99% Invisible - 313- Right to Roam

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people who called themselves “ramblers” and spent their days working in the factories of Manchester, England. Plus, bothy talk. Right to Roam

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When producer Katie Mingle's dad retired, he began walking. A lot. He'd always been a walker, but with all the new time on his hands, his walking took on a forest, gumpian, fervor. He started doing these really long, multi-day treks through the countryside. And even though he's American, he mostly preferred to walk in the UK. In fact, over the course of several years, he walked the entire length of Great Britain. And on one of these many trips in 2003. I was walking through this beautiful, rolling hills and wooded area, and there were, there were just literally hundreds and hundreds of pheasants and grouse along this trail and you'd walk along and they would fly up in the air.

That's my dad, Jim Mingle. I walked and walked and it got later and later and I realized I couldn't get back to my B&B where I was staying. So I decided I would hitchhike back. Hitchhiking is dangerous, Dad, but go on. I stuck out my thumb and I pulled this Jeep and I hopped in and there was this guy sitting there who all dressed in sort of traditional tweed outfit. It was a funny cap and there was a shotgun outfit. It was a funny cap and there was a shotgun on the rack in the back which you never, ever saw in Britain. And we got to talking and he said he was the gamekeeper for Madonna and Guy Richie. My dad had been walking through Madonna's private estate when he was picked up by her

gamekeeper. Which is a thing a lot of wealthy landowners have in England, a person who manages the hunting activity on their land. Right, so this gamekeeper drove him back to the village where he was staying and dropped him off. And no, his story doesn't end with him meeting Madonna. I wish it did too. And I ask about Madonna how he liked this game pre-keeper liked working for her.

He said he loved his job and he thought Madonna was just wonderful. What's your favorite Madonna song, Dad? Oh, I have no idea. I just like the idea of Madonna. I'm not very good at remembering those kinds of things. Now that we've established that Madonna is wonderful and my dad can't name a single one of her songs, you might be asking yourself as I was. Dad, what were you doing in Madonna's backyard?

I was walking most of the time across private property. I was walking from one field to the next, climbing over the fence where they are through a gate and going on and this was permitted. It's true, my dad walked the length of Great Britain and was on private property a lot of the time, which is different, obviously, than the way we do things in the US.

If you wanted to walk across this country, you'd have to do it on a combination of public trails and roads, and you certainly couldn't cut across Madonna's property. This right in Britain, to walk through private land, is known colloquially as the Right to Rome, and the movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people dressed in army surplus shorts and hiking boots, carrying canvass and rucksacks and canteens. They called themselves, Ramblers.

Rambler is one of those quite old English words. I don't know where it came from really, but it means walking or hiking in the countryside. This is Rulie Smith, a Rambler slash journalist who says his rambling forefathers and mothers were toiling away in the factories of 1930s Manchester. Manchester was a very grimy town, a very dirty, smokey, horrible environment. A product really of the industrial revolution. Outside Manchester was one of the most beautiful parts of England, an area known as the Peak District.

So if you can imagine factory workers in Manchester and Sheffield could actually see these inviting moors from their homes and their workplaces and they weren't allowed to walk on them. It hadn't always been this way. For hundreds of years, an idea of the commons had existed in England. So the commons, they were an integral part of medieval life for the ordinary villager in England. That's Ken Ilguna's author of this land is your land,

how we lost the right to Rome Rome and how to take it back. All the land, it was owned by either a king or a lord, but the peasants had very substantial and real rights on these common lands. In this feudal system, kings and lords controlled all the land, and the manor grew enough food to support itself and its tenants. The peasants lived on the land, and the manor grew enough food to support itself and its tenants. The peasants lived on the land,

sometimes without written leases, but with assumed rights to use it in exchange for various types of service. They could graze their cattle, cut lumber, they could draw water, they could collect peat, they could use it for a whole bunch of purposes. All of that began to change in the 1400s when wool prices rose across Europe. Landowners wanted it on the profits and in order to graze sheep more efficiently, they

needed to fence off pastures. And that's when we began to see a period of enclosure. Landowners cleared entire villages of people making them homeless and put up little stone walls and hedges to mark the boundaries of their property. In a county called Warwickshire, 61 villages were wiped out before the year 1500. Over the years, Parliament created more and more laws to keep people from using what was once common land. It all ramped up in the 1700s.

