WITH the right to roam back once more as a live political issue, Nick Hayes’s new book, The Trespasser’s Companion (Bloomsbury, 2022), could not be more timely. It is an informative and attractive read, and it will lift your spirits. Buy it.

In 1999 Marion Shoard’s excellent book, A Right to Roam, provided fuel for the last up-swelling of activism on this issue, while Michael Meacher introduced his “Crow Bill,” which became the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000). Shoard’s book was a great deal more detailed and methodically argued than Hayes’s, and remains indispensable.

Meacher’s Crow Act brought us some very partial and unevenly spread gains. Still, only 8 per cent of our countryside is free for us to wander by legal right.

Hayes’s new book will reach more people — of a new generation — than Shoard’s, and it will be read with simpler pleasure. It is just what we need at the moment.

Most of the pages in Hayes’s book have his own attractive nature drawings on them, and even if his pages have no picture, his captions boldly act like illustrations. His book unites words and pictures as the medieval monks in their scriptoria did 1,000 years ago.

His chapters come in easy bite-sized chunks, and he has elicited contributions from a range of allies who broaden his argument and our sympathies: folk like Ruth Sullivan, Romany activist; Iris Webber, 93-year-old countrywoman; and Josie George, writing as a woman with disabilities.

In this book, Hayes has broadened the focus of his last, The Book of Trespass, which was focused on the ornamental parks and designed landscapes of the aristocracy.

I am glad that the great majority of our ordinary countryside, including our most wildlife-rich natural areas, is without those aestheticised conceits.

For myself, it is the ordinary lowland farming countryside which brings most delight: banks of green willow, winding streams, plough land and old pastures, blowsy springtime hedges, muddy lanes, copses, the apple tree (down low in Linden Lea) — though I know how rare these places have become. They still exist down here in the Weald (google it), but capitalist agribusiness has massively damaged such countryside across most of England.

Hayes works hard to encourage us all to trespass — but his effort did leave me feeling that he could just as well have emphasised the sheer ordinariness of trespass. It doesn’t need organising. It needs nothing special.

Most trespassing is done by dawn and dusk dog walkers, joggers, bird watchers, kids (yes, even nowadays) and by exploring solitaries and couples. Many farmers and landowners know them and many will leave them be.

I have “free walked” my countryside since way back in my first years of school over 60 years ago. Yet we aren’t often confronted, and I’ve never been physically attacked. If we get into an argument we can give as good as we get (if we can be bothered).

The owners often retreat with a flea in their ears, and if they persist we ignore them. Sometimes, landowner challenges can end in interesting conversations and exchanges of information, but we don’t back down.

We’ve just won our latest campaign down here in Sussex, against an ecocidal proposal for a giant Center Parcs leisure development in the heart of Worth Forest. It is a place of such rich beauty that it should be to Crawley and south London what Epping Forest is to east London — a public forest.

Despite 70 years of gross mismanagement, it retains a huge assemblage of special, beautiful and rare wildlife, from Firecrest to Handsome Woollywort (a temperate rainforest liverwort).

In our successful campaign, our use of trespass was absolutely vital: all our survey work, for flowering plants, birds, mosses, fungi, dragonflies, beetles and more had to be done by trespass. All our introductions of local people to the forest had to be by trespass, culminating in our 300-strong mass trespass in September 2022.

If we had respected the landowners’ forbiddings we could not have constructed our case. We could not have made so many people aware of what was on their doorstep and what they were about to lose. Making nature accessible to people was crucial to our success.

And if we are to properly play our role as advocates and guardians of nature, we need a full and inclusive right to roam across all landscapes and natural areas, from the damaged barley barons’ flatlands of the Midlands and East Anglia, to scruffy urban fringe edgelands, and the rolling green pastures of the hilly west and north.

The Scottish freedom to roam established in the 2003 Land Reform Act stands as our model for England and Wales. All our open land should be accessible as of right, bar obvious exclusions like growing crops, gardens, railways, working quarries, livestock mustering areas, and vulnerable and sensitive wildlife resources.

Yet there is another side to this role of people’s guardianship and advocacy which lay behind our use of the trespass tactic. As guardians, we also have to draw boundaries on our own behaviours when they threaten nature within the forest.

In a wide circle from our forest car park, the beautiful and edible fungi — ceps and other boletes, chanterelles, and hedgehog fungi — are no longer to be seen. Those glorious displays of colour and form are now gone — and it is fungal foraging which has done that.

And our behaviour in forests, fields, down and heath can bring more problems too, for walkers’ car parks now have multiple commercial dog walkers’ vans, exercising packs of dogs, some on leads and some not.

Yet the lovely Woodcock nesting in our forest glades, and the Skylark, Woodlark, Meadow Pipit and Whitethroat of our heath and down will be lost from those places where dogs roam free in the breeding season.

Decades back, when I was a trainee warden for the National Trust, I was asked to look after a colleague’s terriers for the day. As I crossed the heath those dogs dashed off into a gorse clump and a large brown bird like a giant Swift shot up into the air. When I got to the dogs they had their noses in that Nightjar’s nest and had destroyed her eggs. It all took only a few seconds.

Most dog walkers would never have noticed the wreck that had just taken place. It was all just a few yards from the footpath, the dogs were not straying widely, and made no noise.

The excellent Scottish Outdoor Access Code that accompanies their freedom to roam shows the way, but it is not enough.

Our universal right to roam must be accompanied by new legal provisions which enable local authorities to, for instance, ban dogs where they pose a threat to wildlife, enforce bans on damaging fungal foraging, and protect spawning streams and freshwater mussel gravels in season from wild swimming and trampling.

Access codes are not enough. We need legal protections and a much-expanded and properly funded national ranger service. A universal right to roam must be accompanied by a universal system of legal guardianship for wildlife so that we do not destroy the things we love.

Join Dave Bangs’s campaign to ensure public access to the South Downs, the Sussex Weald and beyond at www.landscapesoffreedom.com.