> Dr Rose O’Neill, the chief executive of the Campaign for National Parks, said: “National parks like Dartmoor have been protected for decades with the twin purposes of conserving wildlife and enabling public enjoyment. The right to camp on the moor is an important part of this.
>“Now is the time when the government should be providing national park authorities with the powers and the investment they desperately need to deliver those twin purposes. The national parks are on their knees after a decade of damaging government cuts. We support the Dartmoor national park authority’s position in this case and look to the government to act to ensure every child has a right to a night under the stars.”
Hear, hear.
This battle has been going on now for a while now since Darwall came down from London and started behaving like a medieval Lord of the Manner controlling access to his shooting estate..
Classic case of rich people shouting “Get off my land because it’s all mine!”
Right to roam is so important, and just because most people don’t go exploring, camping, or walking, they neglect the concept entirely.
Not to get too deep at 10am on a Saturday but the end game of property law is that everyone owns all the land and it’s all private (thanks late stage capitalism). People with more money can buy more land, and then grow their earnings and buy more land and so this continues unchecked. Eventually you can’t walk anywhere because it’s all private, and the outside world becomes shut off to us as we’re funneled into cramped cities. If the government owns the land then we the people own the land and therefore it should be for all of us together but the elite can’t allow that can they?
I hope they rule against this guy. I rarely see wild campers on Dartmoor. This guy just wants to extend his pheasant shooting operation which isn’t great for the moor itself as he’ll keep it all as Gorse when the rest of the moor is slowly becoming more wooded.
Fuck that, I do wild camping and bushcraft on any bit of land I can find that isn’t actively being used.
I live in the Midlands so it’s a bit harder to find places to do it properly.
TBH, I thought it was already forbidden. Pretty sure we got woken up by a park ranger when we did it circa 1992
This has been happening by stealth for years.
The Templer Way, a national footpath and Dartmoor national park footpath overseen by its own charitable foundation, has been severed in two by a landowner who quite literally removed all the signposts and nailed the gates shut because they didn’t want walkers ‘spooking’ their horses two or three fields away.
I’ve reported it to the park authorities, who then go and re-open the route, but the landowner comes right back and shuts it off again with more nails and baffles every time.
Last time I checked they’d even resorted to putting razor wire on five bar gates they don’t own so that people won’t climb over the gate onto the path.
The start of the route from Bovey Tracey has also been blocked by a housing development. Planning permission signs state that as part of the development, the builders/planners would improve and re-route the footpath. The document states that was supposed to happen by March 2020. The housing estate has been completed. People are living in the properties. Yet the footpath remains a muddy scrub, churned up by earth movers and fenced off with crowd control barriers, ever since. There appear to be no signs whatsoever that the developers will make good on their promise and restore the footpath.
One can rejoin the Templer Way a little further up the Bovey Tracey-Haytor road as it returns back across the contour line, but the road leading up to where it crosses, despite being a public road, evidenced by the road signs strewn up and down it, has a large sign at the bottom declaring it to be a ‘Private Road’ with ‘No Access to the Templer Way’.
I gather this is because the road swings by the front entrance to an old manor house that’s become one of those bougie ‘retreat hotels’ that nobody has ever heard of, but even the gateway to their drive is yet several hundred yards more up the road. One would never even have to pass their driveway entrance to reach the Templer Way.
Now if one wants to access Dartmoor from Bovey Tracey, a town so close to the Moor that one can see people climbing Haytor’s distinctive stack from anywhere in the town, one has to either pay to walk through the National Trust’s Parke Estate, or take a ten mile detour away from the Moor before looping around again and approaching from the North. Or, of course, one could walk up the incredibly narrow B-Road full of blind corners and hedgerows that cars whip through and past at shocking speeds.
As someone who lives in Devon but has precious little money, walking around our beautiful county is a free, quiet, and non-invasive activity I enjoy, but increasingly it seems even the act of walking across a piece of land one doesn’t personally own will be taken from us too.
I wish we could camp anywhere tbh I’m camping out tonight in fact.
8 comments
> Dr Rose O’Neill, the chief executive of the Campaign for National Parks, said: “National parks like Dartmoor have been protected for decades with the twin purposes of conserving wildlife and enabling public enjoyment. The right to camp on the moor is an important part of this.
