The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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To wander and to roam are implicitly connected with moral failings and the word ‘vagrancy’ has as much sense in morality as it does in legal cases concerning homeless people. A deviant is someone who has turned off the right way. To stray from the path suggests a clearly marked line of righteousness, signposted by societal or religious doctrines. And the most fundamental link between the physical world of trespassing and its moral parallel, is the origin of the word itself. 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. Transgression, which carries with it that pungent whiff of candle smoke and incense, that sense of religious damnation, is the reason Christians pray for the Lord to Forgive us our trespasses.

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us

Fences, wall and divisions of all kinds run through Hayes’s book – a gorgeously written, deeply researched and merrily provocative tour of English landscape, history and culture through the eyes of the trespassers who have always scaled, dodged or broken the barriers that scar our land. Even with recent, grudging adjustments to the law, people in England have the “right to roam” over only 10 per cent or so of their native country, and to boat down a mere 3 per cent of its waters. In global terms, that’s an almost-unique dearth of entitlement. The length of public footpaths has actually halved, to around 118,000 miles, since the 19th century. 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). Hayes wants to understand not just how this theft of access happened, how the old shared culture of the “commons” gave way to absolute rights of ownership, but “why we allow ourselves to be fenced off in this way”.

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This is a passionate, brilliant, radical and persuasive work. Hayes is a trespasser who takes us on a series of walks which explore parts of England (92% of it) we are not allowed to see. for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. But it offers a sharp-eyed, muddy-booted guide to the process that left the English “simultaneously hedged out of their land and hemmed into a new ideology”. Take it along next time you plan to jump any wall. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on Well this started off well with a subject that's close to my heart, the ultra-wealthy hell bent on keeping us peasants out of their precious lands.

The Book of Trespass - Bloomsbury Publishing The Book of Trespass - Bloomsbury Publishing

But it’s easy for me. I am white, middle class and male in an empowered situation in society. There are communities in England that have been traditionally marginalised from our countryside for so long that even the idea of accessing nature barely registers. Working- class communities, queer communities and people of colour all are disproportionately affected, in social and health parameters, by their exclusion from the countryside.For me, this book is a bit too long for the amount of substance it contains. Nevertheless the author makes lots of good points in discussions on a series of topics such as the ending of slavery and the financial bonus to former slave owners, the enclosure of common land, the anti nuclear protest at Greenham Common, and the restrictions on access to rivers in England. However there is a lot of padding around these discussions in the form of descriptions of the author’s trespasses. His intention is of course to open our eyes to the amount of England that is closed to the public. However, I found some of that a bit tedious, and skipped quite a lot of it. However, I was stimulated to make a donation to the latest Ramblers appeal! We can’t do much about the injustices that have led to the enclosure of so much of England, but at least we can support those who are defending what we have. As long as what happens on the land is governed by a select few there will never be a society that reflects the values of its constituents, there will never be an England that reflects the values of anything but a tiny minority of its citizens. If we are truly to discover what we have in common, we must be allowed to gather on common ground."

The Book of Trespass : Crossing the Lines that Divide Us The Book of Trespass : Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

This is why the campaign that accompanied the book is so crucial. While The Book of Trespass sets out the context of our wholesale exclusion from nature, the campaign at righttoroam.org.uk seeks to change the status quo. In the slightly bastardised words of Gerrard Winstanley, a land reformer from the 17th century, “words are great, but action is all”. to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more. Otto Ecroyd on his Northbound and Down journey: ‘I left a top job in the city to cycle 5,000 miles’Crucially, and ambitiously, he argues that “Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in columns of hot air to the landless”: our old friend, nationalism as false consciousness. Globally, an imperial machinery of slavery and conquest both bankrolled and legitimised the “cult of exclusion” that kept the English off their own turf. At home, the “magical architecture” and seductive contours of the great estates lent that dogma a patina of beauty and grace. Meanwhile, poachers swung from gibbets, plantation slaves toiled and died, proud commoners became a cowed rural proletariat and, in post-industrial mass society, the heritage industry served up centuries of mass uprooting and intimidation as a glorious aristocratic legacy. Land became a “commodity alone”, “partitioned from the web of social ties” that truly gives it value. Withdraw our consent to the tyranny of private property. We don’t agree any more will not participate in our own servitude. A better way is possible, and will make England a better place to live in Hayes is an alert, inquisitive observer . . . He works also in the tradition of nature writers like Robert Macfarlane … This sensibility gives him a poetic sense of the different ways that we might use and share the land to the benefit of all . . . Beyond its demand for specific, concrete changes to the law on what land we may step onto and for what purposes, this book is a call for a re-enchantment of the culture of nature So what happens next? “We want to engage all the people who are already sold on access – the fathers and mothers, the ramblers, climbers and kayakers – and tell them that something is happening, and get them to join us. Then we need to persuade all the people who don’t have much access to land why their lives would be improved if they did. And then, we need to lobby MPs.” His book, he believes, is the beginning of something, not the end. “We will say to people: come trespassing with us!” He grins. “Our hashtag will be #extremelynonviolentdirectaction. There’ll be animal masks and botany, picnics and poetry. But if someone asks us to leave, that’s exactly what we’ll do.” The main aim of the book is to illustrate how societal divisions such as class, race and gender have been driven and intensified by the divisions imposed between communities and the land they once had access to.

Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler

To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level.The author takes us on a trespassing journey each chapter with a focus on certain aspects of common law and inequalities. At times the flow can be a bit of a ramble (no puns here) but overall the writing is engaging and quite accessible. I'll be honest with you, I'm not much of a reader of non-fiction so in a bookstore I would totally have just walked pass the book. As it is, the book became available on Pigeonhole and the title and description of the book intrigued me so I signed up for it. He crosses the boundaries of one grand domain after another – from Cliveden to Arundel, Highclere Castle (aka Downton Abbey) to Windsor Castle. Eloquent writing evokes the woodlands, the wildlife, the landscapes and ecologies of the countryside that the post-Norman millennium of property law – or, if you prefer, “violence and theft” – has shaped. It also made me sad how us 'common people' were walked all over when it comes to land ownership and how despite all this empty space around us you'll still hear the people higher up complain that we don't have enough space! The treatment of slaves was another heartbreaker!