This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
We’ve had the “Right to Roam” in Scotland since 2003. When I try and look back beyond this date, I have to confess that I can’t remember a time before the law was changed. Freedom of access is so deeply hardwired into my understanding of the countryside that, on visits to England, I am actively startled by signs which prohibit trespassing.
It also happens that I’m a farmer, and I know that this particular knife cuts both ways — but my experience of public access is confused by the fact that I live and work in one of the most obscure corners of Dumfries and Galloway. When tourism operators claim that we’re “Scotland’s hidden corner”, they’re being polite. What they mean is that we’re a black hole: in fifteen years of working cattle on my own hill, I’ve only ever met three hikers — and two of them were lost.
The tension is inevitably different in more popular tourist destinations, and when clear weather offers me views south across the border to the Lake District, I often wonder at the heat and controversy generated by the issue of land access in England. Crouched in my silence and solitude, it’s hard to believe there could ever be too many people in the countryside.
As a primer, Patrick Galbraith’s Uncommon Ground is a valuable introduction to the debate as it currently stands in the UK. With his customary ease of style, Galbraith approaches the issues with lightness and good humour — and he certainly has an entertaining eye for human oddness. Hanging out with nudists, chatting with poachers and being sent on wild-goose chases by sculptors who can’t quite remember where their work has been installed, he immediately gets under the skin of his subject.
As the various strands of this book unfold, the two “opposing sides” in the age-old debate are gradually revealed as a vast and interlocking patchwork of individuals, all of whom are engaging with these issues for different reasons and from varied starting points.
Galbraith draws from a wide and whacky span of examples to show that some campaigners actually have more in common with their opponents than they do with one another, and it’s also clear that both sides have deployed twists and sleights of hand to lend weight to their cause.
For the average observer, it’s often hard to know who we can trust — not only when it comes to cynical or manipulative dishonesties but also because these issues strike deep and confusing chords in ourselves. Even when we try to be clear about how land makes us feel, we often get tangled up; it’s no wonder we’re inclined to reach for easy but misleading narratives.
Galbraith is particularly careful in his discussion of what a “Right to Roam” might actually mean for England. Some campaigners strive for the right to go “everywhere” for the simple (but rather nebulous) reason that anything less would be unfair — but it seems far more likely that, when it comes to the crunch, most people prefer to walk on signposted pathways.
As Uncommon Ground shows, an abundant network of paths is already established in many parts of England and Wales. Pushing for yet more access seems to be rooted in principle more than practicality. Whether we agree or disagree, that’s an important point.
By the same measure, several interviewees draw clear connections between land access and a sense of connectivity with the world around us. Galbraith is clear that Scotland is nothing like a “promised land” when it comes to recreational freedom, but he also recognises that, whilst people can walk wherever they want north of the border … they generally don’t.
The Right to Roam has not transformed the Scottish experience of place or belonging — the landscape is still full of problems and bottlenecks. Twenty years after the law was changed to crack them, significant nuts remain uncracked.
Here’s the heart of Uncommon Ground — not in its open endorsement or opposition to either side but in a gentle teasing out of complexity and nuance. Galbraith’s writing is always preoccupied with human beings, but this book has its foundation in an enormous amount of social, political and historical research. It reads as an entertaining puzzle but also has the clout to advance more serious thought.
Since Galbraith steers away from polemics, there are no clear conclusions or actions to take home from his book. All we can say is that land matters to everybody — and from a dense, funny and often contrary mass of evidence, it’s useful to realise that the status quo is neither as good nor as bad as it’s often made to seem.
