence in southeast England.
Fatinikun founded the group after having also connected with hiking as an adult. As she tells the Guardian in a late-December article touting women-led outdoor diversity efforts, Fatinikun was aboard a train in England’s Peak District when she watched a group of fitted out hikers disembarking for the mountains, and felt an immediate fascination. She bought boots and went on her first hike soon after—this all in 2019—and later set up an Instagram page that quickly became a registered charity.
“‘Many people grow up in cities where they experience racism on a daily basis so it feels uncomfortable to them to head out into the countryside—the last bastions of whiteness—where it is even less diverse,’” Fatinikun tells the Guardian. But there’s power in numbers. Black Girls Hike, its founder explains, “‘gives black women the confidence to go to places they might not have done before.’”
Ejizu would agree. Asked about her dream for the future of the Black Girls Hike London branch toward the end of the Outdoors Fix interview, she laughs, and ponders for a moment. “I guess my dream would be for it to be just a great walking group; for people to come and feel like they’re in a community of other hikers and walkers; for people to feel like it’s their safe space.”
Then she adds: “Also, that [the group is] able to cater to different people’s accessibility needs; that it’s not just for able-bodied people, but that we have walks and hikes that cater to everyone. I think that for me, that’s kind of the dream.”
Barriers to entry in nature don’t stop at legal ownership status, or class, race, or gender. And the fact that Oge Ejizu highlighted this in her interview, calling attention to the inaccessibility of England’s outdoors for those with limited mobility and other disabilities, seems a positive sign of the times.
Paula Brunt was raised in northwest England, in Cumbria’s beloved Lake District, where the eponymous lakes and the low-slung mountains that cradle them create an irresistibly English idyll, drawing tourists each year by the tens of millions.
Brunt lives in southern England now, and serves as secretary and rambles organizer for the Disabled Ramblers group (not technically affiliated with the Ramblers), which she joined in 2014. The year she became a club member, she tells me over Zoom in early March, she was still living in rural Cumbria, and her medication prevented her from driving. She was stuck at home.
Then Brunt got an off-road scooter; an all-terrain vehicle called a Tramper. “It just transformed my life, really,” she tells me. On her scooter, Brunt began regularly joining outings led by the Disabled Ramblers, who organize monthly group rambles (aside from during pandemics) from May to October across England and Wales. Three years ago, Brunt was asked if she wanted to lead one such trek. “Which was terrifying,” she admits. “But nobody died! So that was a good thing.”
On the heels of her first successful regional ramble, group leadership asked Brunt if she’d like to take on a “national” ramble. (Once a year, the charity organizes a weeklong trip to a particularly scenic spot, and these national rambles, excellent for community-building and built-in vacationing, attract group members from all across Britain.) “Yeah, so I did the rambles and said, ‘Can I help in any other way?’ And I seemed to have managed to get myself onto the committee at that point.”
Now on the committee, Brunt does a little of everything, at every level.
She and I speak on a Tuesday. The coming Thursday, Brunt and her husband are planning to go down the road and meet a woman who’s lodged a complaint with her local council about a gate that she’s been unable to open, but which Brunt has already successfully opened once from her wheelchair, at the behest of the same council. Her plan is to teach the woman how to hook a walking stick around the loop locking the gate closed, and spring it open.
More frequently, though, Brunt and the Disabled Ramblers work on a larger scale, collaborating with other organizations and government bodies like DEFRA and Natural England to lobby for better accessibility provisions in environmental legislation. Right now, much of Brunt’s work with the Disabled Ramblers involves consulting with Natural England on accessibility plans for the England Coast Path, an ambitious route which aims to be the longest of its kind, once complete. On one section of this path, in southwestern England near a town called Weston-super-Mare, Brunt tells me, “They’ve taken out steps and put in ramps—so it’s making quite a big difference for a lot of people.”
Brunt has a fundamental principle; one which she and the Disabled Ramblers apply to all of their consulting work in the access space, small-scale or large: “‘By the least restrictive means.’” The gate that she’s revisiting on Thursday, accessible or not, probably doesn’t need to exist in the first place, Brunt thinks. Luckily, removing it entirely would be the council’s cheapest option. Also luckily (or perhaps the result of a generations worth of activist work): People are finally starting to listen.
