The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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It is just delightful in its description of his days trespassing in countryside seen only by a small group of the very rich and their employees – a real sense of his love of nature, a sense of discovery on land and waterways.

The Book of Trespass is a fascinating, provocative, revealing and occasionally infuriating deep dive into the long, complex history of land ownership and access rights in England. In this way, though they present themselves as mechanisms of security, they are in fact tools of oppression.

Everyone supports him – ‘Put up an electric fence and lock them out that’ll show ‘em’ yells one – thus voting for their own exclusion repression. I read this book courtesy of the Pigeonhole so would like to thank them and the author for the opportunity of reading it. There is also an increasing recognition that conservation shouldn't mean protecting sites from the public but instead encouraging people to reconnect with nature.

Richard Scott, tenth Duke of Buccleuch, owns around a quarter-million acres of Britain (no individual has more, although the Crown Estate, the National Trust, the Forestry Common, the RSPB and MoD outgun the Buccleuchs).

Trespasser is the French verb meaning to cross over, which came from the Latin word transgredior, from whose past participle we get the English word: transgression. In doing so, he draws out the histories of colonial extraction that have led to England’s current demarcation, with much of the country now functioning as a quilt of fenced-off private idylls. It ends on an optimistic note, detailing some of the progress that is being made towards giving more people access to this currently inaccessible land.

But what I did love is that Nick’s book is also a wonderful book about nature, about folklore; it’s intellectually powerful, blending thinkers from all sorts of fields. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. It explores the question of property, land, land access and trespassing from multiple angles - from the exclusion of the working-class, privatisation of the commons, exclusion of Black people and women from property. Your right to protest is secured by Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but for the last twenty years, if you do it anywhere but your back garden or a highway, you can be arrested and sent to jail.It shouldn’t only tell you to take your litter home; it should tell you to pick up any litter that you find. Finally, there are the offshore companies, which in 2015 owned 490,000 acres of England and Wales, meaning that an area larger than Greater London can legally avoid stamp duty and inheritance tax (the largest swathe of English land registered to offshore companies is the Gunnerside estate, whose 27,258 acres of North Yorkshire moorland are registered in the British Virgin Islands and which, over the last decade or so, received some €430,000 of taxpayer handouts in the form of agricultural subsidies).

However I was less enchanted by the author's constant belittling of a certain national newspaper and its readers who he seems to hold personally responsible for anything that has happened in the UK to which he doesn't agree. Hereditary aristocrats still own “a third of Britain”, even though foreign corporations now run them close (and have colonised the iconic Wind in the Willows villages by the Thames). Children need to learn about dragonflies by having them land on their noses so that as adults they will find it abhorrent to see a Wispa Gold wrapper next to an orchid. it's always the Daily Mail and conservative's fault for everything that's wrong in England and so on. As well as some fascinating and well-reasoned arguments, there is some beatifully descriptive language to enjoy ".He praises the campaign to save Sheffield’s trees, and has kind words for the Scottish government’s freedom-to-roam laws. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer Author and right-to-roam campaigner Nick Hayes trespassing on Basildon Park’s historic parklands in Berkshire. Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback. When The Book of Trespass is published later this month, he and Guy Shrubsole, the activist author of Who Owns England?