BY ANDREW TETTENBORN  

Monday’s judgment of the Court of Appeal in the Dartmoor wild camping case, which went against the landowners, will form a small footnote in the law books (“The word ‘recreation’ can include camping”) and be pasted in large letters on the trophy wall of such organisations as Ramblers UK and the Open Spaces Society. But it is rather more important than that.  

For those who have not been following the saga, the background is this. The high moor of Dartmoor, called the Commons, is privately owned, the acreages ranging from the vast (stand up the Prince of Wales as Duke of Cornwall), through small estates to typical Devon small farms. For as long as anyone can remember, however, despite its private nature the public has walked and ridden across it without complaint. Since 1951 it has been a national park, with land use powers vested in the Dartmoor National Park Authority (the DNPA); and since 1985 the public’s right to walk and ride on the Commons “for the purpose of open-air recreation” has been embodied in a private Act of Parliament.  

This Act is the casus belli. In recent years the DNPA has taken the view that this comports a right not only to traverse the moor but to stay overnight on it, and introduced a regime allowing anyone to camp in a simple tent for up to two nights, provided (effectively) they light no fires and leave the place pristine. Earlier this year the landowners took issue with this view, arguing that there was a big difference between crossing private land and sleeping on it, and that “open-air recreation” did not include setting up camp.

They won in the High Court, but lost when the DNPA appealed.  

Legally the decision is not exciting, turning as it does largely on the semantics of ‘recreation’. This is a topic where views will always differ: but in law someone has to have the last word, and the Court of Appeal has plumped for an interpretation that does include the right to camp. The only comment worth making is that the decision is partly a product of its time. A couple of generations ago the courts would probably have been much more robust in construing legislation interfering with property rights as narrowly as possible, whereas if you read last Monday’s decision that principle was seen more as an embarrassing curiosity than anything else.  

There are nevertheless two rather important points to make about this decision and its consequences.  

First, it is hard to see it as making good for land management. There is a world of difference between crossing land and staying on it: even if a farmer is grudgingly prepared to accept the public’s right to use a footpath across his field, most would rightly be up in arms if they had the right to set up camp in his woods whether he liked it or not, however little permanent harm they did there.  

An attractive feature of the high moor is its very wildness, and the lack of permanent settlement on the remoter parts. However, in practice, if not in theory, this will now be lost. True, supposedly no-one is allowed to camp for more than two nights; but there is no restriction on numbers, and nothing prevents a new group from camping in the same place on the next two nights after the first has moved on (and, for that matter, who is to tell whether they are indeed a different group?). It’s hard to avoid concluding that the more beautiful parts of the moor will turn into more or less permanent campsites occupied by a fluctuating population of more or less desirable visitors, many of whom will avoid creating disturbance but a number of whom will almost certainly not. It only takes a couple of drunks singing themselves to sleep to destroy the peace and quiet of the moor for the people and wildlife on it, and more importantly disturb the livestock who graze on it and form a mainstay of the economy.  

Previously the landowners would have been within their rights to throw such people and their tents off their land.

Now they will be encouraged by a sense of entitlement to stay where they are. Indeed, now policing such matters will be almost impossible: offenders will most likely openly defy any DNPA personnel sent out to deal with them (if they can be persuaded to go at all: most prefer to work days rather than nights, and could well murmur “health and safety” if they wanted to demur to orders to deal with possibly aggressive young people determined on a night out with their friends in a novel environment).  

Secondly, the result of this judgment will be to contribute to the upsetting of a balance that has served British society well for generations: the co-opting of private organisations and property owners to contribute to the presence of a civilised balance of life in city and country alike. The great London estates, with their vast portfolios of leasehold property, added considerably to the maintenance of London as a civilised and elegant place to live precisely because they had their own social and aesthetic policies. So too the country landowners, either living in their property but in lieu of death duties allowing the public to go round it, or simply regarding their estates as a local amenity, like the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth.  

The Dartmoor proprietors were no exception. Contrary to attempts to portray them as a twenty-first century incarnation of Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant, living on vast acres but meanly keeping everyone else out, the vast majority of them were very happy with the trade-off. They took part in the moor’s economy by farming and depasturing livestock, while at the same time preserving the symbiosis between capitalism and leisure by conserving the atmosphere that brought them there in the first place. If they did put limits on camping (which in practice many actually allowed anyway), they did so because as owners they had the best possible stake in the land and its conservation.  

Increasingly, however, we see an enmity towards this system. The DNPA, increasingly staffed by progressive supporters of rights to roam, rewilding and other anti-proprietor causes, sees Dartmoor predominantly as a national environmental and leisure resource to be run by bureaucrats on bureaucratic and, it may be said, increasingly political lines. Its insistence on appealing the wild camping judgment is an aspect of this, coming on top of efforts to reduce the number of farm animals allowed to be pastured on the moor.  

This is what needs to be resisted. If it is not, the result may be catastrophic. Those who have previously made Dartmoor their home may feel unwelcome and move, making way for the buying up of estates and farms by plutocrats and international celebrities with a desire for a posh private lifestyle but no commitment at all to the locality or its people. Do the DNPA and the ramblers, not to mention the Labour Party, who have predictably welcomed the decision with reverential wonder and vowed to extend its effect to all national parks in the kingdom, really want this? Amid their celebrations of the humiliation of the landowning classes, they would do well to be very careful what they wish for.  

Andrew Tettenborn is a writer and academic.