A lot of what Brunt has to say about the financial inaccessibility of all-terrain wheelchairs, and the many intersections between disability access and broader U.K. land access, as well as the intersections between campaigning for accessibility for people with limited mobility and those with sensory and/or mental disabilities, is echoed nearly verbatim in my interview with another English rambler working on access for the disabled—a former head primary school teacher named Debbie North.
Years ago, getting into the hills on foot was North’s way of managing the stress of jobs in tough schools. But then she got sick, and lost some of her mobility—and with it, the freedom to lose herself in the outdoors. “Not being able to do that had a very significant impact on the way that I thought that my life was going to go,” she tells me. “I had to give up my career. And I gave up my passion for hillwalking.
But what North hadn’t realized before losing mobility, and would soon come to know well, was the vast meaning of “access”; the leaps and bounds in wheelchair technology that have been achieved in the past decades. And so a new passion of hers was born: Using, and helping others use, all-terrain wheelchairs.
Today North, like Brunt, works on a wide variety of accessibility issues, ranging from helping national parks draft access statements, to crossing the country to test out the alleged accessibility of tourist spots that tout it, but want (and often, as it turns out, desperately need) firsthand input from wheelchair users themselves.
And for the past six years, North has been building out the accessibility section of The Outdoor Guide (TOG), which is where I found her. The Outdoor Guide, created by Gina Bradbury Fox with the aim of broadening the reach and scope of her sister Julia Bradbury’s nationally televised British rambles, added an “AccessTOG” branch with North at the helm in order to broaden peoples’ horizons about all that was possible with limited mobility.
For her role at AccessTOG, North researches accessible alternatives to the rambles that Julia Bradbury films, and then completes them using a 4x4 all-terrain wheelchair of her own, a film crew trailing behind. The videos are short and sweet, yet thorough right down to the best and most wheelchair-friendly spot to purchase the requisite British cup of tea, post-ramble.
“For The Outdoor Guide, we try and keep it within sort of a family-type walk,” North says. “We’ve got some of the extreme walks on the website, but the majority of the 100 walks that we’ve got on are what people could probably do in a normal mobility scooter. And then we’ve got the other ones.”
When North first dipped her toes into “the other ones,” the national parks called her a “madwoman”; an “extremist.” But craving the thrill of summiting mountains, she pushed through the bias. “I’ve come across prejudice with mountain rescue, for example, who don’t really feel that I should be at the top of the mountain—but they haven’t seen the preparation that has gone behind the expedition … People are twitchy when they see a person like me on the top of Helvellyn,” North says, referring to England’s third-highest peak. “They’re like, ‘You’re not supposed to be here, you’re supposed to be down on a duck pond walk.’” (At this, Bradbury Fox, also on the Zoom call, chuckles and shakes her head.) “Mountain rescue got really, really twitchy. And now they say, ‘Where are you going this time, Debs? Where’re you heading to?’”
It’s a rare rambler who truly craves the extremes, taking uncertainty, bad weather, and physical discomfort in stride. I am not such a person (much as I wish I were), Debbie North just might be, and Mark Newton most certainly is. A middle-aged Welsh veteran equipped with a Tramper, a caravan attachment to sleep in, and his two cats in tow, Newton circled the entire British coast in under two years, circling back around to Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre in late 2014. He raised thousands of pounds for his favorite charities with the feat, and won the Guinness World Record for “Longest journey on an electric mobility vehicle.” Not long after, Newton set out again.
Late at night, mid-September, 2019. Quintin Lake comes home, but feels unwelcome. Lake, too, has traversed the entirety of Britain’s coast on his own. His journey began in 2015, and ended, nearly five and a half years later, at London’s iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral, in his native England, steps north of the River Thames—right around the spot on the map where the slim, snaking river first hints at opening itself up to the North Sea some 30 miles east.
Lake is no stranger to Britain or to long walks, but this walk—“The Perimeter,” he calls it—was his longest, and arguably his most British, yet. “It’s been said that Britain is more edge than middle, and I think it’s kind of true,” Lake muses over Zoom, explaining one of his reasons for taking the long way around this time. (In the late ’90s, when he was 21, Lake walked the more common Land’s End–to–John O’Groats, or “LEJOG,” route, trekking solo across contiguous Great Britain from its southernmost to northernmost tip.)
“It’s an island, and there’s separateness to it—it’s a place of arrivals and departures. So whether that was the early Christians coming from Ireland, or the Vikings coming from Scandinavia, or whether it was a French, or Spanish, or German invasion, or whether when it was physically connected to the continent, with the land bridge, there are all these echoes of different past connections [along Britain’s coast].”