There was nearly 4,000 acts of parliament between 1760 and 1870. That's a sixth of England that went from common lands to enclosed private property, destroying people's livelihoods in way of life. People were so desperate to continue hunting on this once common land that they came at night and covered their faces in soot for extra camouflage. They became known as the Blacks. And in 1723, Parliament passed the Black Act. So this Black Act, it created 50 offenses that were punishable by death for people who were accessing

this land. Eventually, the death penalty for trespassing was done away with, but the land remained closed to the vast majority of people. In the 1800s, Britain industrialized, and people found themselves indoors all day and unable to find places for recreation. England did not have a national park system at this time, and the trails that people could access were extremely limited. Still the people long to be in the hills.

They walked where they could and trespassed where they couldn't. They climbed over fences and tried to stay hidden from the gamekeepers. And all over England, so-called Rambling Club started to form. The Forest Ramblers Club, the Midlands Institute of Ramblers, the Manchester Rambling Club, there were tons of these walking groups in the late 1800s and early 1900s forming to fight for access and walking rights. They oftentimes had socialist sensibilities, but at the heart, there was a love for walking and a belief that it was their right.

Access was no longer a matter of survival as it had been in the days when enclosure began. It was about recreation and getting away from the polluted industrial cities. Which brings us back to polluted industrial 1930s Manchester, an rambling club called the British Workers Sports Federation. The British Workers Sports Federation. And in this group was a charismatic rambler named Benny Rothman.

A stocky little character, a very broad grin and great sense of humor, and a man of the highest principles. But he was exceptionally short, he was about five foot nothing, as we say. Rulie actually got to know Benny later in life. He was a man who I very much looked up to, although he was very short. So one day back in 1932, a few people from Benny's group tried to take a walk in the Hills near Manchester in that beautiful mountainous area near the city called the Peak District. And they were chased off by a group of gamekeepers and when

they got back to their camp Benny Rothman and others said you know if there was enough of us they couldn't stop us. So Benny and the other ramblers came up with an idea. Let's get a huge group together and walk onto this mountain called Kinder Scout. Which was the biggest mountain in this peak district. It was called the Forbidden Mountain. And this area, this was guarded by a whole bunch of gamekeepers.

These were intimidating. Men,. I mean they would use telescopes to identify trespassers from afar. They carried these big sticks or clubs that they would sometimes use on trespassers. The British Workers' Sports Federation did not keep their plans to trespass a secret. They gave an interview to the local paper saying, we feel we cannot any longer submit to being deprived of the beauties of the countryside for the convenience of the landowners. Wherever we claim we have a just right to go, we shall trespass in mass and Sunday will be the opening of our campaign. Not everyone was on board.

More conservative Rambling groups in the area wrote editorials denouncing their plan, saying it would hurt the cause for expanded access to the countryside. One editorial argued that trespassing was fine, but it should be done alone, or with just one or two people, quietly, neatly, and successfully. The police were well aware of the plans to trespass at Kinder Scout and Benny Rothman's role in all of it. And on the day of the event, they tried to serve him with an injunction to keep him from going.

