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# There is a movement in England called Right to Roam, which concentrates on demanding that people be given back the ability to walk through a wood, a field or along a river without the risk of being accused of trespassing on private property
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/est-v-anglii-takoe-dvizhenie-right-to-roam-kotoroe-skontsentrirovano-na-trebovanii-vernut-liudiam-vozmozhnost-proiti-cherez-les-pole-ili-reku-bez-riska-byt-obvinionnymi-v-narushenii-gra/
- Published: 2026-05-05T13:17:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:09.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Cinema, London, Society, Nature

Hugh Thomson has made a documentary about it, [Our Land](https://youtu.be/est-ISGu9D0?si=DcyIQDmzr-WN5QJN&ref=theparnassian.com), the premise of which is that in England and Wales 92% of the land is closed to public access, and local residents often cannot freely walk through the woods around their own village.

In Scotland, a reform of 2003 opened virtually the whole territory to walkers. In Scandinavia the right of allemansrätten goes back many centuries. In England a law of 2000 already touched on the question, but access was then secured to only 8% of the land: mountains, moorland and common grazing, leaving woods, rivers, fields and coastline closed. At present, about 0.36% of the population of the country owns half of all the rural land of England.

The film shows how the campaign works from the inside. Activists stage deliberate trespasses, in which hundreds of people symbolically cross a fence in order to be recognised as trespassers and thereby demonstrate the absurdity of the law. The narrative is built around Dartmoor, the only place in England where the traditional right to camp in the wild survived, until in 2023 a local landowner, Alexander Darwall, challenged it in court and won in the first instance. In 2024 the High Court overturned the decision, but Darwall lodged an appeal, and the battle goes on.

Among the heroes of the picture are Guy Shrubsole, author of the bestseller Who Owns England, and the activist Nicola Cheshire, who lost her home because of a conflict with a landowner. The authors propose a simple but rather radical idea: that the land under our feet should be passable. This is not a question of abolishing private property, but of restoring a public layer of use that existed for centuries and was erased in the last two or three.

Incidentally, in Russia the Forest Code gives citizens the right to stay freely in forests and to gather, for their own needs, wild-growing fruits, berries, nuts, mushrooms and other edible forest resources, as well as non-timber forest materials. But since 2019 fines have been introduced for gathering plants and fungi listed in the Red Book, since 2020 there has been criminal liability for gathering particularly valuable species, and in 2021 fines of up to 60,000 roubles were introduced for lighting fires and gathering brushwood during the fire-hazard season in forests under a special regime. I say nothing of the gathering of windfallen wood, where there are some complications, and additional restrictions introduced by regional legislation.