The National Trust and the Mass Kinder Trespass

david bangs dave.bangs at virgin.net
Tue Mar 13 21:14:46 GMT 2012


It's great the Nat Trust are commemorating Kinder Scout...but they wouldn't have been at all supportive at the time (doubly not, as it was organised and led by a member of the Communist Party) ...and their current policy on the right to roam is not perfect by any means, as Paul said. 

I can think of NT properties down here in Sussex which should have statutory open access carte blanche, but have none, or have only partial access. Even nationally famous places like Petworth Park have no statutory (CROW Act) public access, I think...None of the 1000 acre Drovers Estate on the South Downs has CROW access, neither does the farmland and many small woods of the Slindon Estate, or much of Saddlescombe Farm at the Devils Dyke (including superb aboriginal down pasture sites), or Ashcombe Bottom near Lewes, or the huge (2050 acre) Harewoods Estate and the 430 acre Sandhills Estate, both near of Gatwick...and on and on...

Some of that will be due to the obstruction of their farm tenants who have full agricultural tenancies, but some is due to the NT's indifference/hostility to such open access.

They're OK-ish nowadays (well, mostly) about 'open country' public access (mountain, moor, heath, down, and common), but crap about ordinary farmland access...the sort of countryside which most of us use and love, and which has a full right of open access in Scotland and Sweden...unproblematically, largely...

I remember being on a course with a Nat Trust regional countryside manager for the North East some years ago and arguing with a farmer on the course about the right to roam...and the Nat Trust manager heavying in on me...with real anger...AGAINST the right to roam...

Dave Bangs


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: mark at tlio.org.uk 
  To: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com ; TheLandisOurs at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 7:33 PM
  Subject: [TheLandIsOurs] Re: 80th anniversary of the Mass Kinder Trespass


    
  I was being tongue-in-cheek, hence the quotations. However, if TLIO 
  announced it as something being done, it wld come across (or cld be 
  spun across) as being an "action".

  That said, if people turned up without the proper equipment expecting 
  it to be just a walk up a hill, that might be a problem.

  However, the way you've expressed yourself, it sound like you feel 
  that stamping TLIO's name of something you are doing anyway with 
  friends is hijacking your own initiative, so don't worry.

  I got 2/3rds of the way up 2 years ago, but me and my mate chickened 
  out when the wind picked up & heavy cloud came over the top,
  M


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