The police knew he was coming, and he arrived by bicycle, and they all expected him to come by train, so they were kind of hanging out at the train station. Rothman makes it to the trespass and finds about 400 other people are there too, mostly young people below the age of 21. A lot of men, but some women too. They're wearing old army tops and multicolored sweaters and khaki shorts and worn work boots. This is kind of the standard hiking garb of the day and for whatever reason they carry these enormous rucksacks. They're considered like the thing to do at the time. They co-often wore bear eyes on the heads,

so it was a very, very motley crew, I think. This motley crew of hikers gathered with their braze and rucksacks at the base of the mountain, and Benny Rothman gave a speech about taking back the rights they lost in the enclosure acts of the 17 and 1800s. And he emphasized that the trespass on Kinderskout was meant to be peaceful. And with that the group set off of the mountain. The other thing they did was sing. They quite often sang when they went out rambling.

And they were singing songs like the Internationale and that sort of thing. And that of course showed their political leaning as well. Communist. The ramblers were in a good mood as they hyped. They sang and talked. There were some police behind them keeping an eye on things and huffing to keep up with the pace of the young walkers. At one point a group of gamekeepers approached them, wagging their sticks, and a small scuffle

ensued. One gamekeeper kind of rolls over and hurts his ankle. That's the extent of the scuffle. Eventually, the ramblers made their way back to the bottom. The trespass had been a success. They'd openly walked on Kinder Scout and no one had been able to stop them. And it probably all would have ended right there, with nothing much gained or lost on either side. If the police hadn't decided to make some arrests.

Rothman and five other ring leaders, they're arrested. At this time, trespassing wasn't even an arrestable offense, so the police came up with another charge. Insightment to riotous assembly. One rambler got off, but the rest were convicted. came up with another charge. One rambler got off, but the rest were convicted. And they're given prison sentences from two to six months. But when the sentences were handed down by the judge, that actually united the rambler's cause

and they all thought this was terrible, you know, just for walking on the moors people being sent to prison. Suddenly there was this huge amount of awareness in the general public about walking rights. This was like a national news item at the time. And people were sympathetic. And it would set in motion changes that would transform how England thinks about private property. It's been described as one of the most successful acts of civil disobedience ever in the history of this country. The whole thing is even memorialized in song. There was a guy on the trespass named Jimmy Miller.

He eventually became a pretty well-known folk singer in England and changed his name to Yuan Macon. And Yuan wrote the song based on the mass trespass called the Manchester Amall. And you enroute the song, based on the Master's Press, called the Manchester Rambler. Do you know the words? You're not gonna ask me to sing it, are you? I actually, yeah, I really want you to sing it. I can sing the chorus, but I think you should get a recording, really.

I'm a Rambler, I'm a Rambler, from Manchester way, I'm a rambler from Manchester way. I get all my pleasure, the heart maul and way. I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I have my freedom on Sunday. The day was just ending and I was descending. It is the anthem for the trespasser in this country and it'll be played at my funeral. After the trespass, the Rambling Groups continued to push for expanded access.

There were more trespasses. In a 1951, when Britain opened its first national park, it was in the peak district where the Kindre Scout trespass took place. This was no accident. Years of negotiations between the Ramblers and the landowners and legislators in the area had paved the way. But it wasn't until the year 2000

that the Ramblers got what they'd always wanted. An act of parliament that opened up huge swaths of the country where people could roam free. The countryside and rights of way act, and that opened up mountains, moors, heaths, downs. Those are just kind of fancy English words for unimproved grassland. And now we do have the right to roam in open country which is what those lads in 1932 were fighting for. The 2000 act opened up about 7% of the land in England and 21% in Wales on which you are free to roam meaning you don't even have to stay on a trail. You can truly just wander around. And 7% may not sound like a lot. But between that and other designated

trails, where there are more restrictions, you can now pretty easily walk across England, just like Katie's dad did. A small footnote. The year after my dad rambled across Madonna's property, she actually sued to keep people from wandering around out there. The government ended up allowing her to close off a lot of her estate, but did keep some small amount of it open to ramblers. Madonna wasn't the only person with concerns about ramblers. When the countryside and rights of way act past, a lot of landowners feared the worst. You know, everyone was worried about people sniffing glue out on the countryside and people being mowed down by tractors and wildly fornicating.