Lake—still young, but with a former life as an architect already behind him—is now an architectural and landscape photographer, and undertook this epic journey–cum–art project in part to connect more deeply with the landscape beneath him. But this sense of true connection proved hard to come by at times, especially in England and Wales.
As Lake clung to the coastline, regularly going days without human contact, or trails to walk on (especially in Scotland), he often resorted to pitching his tent despite the elements, and “wild camping”—which, when applied to England and Wales, he calls “stealth camping.” In lowland England and Wales, where wild camping is illegal, Lake figured that so long as nobody could see him, they couldn’t catch him. His days in England and Wales were strenuous, often solitary, and made extra long by the need to set up and break down a covert camp under the cloak of darkness; he looked for well-hidden spots that lacked any sweeping vistas, in order to avoid being spotted by landowners.
“Whereas in Scotland, you can camp anywhere,” Lake wistfully explains. “And that makes you feel much more connected to the landscape, like you’re not a criminal.”
In 2003, Scotland passed the Land Reform Act, and, with some minor exceptions, its people gained the comprehensive freedom to roam (and swim) perhaps the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.
Granted, I visited the craggy, moody, sheep-heavy northern coast of Scotland for four days, four years ago. Quintin walked the country’s vast coastline for about 200. Encouraged by his glowing reviews of land access in Scotland, I prod a little. “So there’s kind of more of an ingrained culture, just on a face-to-face level, of… freedom?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s ‘ingrained,’ because [the access law] is quite new … I found that the majority of people were really proud of it, and that the majority of people, if I met them somewhere wild and asked, ‘Would it be alright if I walked down this road?’ nearly always—every Scot I met—would say, ‘Oh, you can go wherever you like, because we have open access!’” The rare prickly landowner Lake did come across in Scotland, he recounts, usually had a telltale English accent.
“I felt angry about the restrictions in England when I came back to it,” Lake tells me. It was late at night; September. “There’s a tiny little sign on the coast saying ‘Welcome to England,’ and then you cross the border, and immediately you’re in this kind of corridor of barbed wire. And there’s this immediate sense that you’re not to be trusted, and you’re in trouble. And it’s a really visceral thing when you’re just walking on the ground.”
Sam, Rachel, and John near Scotland and Britain’s rainy northeasterly tip, at Duncansby Head. August, 2018. Photograph by Julia Holzman.
Scotland is home for Fiona Ferguson, youthful and Zoom-savvy but all the while busy cooking up elaborate outdoor plans for her nearing retirement. Currently living in the small city of Perth, not far north of Edinburgh, Ferguson agreed to talk with me after I posted about my research in a Facebook group for British walkers. She’s been in Scotland nearly her whole life, save for a decade-long stint in South London.
Ferguson is not a walker by trade (so few are!), but rather a casual hobbyist. She’s been walking and hiking for fun since before the pandemic made it cool—and her dogs will always need to be walked anyway, she jokes, “So you might as well make the most of it.”
I ask Ferguson about the massive expansion of access rights that came with Scotland’s Land Reform Act, eager to hear a local’s perspective on the paradigm shift that Lake’s version of post-2003 Scotland seems to suggest. But that roaming-friendly culture that Lake so cherished in 2018 and 2019 has been around as long as Ferguson can recall—which holds up against history. The 2003 legislation didn’t exactly usher in a radically new era of land access in Scotland, largely responsible, as it was, for codifying the country’s already extensive tradition of roaming rights.
“My understanding is that there’s never been trespass laws in Scotland. That basically … you can go anywhere you want in Scotland, as long as you’re not damaging anything; as long as you leave it the way you found it,” Ferguson tells me. “But I was aware that the English laws changed a bit a while back, to make places more accessible for walkers and things like that, because it used to get quite dangerous if you were crossing a field and a landowner decided they weren’t too keen on you being there. That’s not something I’ve ever encountered in Scotland.”
Ferguson is the first to admit that she doesn’t make much use of her thorough right to roam off-piste. For all the stormy days Lake spent traversing the wildest reaches of the Scottish Highlands with nothing but a paper map (and a handful of offline mapping apps) to guide him, Ferguson has spent countless more enjoying Scotland’s marked paths and trails. When she’s out on her own, it’s simply a matter of practicality: “If I was to turn an ankle, I would be wanting to see that I’m on this path, not somewhere difficult to find,” she tells me.
