Mass trespass on Dartmoor to highlight England's 'piecemeal' right to roam laws

These limitations are difficult to understand. I guess that lords and landowners hsd to repress the peasants in the uk with all possible means but.. this is silly.<p>Here,in Estonia, everyone can walk on anyones land unless it is someones private home or its surrounding yard (lawn, fields, etc).<p>You can walk, hike, collect berries and mushrooms for private use everywhere (unless it is on an industrial scale).<p>If your piece of land is on a sea or lake side or a river, then you must provide access to it, 5 metres from the waterline must be acessible for everyone and can&#x27;t be fenced off.<p>I once saw a news item from the uk where someone from Latvia was collecting mushrooms, the land owner didn&#x27;t like this and the mushroom gathrer had to pay a big fine. Even though nobody was stolen from since the people in the uk don&#x27;t know anything about wild mushrooms and thry would just rot and go bad. Kind of absurd

I think this is a situation of nice in theory harder in practice. Take a look at national and state parks in the US, for the most part people are pretty good, but then again they have police forces &#x2F;rangers, and there is a reason.<p>On my family’s farm, the whole place was posted: “no trespassing&#x2F;no hunting” yet we’d have people out in a pasture trying to pet farm animals or horses or find deer stands and trash (mostly beer cans in the woods), or people who would help themselves to our raspberries&#x2F;apples etc., not to mention the amount of trash we’d find and clean up along our road frontage. I can’t believe how much worse it would be if people felt entitled to be there.<p>I’m generally aligned with principle of right to roam, but I think it’d be a nightmare in practice. + I can’t even think about the associated liability when some person gets kicked by horse or gets shocked by an electrical fence etc.

Slightly off topic, but related: I&#x27;m always interested in the different approach to public &quot;right of ways&quot; in the US (and Canada) versus the UK. Given that the concept of public right of way was well established in the UK before the colonial period, why didn&#x27;t the colonies recognize rights of way based on well-established use? Based on my limited knowledge of the US and Canada, I&#x27;m not aware of any State or Province that recognizes the right of the public to cross private land on established paths&#x2F;trails in the way that is recognized in the UK.

I’ve always been profoundly jealous of countries with right to roam laws and dream of a day when we might have some thing similar in the US. Here in the west we have so much public land that is effectively closed to access due to wealthy landowners litigating over stupidities like corner crossings so they can monopolize the use of parcels they don’t own.

I loved roaming in England. Thinking of the US, how does this relate to squatter&#x27;s rights? If have the impression that it is risky to let people hang out for too long on your land in the US. It also seems to tie into the problem of homelessness that we have in the US.

The US state of Washington won&#x27;t allow the creation of &quot;island&quot; properties. A landowner (including governments) can&#x27;t subdivide a parcel of land unless there is public right-of-way to all the divided parcels. Right-of-way isn&#x27;t a parcel; although it theoretically belongs to the government it can&#x27;t be sold.<p>This makes it impossible for this problem to happen in the first place.

Canada has &quot;Crown land,&quot; which is public for people to use, but maps aren&#x27;t great, and I understand that much of it is not accessible. These rules will fall, as populations shift. I live in a rural area close to a city with massive immigration (we&#x27;re one the highest growth countries in the world right now), and Western norms and conventions that make rural life secure and viable, which facilitated a lot of land and public space use - are absolutely not universal.<p>To respond, I&#x27;ve just bought a drone that dissuades people from tresspassing, loitering, and lining the roadway in front of my house at night, but tech is just a temporary measure. These roaming and public space laws are at the cusp of the conflict of demographic change. Rural life is viable because of the norms around space and privacy, and if we introduce urban security issues to rural communities without also adapting the laws to mitigate their effects, it will destroy that way of life completely.

Feels like Vinod Khosla’s “public” beach.[0]<p>In unrelated news, I’m currently looking for investors to purchase a surplus LCAC[1] for midnight beach outings.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kqed.org&#x2F;science&#x2F;1955623&#x2F;the-neverending-battle-over-martins-beach-explained" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kqed.org&#x2F;science&#x2F;1955623&#x2F;the-neverending-battle-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;5Tj9KU8q8rk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;5Tj9KU8q8rk</a>

A map of the islands &amp; barriers would be very helpful to the messaging here.

Are there any reasons other than purely historic ones for the right to roam on access lands? Because it seems like something that&#x27;s pretty indefensible as is, either the public should be allowed to responsibly trespass on private land or they shouldn&#x27;t.