Like, this was all in the newspapers. Like, people were really worried, but none of that stuff turned out to be true. In addition to Britain, a bunch of other European countries also have partial right to Rome systems, meaning some but not all private property is accessible to walkers. But then there are countries where the right is even further expanded. Norway, Finland, Sweden has this thing called Alamansrotten, which means every man's right. And this means you can walk over Kaupp man's right, and this means you can walk over cow pasture, this means you can walk through the woods, this means you can access virtually

the whole countryside. In the United States we have a system of national and state parks, but we don't have any rights to wander through private property, And in some places, you might even get shot for doing it. The idea of opening up private land to the public seems almost un-American, but this wasn't always the case. Yeah, this is kind of like a forgotten chapter of American history. Americans who were un-inslaived, we had the right to roam from the colonial days up until the Civil War. In the early days of this country, it was common practice to hunt and fish on private land if it wasn't enclosed by offense. In fact, the Pennsylvania delegation to the Constitution

even tried to get this enshrined in the Bill of Rights. That's how important this was to early Americans. Nearly a century later, in an 1862 essay entitled Walking, Henry David Thoreau wrote that he feared that one day, quote, walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. This day may have come even sooner than Thoreau feared. Kenogunas says our concept of private property began to change just a few years later

after the Civil War, partly because of the end of slavery. One perfect example of this is in 1865. It's the Louisiana legislature. And after the war, they passed this resolution. They acknowledged the end of the war and they also do something else. They criminalize trespassing. Now, why would they do that right after the Civil War? I think I know why.

They did that because now you had a whole bunch of free and independent black people. There were other reasons as well. As Native Americans were forced onto reservations, land grants to the Railroads and the homestead act of 1862 turned great swaths of public land to private ownership and then came barbed wire. Fences became a lot cheaper so you could put fences up for livestock so suddenly a whole bunch more of the country is enclosed. You have a diversified economy, so people are no longer relying on the land for

hunting and fishing and gathering as much as they used to. So when people start chipping away at access rights, you don't have an impassioned group of proponents fighting to maintain their access rights. But Ken Ogunas thinks we should be fighting for recreational access in this country, where a lot of our public land is concentrated in places that are hard for most people to get to. For instance, Alaska has 329 million acres of our public land. That's 41% of all public land. You look at the five states with the highest percentages of public land.

That's Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming. All this land is in states where there aren't that many people. Ilgunas believes a right to roam system could help connect all these disparate pieces of public land and give us a sense of ownership. I think if we bring in a system like the right to roam, you know, we're still going to look at the land as if it's someone's, but I think we'll also begin to look at it as if it's sort of hours. And for what it's worth, my dad agrees. He says there's something really special about being able to walk wherever you want. I thought the whole concept of being able to walk respectfully across

private land was extraordinary and it was something that just doesn't exist here. We have a lot of public land where you can walk in the U.S. but this seemed very different. There were so many routes and trails to choose from. It felt like the whole country was open to you. These days, if you ramble across the open grasslands of England or Wales, you'll see the remnants of enclosure, the stone walls and fences. And you'll also see the things meant to help you get past these barriers, the styles, which are step ladders to help you get over fences, the so-called kissing gates, which are these shaped openings that people can walk through, but livestock cannot.

Because the fences aren't there to stop you anymore. You just hop over and continue on your way. Some places go beyond a right to roam and offer free shelter to a weary rambler. We visit Bothy's, up next. After England and Wales began implementing their countryside and rights of way act, Scotland, I love Scotland, they decided to take things a step further. So in 2003, they passed their own Land Reform Act, and it did a bunch of things, but first and foremost, it codified a long tradition of public access. Basically, if people are respectful of other people and property, they can roam even more

freely on private land up north. And it's part of a larger ethos about accessibility exemplified by these little buildings called Bothy's, a regional phenomenon that Kurt Colstead is here to tell us about. So historically, a Bothy was typically a small cottage for farm workers, but rural depopulation led to a lot of these being abandoned. So travelers who saw they were empty started spinning the nights in them. So the first time I ever encountered the word Bothy was in Starling, Scotland, and I ate it at a place for lunch called the coffee bothy, which I think is not these sort of things,

