As 2021 draws to an end, I review four great books about Lakeland or walking: James Rebanks portrays three generations on a Cumbrian fell farm and finds the key to a sustainable future in the teachings of his grandfather. Chris Townsend walks Scotland’s spine. John Bainbridge takes us on furtive forays into Forbidden Britain; and Beth Pipe teams up with Karen Guttridge to blaze a new Lakeland trail, connecting the district’s distilleries.

• English Pastoral by James Rebanks
• Along the Divide by Chris Townsend
• The Compleat Trespasser by John Bainbridge
• Gin, Cake and Rucksacks by Beth Pipe and Karen Guttridge

A scintillatingly righteous and illicit ride through Britain’s prohibited playgrounds of the privileged.

The Compleat Trespasser is a blast of invigorating country air, laced with the adrenalin rush of a secret sortie behind enemy lines. If you have ever stared at a “Private: keep out” notice and wondered who declared large swathes of our land, “the common heritage of us all” (as John Stuart Mill described it), to be the sole preserve of a privileged few, then The Compleat Trespasser is the book for you.

John Bainbridge takes us back to Norman times when the new Conqueror’s love of hunting led him to declare a quarter of England as royal hunting forests or hunting chases belonging to favoured nobles. Villages were cleared and residents massacred. Those who resisted were declared outlaws, and the legends of Robin Hood were born.

Several centuries later, the enclosure acts robbed common folk of common land and turned us into a  nation of landed gentry and landless poor. By the end of the nineteenth century, emboldened land owners were going further in barring access, closing ancient rights-of-way, and denying locals traditional rights to gather wood. 

Trespassing became a political act of defiance, promoted by noteworthy intellectuals as a necessary mode of resistance. We learn about the subversive acts and ideas of writers like C.E.M. Joad and Stephen Graham, poets like William Wordsworth, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, and campaigners like Henry Irwin Jenkinson, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, and Benny Rothman. As campaigning won widespread support, unscrupulous landowners became ever more entrenched, and the situation gave rise to mass trespasses. The battle for Kinder Scout is well documented and serves as the crescendo to which the book builds, but there were forerunners, most notably the Keswick trespasses in Fawe Park and over Latrigg, which Bainbridge evokes in intimate detail. 

It took until the year 2000 for the Countryside and Rights of Way Act to turn all uncultivated upland and downland over to open access, but the English law still falls short of the more progressive Scottish version, and the battle to right historic wrongs is not over. 

If all the Compleat Trespasser did was to document the history of the Right To Roam, it would be a compelling read, but what really sets it apart is the way Bainbridge intercuts the history with first-hand accounts of his own forays into forbidden Britain. Prepare for adrenalin-fired bursts of adventure: being shot at by a game-keeper; skulking behind a tree to avoid the fists of a drunken landowner; boldly striding through the yard of an aggressive farmer with a reputation for assaulting walkers. The expressive prose puts you right there, darting for cover, holding your breath, listening for footsteps and praying the possessive belligerent on your trail does not have a dog.

Thoughtful and thought-provoking, The Compleat Trespasser is a scintillatingly righteous and illicit ride into the prohibited playgrounds of the privileged.

Follow John’s blog: Walk the Old Ways

Next: Gin, Cake & Rucksacks by Beth Pipe and Karen Guttridge