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Devon campaigners call for ‘right to riverbank' after finding Dart has 108 owners
Campaigners in Devon are calling for a right to the riverbank after finding their local river, the Dart, has 108 separate owners, with an eighth of it owned via offshore companies.
Locals used site visits, angling maps, Companies House records and Land Registry data to find out who owns the River Dart.
The government in its election manifesto last year promised to implement nine new 'river walks' in England to extend public access to the countryside, after it U-turned on a previous policy to enshrine a right to roam in law.
No plans have yet been laid out for the river walks, neither where they will be nor how the government proposes to implement them. Ministers would have to work with local landowners to gain permission for the riverbanks to be used by the public, and the research by Devon campaigners shows how difficult this can be.
Aristocrats own large swathes of the Dart. The Duchy of Cornwall owns the largest slice of riverbank at 28 miles (45km). The Dart is 47 miles long, so has nearly 100 miles of bank altogether. The next largest owner, the Spitchwick estate, owns 12 miles, and the Duke of Somerset has about 1.25 miles. The research also found that 11.6 miles is owned via offshore companies.
Right to roam campaigners have long asked for aristocrats to open up their land for the public to walk across. In 2022, dozens of campaigners descended upon the Duke of Somerset's estate to picnic and play music, ignoring the 'keep out' signs. In Scotland, there is a right to walk across the entirety of the countryside as long as ramblers are respectful and leave no trace behind.
Research by British Canoeing has previously found that fewer than 4% of English rivers are open to the public. A patchwork of landowners have rights over tiny lengths of river, which makes it almost impossible to create routes for swimming and boating without land reform, campaigners have said.
Lewis Winks, who compiled the River Dart research, said: 'The River Dart is rightly a much-celebrated part of the Devon landscape, yet the rights to the river – and those who own them – largely remain a mystery. The more time I spend with the Dart, the more urgent the question becomes: who gets to decide whether we are able to know and love this river?'
He said he embarked on the daunting task of mapping land ownership along the Dart 'to understand who holds power over access here'. He added that 'what quickly became clear was how little transparency exists – even those working closely with the river often don't know who owns the banks'.
The Dart rises high on Dartmoor and flows to the sea at Dartmouth. Though it is a significant river in the area, it is relatively short compared with others in the UK. For example, the Severn is 220 miles long, and the Thames is 215 miles long.
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Winks said: 'The situation along other, longer rivers is likely to be even more complex. Achieving increased access to rivers based on a permissive approach would present a logistical nightmare. Each stretch would require time-consuming negotiations with dozens – if not hundreds – of large landowners and corporate bodies, many of whom are difficult to identify.
'That's why we're calling for a rights-based approach to river access – similar to the system in Scotland, where the public has the right to responsibly walk, swim, paddle and canoe along most rivers and lochs, with sensible exceptions.'
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokesperson said: 'Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and this government is committed to turning the tide on its decline after years of neglect. We are progressing plans to designate nine new national river walks, one in each region of England.'