but it's kind of like us saying that I ate it at a pizza hut last night. Yeah, exactly, right. So Bothy has this broader association of these old, you know, old small buildings on farm steds. But yeah, it now is sort of grown to have this larger meaning of also being these places to stay. So if you bump into a traveler and say, hey, I'm staying at the Bothy, they'll probably know what you mean. Right, right. Cool. So Bothy's can be found across the British Isles,

but especially in the Scottish Highlands. And while they're publicly accessible, most are still on private property. And the owners just let ramblers sleep on their land, and Bothy's that they own. They do. Over time, a lot of these land owners have actually really embraced the tradition, leaving buildings unlocked and open for use. But it's a community effort too. There are volunteers who help take care of and manage bothy's through the Mountain Bothy Association, which is a Scottish charity. So I'm picturing these mostly as like small, dark stone cottages, angled roofs, little chimneys

on rolling, grassy hillside, so that's the image I'm going to complete. Is that about right? Yeah, that's, yeah. So a lot of them look exactly like what you're imagining, but not all of them. There's actually a pretty wide variety in terms of their settings and their architecture. Some are inland, others still on the beaches. Some used to be things like post offices or schools. And there's this one out in the coastal cliffs of sky called the lookout. That was actually built to be a Coast Guard station.

That has these big windows and these really awesome panoramic views. And it comes with binoculars, wildlife identification charts and this logbook for people who wanna watch the dolphins and the whales. So there's no reservations, you just ramble up and you can stay in one of these places. That's the idea.

So you have to find them first. And that wasn't always easy to do. For decades, it was mainly a word of mouth system. And then a few years back, the Mountain Bothy Association started putting maps up online, making it easier for people to plan out their trips and get to them. So you get nature, you get views, they're free. Where do you sign up? I mean, that's pretty stunning.

Well, you don't have to sign up, which is the beauty of it. But I should warn you that bodies can be pretty minimalist at times, some have sleeping platforms and stoves and little libraries, things like that, but they don't typically have running water or much insulation. Still, I mean, it is a really impressive system

and a great way to repurpose old buildings that are not otherwise in use. And it works especially well in Scotland where really remote places can be accessed in part thanks to really permissive roaming laws. How do I know I'm staying in a designated botty on someone's land rather than just accidentally sleeping in their garden shed? You know, I'm not sure. I didn't see anything about this, what I was reading about them. But I wonder, if you did just accidentally stay in an abandoned building,

I mean, that's how Bought Being started, right? That was sort of the origin of it. Is this a system that's unique to Scotland? Not entirely. The US and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and actually a lot of northern European countries also have their own versions. That said, in many places,

they're even more rustic, and they're often owned and operated by government agencies and set up on public lands. Right, and we have a much more divided system here of public versus private land. When it comes to private property, you really have to watch out for those no trespassing sides and heed their warning. Exactly. While in Scotland, people really have to watch out for those no trespassing sides and heed their warning.

Exactly. While in Scotland, people really can just go out and wander in the truest sense of the word. And if they happen to come across a botty along the way, they can just walk right in. And listeners can find images of bothies as well as links to maps and other information about the botty network. And an article that just published on our website, it's at 99pi.org. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Senior Producer Katie Mingle, Mix and Tech

Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Rihau. The other 99PI Ramblers, our digital director Kirk Cole Stead senior editor, Delaney Hall, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald Vivian Lee, Avery Trophamine, Terran Mazza, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Jim Mingle, who gave us the idea for this story, and Kate Ashbrook from the Ramblers Association, which continues to fight for walking rights in England and Wales. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. You can find them all that radiotopia.fm.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But I invite you to ramble on over to our fertile land of design stories. We're at 99pi.org. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ you