21-05-2025
Dartmoor will be poorer for the Supreme Court's decision
In January 2023, the largest land access demonstration since the 1930s took place on a bright wintery morning on Dartmoor. As many as 3000 people massed on Stall Moor to protest the ban on wild camping.
Dartmoor had been one of the few places in the UK where ramblers could pitch a tent for the night until the hedge fund manager, Alexander Darwall, brought legal action claiming that the right to camp was expressly not allowed in accordance with the Dartmoor Commons Act.
Darwall was a focal point of that bright wintery morning. His visage appeared on banners, his name was on everyone's lips, and at the end of the day, as the sun went down, a chant of 'Darwall… a---hole' went up, while drummers kept time. It was very much an us versus him paradigm and the tales were wild. His reason for buying the land, according to some, was mineral rights. Others told me he'd inherited it all. But then again, another observer told me it was about the vast profits he supposedly makes from pheasant shooting. Alexander Darwall was everywhere and nowhere, not so much a man as an idea.
There was a real carnival atmosphere. It felt both quietly revolutionary and quite childish. But I wasn't there to protest. I was there to research my book on land access, Uncommon Ground, and the protest, in spite of being the focus of the media, wasn't where the most interesting story actually was.
About five months after the protest, I headed back to Dartmoor to visit a 76 year old gamekeeper who, for 43 years, has run a shoot on that contested ground. 'Frightened the s--t out of me', he admitted, when we sat down to talk in his cottage. He'd spent the morning on guard in his pheasant pens in the valley below and then, in the afternoon, he'd driven up to have a look. He was keen to make it known that he hadn't encountered 'a bad person among them.' Snowy clearly isn't worried about thoughtful ramblers. The trouble, he told me, 'are the scrotes'. He has apparently wasted huge amounts of time over the years clearing up after irresponsible fly campers.
His observation was fascinating as I encountered a whole suite of people who would happily see Snowy's way of life as a pheasant keeper consigned to history but his point was important – it's very hard for those who camp responsibly to recognise that a great many don't.
While we chatted about times past and about Snowy's love of wildlife, a truck pulled into the yard. 'This here', Snowy explained with great admiration, as the driver got out, 'is young Simon.' Simon, he told me, would be taking over as head keeper, and with him was a local farmer's son.
Simon was thoughtful, tremendously balanced, and clearly immensely keen on conservation. Sometimes, he told me, he almost has to laugh. He'll find people having a picnic right in the middle of his lapwing plot (a bird which is almost extinct on Dartmoor) and the picnickers tend to have no idea they are disturbing anything. Some of them, he went on, are really respectful and want to learn but others seem to want a fight.
Snowy turned to the young lad and asked him what he thought of it all. Shyly, he said to me that as he sees it those at the forefront of the fight to camp on Dartmoor are just 'a bunch of rich Londoners trying to tell us what to do.' He's not entirely right – but he's closer to the truth than many would like to admit and who am I to tell him he's wrong? What's interesting is that he feels that way and he added, in case I was in any doubt, 'any young farmer will tell you the same'.
What stays with me most from that conversation was Snowy saying that when he first realised the impact that the public has on nature was during foot and mouth. The whole thing, he recalled, was terrible but because there weren't any people, everything changed. 'I saw adders. I saw birds in places I've never seen, and the insect life in the grass was just totally different.'
On 21 May, 2025, at mid-morning, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that people do have the right to camp on Dartmoor. Part of me is pleased – it means a great deal to some but I worry too for the wildlife and I worry about that young lad and Simon and Snowy. I worry because the media is focussing predictably on the campaigners and those privileged few who own the land. As ever it's as though those who work the land don't exist. Ask any young farmer, that boy said in that cottage kitchen, except we won't.
