LEGISLATION FOR RAMBLERS
By C. E. M. JOAD
RAMBLERS are now a recognized community. The Prime Minister sent them a message in connexion with Ramblers' Sunday this week. They know what they want and they have formulated a definite pro- gramme which is coming to be known as the " Ramblers' Charter." The main points of the Charter are the demand for footpaths, the demand for access to mountains and moorlands, and the demand for national parks. The reasons behind the demand are clear enough. The obvious course for the walker, driven for ever off the roads by the motorist, is to retire to the footpaths, but as the number of walkers grows they find more and more footpaths closed against them.
The Rights of Way Act, which came into force on January 1st of this year, has not relieved the situation. What it has done is to confer legal sanction on existing usage, providing that where there has been public use of a footpath for twenty, and in some cases forty, years, such footpath may be considered a public right of way. To prove twenty years' usage is exceedingly difficult. During the months before the Act came into force devoted bands of ramblers made the attempt, patrolling Sunday after Sunday miles of disputed footpaths in Lancashire and Yorkshire and meeting with opposition.
Meanwhile, little or nothing is done to provide new footpaths. We have spent over £600,000,000 on the provision of new roads in this country since the War ; practically nothing on new footpaths for the walkers whom the motorists have displaced from the roads. In some cases, it is true, footpaths have been laid down by the side of the new arterial roads, but they do not amount to more than a couple of hundred miles in all, and no new footpaths have been made away from the roads, across fields, for example, or through woods. Hence the demand for a new system of footpaths.
The position in regard to access to mountains and moorlands has been considerably worsened from the walkers' point of view by the slump. Take as typical the following case, which came to my notice at a demon- stration of some 3,000 Yorkshire ramblers which I had the privilege of addressing on Ilkley Moor a couple of weeks ago. A Local Authority has during the last three years been driven by its desperate need of money to let a moor to a shooting tenant who pays £500 a year rent for it. The moor is crossed by several paths which walkers have hitherto used .without molestation. The shooting tenant, however, complains that the bands of walkers who traverse the moor on Sunday depreciate the value of his shooting during the week. The Local Authority has accordingly tried to close the footpaths, replying to the ramblers' protests with the formidable argument that it cannot afford to lose the IMO a year revenue which the withdrawal of the shooting tenant would involve. The money, it is said, would have to be found from some other source, and the only course would be to add to the rates. This the Authority cannot bring itself to do. Conse- quently it cannot offend the shooting tenant, and the walkers must suffer.
Where a footpath right of way across the moors is established beyond possibility of question, walkers may of course continue to use it. With what result ? On a fine Sunday the footpath will be hidden beneath a con- tinuous file or double file of walkers, following one behind the other like a girls' school taking a Sunday walk in crocodile. I know few more distressing sights than the footpath leading on to the Derbyshire moors from Hayfield on a fine Sunday. The footpath, given reason- able solitude, would provide admirable walking. It goes up high on to heather moors with commanding views over miles of moorland country. It finally descends steeply into the valley by Jacob's Ladder to Edale. Along this path there streams a continuous line of walkers. On either wide of it stretch away to the horizon the vast spices of the moor, wasted and empty—empty, that is, save for keepers.
Anomalies such as these have led to what is perhaps the most disquieting feature of the present situation, the growing number of clashes between ramblers and keepers. In increasing numbers ramblers seem disposed to take matters into their own hands and defy the keepers to prevent them from walking where they please. Moreover there are not so many keepers as there were, since the growing impoverishment of landowners makes it impos- sible for them to maintain their numbers at the old level. In any event, the solitary keeper, faced with a body of half a dozen or a dozen determined ramblers, is practically helpless.
There can, I suppose, be only one outcome of the situation. Walkers will invade the moors in ever larger numbers ; shooting rights will lose most of or almost all their value, and from the moors in the neigh- bourhood of large towns the sportsmen will withdraw into the more remote fastnesses of the hills. So far, perhaps, from the walkers' point of view, so good. But it is not really good. In the first place, such a develop- ment of the existing situation will bring the law into contempt and leave behind a legacy of quite unnecessary bitterness. In the second place, the measures which have been taken to achieve the end will be found to have defeated their own object. It is only if the moors are so multitudinously invaded as to render grouse- shooting impossible that, short of legislation, the ramblers are likely to get their way. But such multitudinous invasion of the moors will defeat the very purposes for which men seek them—solitude, and the sense of exhilara- tion which comes from intercourse with wild nature.
The spirit that is in nature has power to solace and to refresh. Wooed with discretion it can renew with vitality the personality drained and colourless from con-. tact with many men. But if nature is too often or too multitudinously approached, the virtue goes out of her ; and, once the spirit has fled, it cannot be readily recalled.
For these reasons it is highly desirable that the changes necessarily attendant on the development of the ramblers' movement should be effected by legisla- tion. Two measures only are demanded, and they are completely adequate to the purpose. One would give walkers and artists access to all uncultivated places above a certain height. The other is an Act to imple- ment the report of the Government Committee which recommended the setting aside of certain areas as National Parks.
Once again the economic situation induced by the slump has increased the urgency of this last demand. The position is, alas, all too familiar. Big landowners, unable to keep their heads above the rising waters of estate duties, death duties, super-tax, income tax and the rest, are obliged to sell their estates. The estates are broken up, trees are cut down, roads driven through, and in due course the familiar inflammation of red roofs begins to appear, for all the world as if the land had caught measles. So rapidly is the disease spreading that, unless the present haphazard development is checked, the coun- try will be as effectively ruined during the next hundred years as the towns were ruined during the last. That it will not continue unchecked the Town and Country Plan- ning Act of 1932 affords some guarantee. Some, but not enough ; for the powers which the Act gives to Local Authorities to schedule areas are not compulsory, and the arrangements for compensating landowners whose land is scheduled as a non-building area are grossly inadequate: In the long run the bulk of such compensation will have to come out of the rated, which means in practice that action to schedule is not being taken.
The ramblers' movement at any rate has become, imbued with the conviction that the only way to deal with the situation is the provision of National Parks. The time has come, they insist, for the establishment of a Ministry of Amenities with jurisdiction over the hundred and one new problems that the changed habits of the community have created in the countryside. At one time ramblers entertained the hope that the Labour Government would give them what they wanted. Today they are not so sure, and after twenty years' agitation they are getting impatient. But there are hopeful signs. The association known as the " Friends of the. Lake District," which was inaugurated at Keswick on June 16th, is a good example of the way in which public opinion, and not only ramblers' opinion, is organizing behind the National Parks demand.
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