On path or off, though, Ferguson and Lake seem to agree: Scotland is for walkers. Comparing Scotland with England, Ferguson says, “When you’re out walking, [Scots] are much more likely to say hello. And, you know, they might even stop and have a chat. And there’s usually some comment about the famous Scottish midge; the biting insects that attack you.”
I ask Lake whether Britons have adopted any American thru-hiking culture, and he tells me that they haven’t. “American online communities; ultralight hiking; wearing trail-running shoes; things like that—all that culture is American … We don’t have ‘trail names.’ It sounds like enormous fun. We don’t have ‘trail angels,’ we don’t have any of that stuff, unfortunately.”
But in my conversations with both Lake and Ferguson, Scotland’s West Highland Way comes up as a glowing example of a trail that’s often crowded, in a good way. On the West Highland Way, Ferguson tells me, “There was a real sense of camaraderie that I haven’t experienced anywhere else, walking in other parts of the U.K.” Lake says that on busy trails like these, “You meet the same people over multiple days, and you get to know them, and you chat and meet them in pubs. There is a real sense of trail solidarity.”
But circumnavigating the British coast, no such community exists. Only history and shifting light; shoreline pollution and community beach clean-ups; toxic agricultural runoff water and copious rain and worrisome cliff erosion and the remarkable proliferation of wind farms. And maybe a tourist like me, out for a summer day’s jaunt down the South West Coast Path with three friends, an amateur’s camera swinging from her neck, offering a nod and a smile.
And then there’s Northern Ireland. Nearly 100 years ago to the month, on May 3, 1921, the aptly nicknamed “Emerald Isle” was officially partitioned. While the Catholic-majority south gained its partial independence the very next year, and was known as the “Irish Free State” until the Republic of Ireland Act came into effect in 1949, Protestant-majority Northern Ireland has remained a full-fledged nation of the United Kingdom to this day, albeit not without significant contest, and always a choppy Irish Sea away from the metropole.
Three decades after partition, Seamus Murphy was born. As a child growing up about a mile north of the ultra-porous north-south border, Murphy felt free to roam his local hills, now a designated “Area of Outstanding National Beauty” (AONB) called the Ring of Gullion, and he took ample advantage of that freedom.
But as the 20th century drew to a close, Murphy’s children and their generation found themselves without the same liberty to explore the countryside. “The Troubles,” which lasted from the late 1960s up until the turn of the millennium in Northern Ireland, left Murphy’s treasured hills markedly unsafe, and therefore unfree. “The British Army had a series of forts on the hilltops with exclusion zones around them,” Murphy explains in an email before our interview. “And given the possibility of attacks on the forts, it was just unwise to walk in the hills.”
So in January 2011, he founded the Gap o’ the North Hill Walking club. In a way, it was a reclamation of the land he grew up on—but also, Murphy has always been more interested in the history of human interaction with the landscape than in untouched “wilderness.” And in Ireland, very little land looks untouched, anyway. So the club was also formed as a way for Murphy to share and expand his knowledge of regional landscape history, and to deepen fellow members’ appreciation for their ancestral land.
“Our club differs from probably most of the other ones in Northern Ireland and indeed all of Ireland, by virtue of the fact that we actually live within the mountains,” Murphy ventures. “We don’t have to travel to hillwalk.”
(Murphy explains that to him, the word “hillwalking” carries a more free-range connotation than the word “hiking,” which he generally takes to mean that a defined trail is being followed. In Ireland, where the few mountains that do exist might be condescendingly deemed mere hills by outdoorspeople of more vertiginous heritage, Murphy says that trails aren’t always necessary.)
About five years ago, in the midst of retiring from the club’s leadership committee, Murphy looked around, and noticed that four extended families were more or less running the joint. A few years later he took stock again, and the same was true. “They were no longer the same four families—well, three of them were the same—but my cousins were on the committee, and another guy’s brother was, and so on. [It’s] very close-knit like that.” This deep-rooted localness has served the Gap o’ the North club well in their quest for better access to walking routes.
In their 2017 Environmental Law Review paper, “The trouble with accessing the countryside in Northern Ireland: A comparison with Great Britain,” authors Linda Price and Mark Simpson explain that Northern Ireland was not only the last U.K. nation to codify any provisions for expanded recreational land access (which it did, eventually, in 1983’s Access to the Countryside Order), but also that it’s since followed through on using these provisions to a far lesser extent than its British neighbors.
The reasons for Northern Ireland’s continued resistance to public roaming rights are plentiful and intersecting, which Price and Simpson’s paper makes clear. Among these many reasons is the widespread sense that Northern Ireland’s farms are mostly small and family-owned, as opposed to the perceived profusion of vast, faceless swaths of corporate farmland across Great Britain.
Price and Simpson’s Northern Irish interview subjects tended to understand the relative strength of Northern Ireland’s farming and landowning lobbies (as compared with those in Great Britain) as rooted partially in the intimate scale of farming there, given that the public’s misuse of one footpath has the potential to wreak proportionally greater damage in Northern Ireland than it might on a sprawling British farm. (Granted, Price and Simpson note that their interviewees’ perceptions of British scale might be skewed.)
Murphy, while no great fan of strict Northern Irish landowners himself, brings this point up in our interview, too, almost verbatim. He also mentions a fear among these smallholders that usually goes unspoken: that the introduction of better rights of way might compromise their abilities to sell farmland for housing.
Luckily for Murphy, the Gap o’ the North’s intrepid hillwalkers are local—and therefore closely intertwined with the farmers and smallholders whose hills they like to walk each Sunday. The club asks farmers they know for permission to cross their land, and generally, they’re warmly invited to do so. But when the club asks permission to advertise the walks on their website, they’re uniformly greeted with resounding nos.
“In other words, on a neighborly basis, they will allow us to walk, but they are very wary that we’re trying to extend that access to all hillwalkers,” Murphy says. “And the farming organizations are actually combing the literature and checking the websites for anybody advertising routes … This has created a culture where the statutory agencies are afraid of the farming lobbies. This is why our access officers in our local council are utterly useless.”
Without any help from the impotent access officers (a task administered differently across Northern Ireland by individual local councils, as dictated by the 1983 law), the Gap o’ the North has been diligently trying to stake out a 60-kilometer “marked line of walking” (not a built path) around the Ring of Gullion since the club’s inception. They just want some signage, and unlocked gates where necessary.
“So we made a list of farmers that we needed to talk to. And then we deliberately picked members of their extended family to go talk to them. And we used kinship networks like that. But many of them said, ‘Look, how can I be sure that I'm not going to get another group here next week?’ So they were specifically looking for that assurance that we were not transferring access to a wider walking community.”
On an interpersonal level up in the hills, and on a national level in the courts, Northern Ireland’s farming lobby remains prohibitively powerful. But hillwalking has been on the rise, too. Murphy estimates that the sport gains 10 to 15 percent more participants each year across Ireland—notably, he says, many of these newcomers are women, whereas the hillwalking of Murphy’s college years was almost entirely male-dominated.
And since the early 2000s, Northern Ireland has been deeply conflicted over whether or not to establish its first and only national park in the picturesque Mournes Mountains. All three countries of Great Britain, as well as the usually more land-restrictive Republic of Ireland, are home to multiple national parks. Northern Ireland—which, as, Price and Simpson write, has little “physical and emotional distinction between urban and rural,” and is lacking Britain’s looming cities full of people dreaming of escape to an idyllic, open countryside—is holding out tooth and nail.
June 2018 ended fast, before I had time to savor it all. My journal entries began tumbling over one another, out of my control; I wasn’t used to experiencing so much so quickly that the actual living of life edged out the time and will to record it.
And I certainly had no time to rigorously fact-check Taegen’s suggestion from our first day in Dorset, about the radical publicness of the land we lived on that summer. Our second and third days on the Jurassic Coast, we roamed the most vibrant and varied landscape I’d ever seen. We spent steep and sweaty hours walking our seven-mile stretch of the South West Coast Path, from Osmington Mills, a popular 17th-century port for smugglers offloading loot in England, to Lulworth Cove, where 21st-century parents were out in droves, springing for those 50-pence-extra Cadbury Flakes to adorn their children’s ice cream cones. And then we walked back again.
Ruba and Taegen walk England’s South West Coast Path, approaching Durdle Door via the clouds. Photograph by Julia Holzman.
This is the online version of my B.A. Capstone project, submitted to the UChicago History Department on April 9, 2021. To see a cited version, please get in touch.