>“Now is the time when the government should be providing national park authorities with the powers and the investment they desperately need to deliver those twin purposes. The national parks are on their knees after a decade of damaging government cuts. We support the Dartmoor national park authority’s position in this case and look to the government to act to ensure every child has a right to a night under the stars.”
Hear, hear.
This battle has been going on now for a while now since Darwall came down from London and started behaving like a medieval Lord of the Manner controlling access to his shooting estate..
[National park authority defends wild camping rights on Dartmoor](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/13/national-park-authority-defends-wild-camping-rights-on-dartmoor)
[Interestingly the Darwall’s have tried to do exactly the same thing at their 16,000 acre Suisgill Estate in Helmsdale, Scotland where they are trying to licence gold panners.](https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/highlands-islands/1395889/row-breaks-highland-estate-owners-estate-introduce-charges-gold-panning/)
Classic case of rich people shouting “Get off my land because it’s all mine!”
Right to roam is so important, and just because most people don’t go exploring, camping, or walking, they neglect the concept entirely.
Not to get too deep at 10am on a Saturday but the end game of property law is that everyone owns all the land and it’s all private (thanks late stage capitalism). People with more money can buy more land, and then grow their earnings and buy more land and so this continues unchecked. Eventually you can’t walk anywhere because it’s all private, and the outside world becomes shut off to us as we’re funneled into cramped cities. If the government owns the land then we the people own the land and therefore it should be for all of us together but the elite can’t allow that can they?
I hope they rule against this guy. I rarely see wild campers on Dartmoor. This guy just wants to extend his pheasant shooting operation which isn’t great for the moor itself as he’ll keep it all as Gorse when the rest of the moor is slowly becoming more wooded.
Fuck that, I do wild camping and bushcraft on any bit of land I can find that isn’t actively being used.
I live in the Midlands so it’s a bit harder to find places to do it properly.
TBH, I thought it was already forbidden. Pretty sure we got woken up by a park ranger when we did it circa 1992
This has been happening by stealth for years.
The Templer Way, a national footpath and Dartmoor national park footpath overseen by its own charitable foundation, has been severed in two by a landowner who quite literally removed all the signposts and nailed the gates shut because they didn’t want walkers ‘spooking’ their horses two or three fields away.
I’ve reported it to the park authorities, who then go and re-open the route, but the landowner comes right back and shuts it off again with more nails and baffles every time.
Last time I checked they’d even resorted to putting razor wire on five bar gates they don’t own so that people won’t climb over the gate onto the path.
The start of the route from Bovey Tracey has also been blocked by a housing development. Planning permission signs state that as part of the development, the builders/planners would improve and re-route the footpath. The document states that was supposed to happen by March 2020. The housing estate has been completed. People are living in the properties. Yet the footpath remains a muddy scrub, churned up by earth movers and fenced off with crowd control barriers, ever since. There appear to be no signs whatsoever that the developers will make good on their promise and restore the footpath.
One can rejoin the Templer Way a little further up the Bovey Tracey-Haytor road as it returns back across the contour line, but the road leading up to where it crosses, despite being a public road, evidenced by the road signs strewn up and down it, has a large sign at the bottom declaring it to be a ‘Private Road’ with ‘No Access to the Templer Way’.
I gather this is because the road swings by the front entrance to an old manor house that’s become one of those bougie ‘retreat hotels’ that nobody has ever heard of, but even the gateway to their drive is yet several hundred yards more up the road. One would never even have to pass their driveway entrance to reach the Templer Way.
Now if one wants to access Dartmoor from Bovey Tracey, a town so close to the Moor that one can see people climbing Haytor’s distinctive stack from anywhere in the town, one has to either pay to walk through the National Trust’s Parke Estate, or take a ten mile detour away from the Moor before looping around again and approaching from the North. Or, of course, one could walk up the incredibly narrow B-Road full of blind corners and hedgerows that cars whip through and past at shocking speeds.
As someone who lives in Devon but has precious little money, walking around our beautiful county is a free, quiet, and non-invasive activity I enjoy, but increasingly it seems even the act of walking across a piece of land one doesn’t personally own will be taken from us too.
I wish we could camp anywhere tbh I’m camping out tonight in fact.