People have some bizarre (and sometimes, unhinged) ideas about how humans move in the landscape when they're given unrestricted access.

No, they don't trample every bluebell. Nor do they carry out search & destroy operations on every bird nest.

Here are some examples 🧵 Local to me. Not a right of way, just a popular informal desire line linking the suburb to a nearby footpath (sections of our Right of Way network are only functional *because* of such informal paths).

I'll repeat: not an official footpath. Yet look how disciplined the line is.

Some brief thoughts on the ethics of hunting and where we draw the line.

I think there are basically six interrelated criteria against which you can evaluate the legitimacy of shooting & hunting practices:

-welfare
-utilisation
-conservation
-meaning
-scale
-respect 1. Welfare

How is the animal killed? A clean shot from a skilled marksman is clearly preferable to dogs chasing frightened quarry across the landscape before ripping it to pieces, abetted by humans on horseback. What skill threshold is in place before shooting can take place?

Where to start with this @FarmersWeekly piece on @Right_2Roam which seems to have no idea what is being proposed & bemoans the loss of opportunities to "monetise partnerships with healthcare providers as solutions to the UK’s health and wellbeing crisis".
fwi.co.uk/news/opinion-r… Firstly, the RTR proposals are not an "all-access approach". They simply mean exclusions should be justified on reasonable grounds not arbitrary whims.

What those are is up to us. You can see the list of exclusions used in the Scottish model, which we would like to adopt, here.

Last week @UKLabour clarified its vision for an English Right to Roam Act, looking to the Scottish model to replace “a default of exclusion with a default of access”. But what does this mean and why is it important? 🧵 Currently in England there is around 8% of access rights to land, and 3% of (undisputed) access to rivers.

This primarily consists of the footpath network [0.3%] (as much of 49,000 miles of which may be missing) and open access land, covering ‘mountain, moor, heath and down’.

As parliament debate #AccessToNature today, a personal essay.

Deep in my valley is a tree so old it makes my bones ache. There are only a handful like it in the country, and its boughs harbour some of our oldest stories.

Yet almost no-one has ever seen it. 🧵 That’s because it resides on a 5,000 acre private estate at the border of England & Wales.

The estate is old: Norman Conquest old. With the same family, the Scudamores, holding it since the 11th century.

But the tree is older still...

UPDATE: I met the farmer doing this yesterday. The conversation we had was NUTS. He's tearing down all this amazing successional habitat, which has been naturally afforesting for about fifteen years, so that he can get paid to plant... Trees.

https://twitter.com/jm0ses/status/1629756396643184641

The Welsh Government have said they want farmers to have 10% tree cover on their land. But because they haven't specified the conditions, the farmer said he needs to "keep his options open" -- by removing as much existing, natural tree cover as he can.

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-…

While we take stock of big, new losses in Dartmoor, I want to take a moment to talk about the micro enclosures happening every day around the country. They’ll never make the headlines. But they completely shape the way we live our lives.

This is mine. 🧵 Near where I live is an old weir. I know weirs are bad for rivers but I'm extremely fond of it. I swim here. I watch the dippers when I’m sad. If I need to clear my head, this is where I come. You can sit on its wall, water at every side, and simply be.

It’s part of who I am.

When @paulpowlesland told me in 2017 that he was going to up-anchor, squat a fucked post-industrial river in East London & try to precipitate its ecological recovery, I thought he was as crackers as his psychedelic cat leggings.🧵(1/14) | FULL ARTICLE: thelead.uk/londons-forgot… Five years later, The River Roding Trust (@riverroding) has planted 100s of trees, removed over 1000 bags of rubbish and hoisted exactly 75 shopping trolleys from the clay-thick riverbed. Its polluters are now being exposed and challenged for the first time in decades. (2/14)

Good provocation, encapsulating the full kaleidoscope of rural bastardery. For my part: I dwell on the wrongs of landowners as a counterweight to the disproportionate attention levied at members of the public, whose harmful impact on the natural world is of far less significance.

https://twitter.com/philsturgeon/status/1589225779614736385

But as Phil rightly points out, some landowners are serious, positive people trying to do what's right. And some are arseholes getting away with what they can. And vice versa. I'm more than happy for the conversation to move on from the tit-for-tat to new models and new cultures.

'Hot day in England. Maybe I'll go for a swim'.

Here are the twelve ways in twenty minutes I was told to fuck off when I tried.🧵 NO PICNICING (sic)

(THIS IS A PUBLIC FOOTPATH *ONLY* DON'T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT STOPPING FOR A SANDWICH)

Richard Benyon (Minister for Access to Nature) claims public access is embraced at his 12,000 acre estate. What he means is you can walk for about 20 minutes up a drive, get diverted onto a field of trashed monoculture, before being punted back across the (horribly busy) A340.

https://twitter.com/RichardHRBenyon/status/1556921371732623361

Worse, he claims that route is their big offer for 'social prescribing' (when a GP refers you to experience nature to improve your mental health. Let me tell you: there's nothing about this route that will improve your mental health. Quite the opposite.

I'm all for revamping media coverage of the countryside (and agree that @BBCFarmingToday does a pretty good job, all considered) but the absolute fucking chutzpah of the Countryside Alliance accusing anything of being 'unrepresentative'🤣

https://twitter.com/CAupdates/status/1556676652104667139

Here are the top hits on the Countryside Alliance website for search terms on issues I would say either affect the majority of the countryside or how representative it is.

Last weekend myself, four botanists and fifty Bristolians set off for a mass trespass of the 52,000 acre Badminton estate in South Gloucestershire.🧵 Badminton, owned by the Duke of Beaufort, comprises a vast chunk of South Gloucestershire. Every year the public hands over around £500k in subsidies to Swangrove Farms (the agricultural arm of the estate) but unsurprisingly, receives little in the way of access rights in return.

PHOTO ESSAY: about rivers, access rights and trespass on the river Monnow: which runs from the foot of the Black Mountains near Capel-y-ffin to join the Wye at the appropriately named town of Monmouth. I’ve spent most of my life around this river and yet in some ways I barely know it. That’s because for most of its watercourse, lawful access is non-existent. That’s not unique to the Monnow: in England at least 97% of rivers are off-limits to the public.