Tag: Right to Roam

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There and Back Again

breakfast view from Mansefield Inn Whithorn
The Mansefield B&B, Whithorn

Pilgrimage has two directions. At least, usually it does: Sara Terreault can explain better than me how the ancient Irish (Insular) monks went on peregrinations or wanderings with no intention of returning home. But for the rest of us, to every “there,” there is usually a “back again.” Thank goodness! Whithorn said goodbye with a noisy overnight storm that made me get up to close my window against the sideways rain, then clearing and becoming coyly sunny and warm just as we left. Above is our view from breakfast in the Mansefield Inn. It was once the parsonage to the church converted into a Gulf gas station and garage (below). Fortunately, the conversion of the parsonage was a better job.

Whithorn Church Gas Station
Free Church Gas Pumps
Steampacket Inn view Isle of Whithorn
The Steam Packet Inn, Isle of Whithorn

The folks here are rightly proud of where they live. In our 45 minute taxi to the closest train, the driver told story after story, some of which I can repeat, then briefly turned off the taxi’s meter to take us a few hundred yards off-route to see Kennedy Castle. Once on the train, Ken, Christine, and I headed north to Glasgow. My son Daniel once told me how strange it felt to see a pilgrimage “undone” by being in a motorized vehicle heading back to the starting point. I liked seeing some of the sights again from our Scottish Railway car, including these children at one junction waving at the train.

kids waving at the train
waving at the train as we made our way home

There were unmarked grassy places along the coast where courageous Scots were drying out tents, and I wondered if these were examples of  the “Right of Responsible Access.”

Glasgow Train Station
Glasgow Central Train Station

Glasgow Central Station is one of those beautiful, soaring Victorian train stations. We dropped off Ken and Christine’s things, then they accompanied me to the bus station to catch my bus to the airport. On the way we stopped for tea at a replica tearoom done up in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow’s famous early 20th century architect. Now I’m waiting to board a prop plane back to East Midlands.

Mackintosh at the Willow menu
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (or at least a tea-room dedicated to him)
goodbyes at the bus station
saying goodbye at the bus station

Can one really say that they get to know a place in a short week, even while walking? We covered 120 km, more or less. We saw a lot of mud and stones, beached jellyfish and sheep and cattle and dark woods, barley fields and brambles. Walking is different from seeing land from a train. But both, as Ken reminded me, are different from actually spending time, which is how you make an “anywhere” a “somewhere.” It’s partly by telling stories, and remembering, that we create a sense of place. So that’s the next task for me, as a pilgrim returning from the Whithorn Way. I was happy to share Christine and Ken’s company throughout this long walk. PS: It’s interesting that, after a week researching the Right of Responsible Access in Scotland, on my return to Nottingham Google Maps led me right through a new car parking lot that SHOULD also be a footpath. I wound up exercising my right and hopping the barrier to walk through.

Right to Roam back in Notts
why did they close off a public footpath?

 

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Rock-hopping the Whithorn Way

seascape near Denure
castle ruins near Dunure photo M. Anderson

“From Canada, are ye?” said the nice woman at the coffee shop. “Canada’s beautiful. I’ve been to Ottawa. We’re from here.” She shrugged, smiled: “It’s nice enough.” Seemed like a typically-Scottish understatement to me – this is the view they enjoy just outside the coffee shop. We were exhausted after a day of walking along the Whithorn Way along the ocean, rock-hopping just above the receding tide-line and scrambling over sea-algae. I’m here on a Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association grant to see about the Scottish “Right of Responsible Access.” The key, said our Scottish host John Henderson, is that word: responsible.

near Robbie Burns underpass
viaduct walking near Robbie Burns museum Ayr  photo M. Anderson

It didn’t take long to see that the Scots, like Canadians, have some trouble with the  “responsible” part of their relationship with the natural world. The legislation establishing The Right of Access in Scotland is recent –  nine years old and part of the devolution of power to Scotland. As would be the case if we were fortunate enough in Canada to adopt similar legislation, the educational curve is still ahead. We saw lots of garbage on our shoreline scramble, even though the views were magnificent otherwise.

glove and sea
beach garbage south of Ayr photo M. Anderson

Maybe Scots, like Canadians, haven’t yet learned how beautiful, fragile, and important the natural world around them is. Finns, for instance, are taught to respect nature from kindergarten. Learning to enjoy berries, mushrooms, and views, and not disturb others, especially landowners, seems to be in Finnish DNA. In Scotland we passed what appeared to be an “Open Access” camp on the beach (see below, in the distance) and while the folks were practicing their rights, their garbage seemed to be a problem.

rock walking with campsite in background
pilgrims and Open Access camp in background photo M. Anderson

Still, one can hope. Local organizations had both cleaned up the last part of today’s walk, and had also set up trail markers. We hadn’t seen any markers on the first leg and had had to backtrack several times as a result. This is probably how Responsible Access is best lived-out: by community groups that operate locally to remind citizens to both get out on the land, and to leave no trace except their paths.

for more on the journey, see Ken Wilson’s blog Reading and Walking at https://readingandwalking.wordpress.com/

bluebells and ocean
Scottish bluebells near the sea photo M. Anderson
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Today’s Kinder Trespass

Kinder Trespass 1932

This morning I’m nursing an incision from my recent hernia surgery. But as I drink tea in Nottingham, walkers in England’s Peaks District, just a short distance away – including our friend Meredith Warren – are right now adjusting backpacks, filling water bottles, and scanning the Kinder Scout headlands. They’ll stop at the quarry where, on Sunday April 24, 1932, Benny Rothman (who arrived by bicycle to avoid police at the train) gave a rousing speech and led about 500 young people in the “Kinder Scout Mass Trespass.” That original protest might have been forgotten, except for the arrest of five of the Ramblers; Rothman got four months in prison just for his speech. The resulting public outcry led, eventually, and after much more protest, to the beautiful, wide-open British Parks that so many now enjoy, and the “Right to Roam” allowing limited public access to private land.

I climbed the 2000-foot Kinder Scout rise on a hot day last year. Oddly, the two people with me were both Canadians I had just met (we had that awkward moment in the bakery when we just had to ask, since our accents sounded so much “like home”). Between breaths we talked about whether a “Right of Responsible Access” would work in Canada. I’m convinced it would, and should: not only was much of North America an Indigenous “commons” before European contact, Settlement, and expulsion of First Nations, but for those of us who are European-background, our own histories and cultures often have clear antecedents for “everyperson’s right”. It’s ironic that the very descendants of the Irish, Scots and English who had been violently “cleared” from their commons lands by landowners so often went on to do exactly the same thing to Indigenous peoples.

We Canadians can do better. The examples are before us. National Trust’s website for Kinder Scout states “walk in the steps of the trespassers and enjoy what others fought so hard for.” We have important, historic trails on private lands on Turtle Island, too. They need limited, responsible, public access –  in my upcoming book with University of Regina Press I describe our experiences walking some of these incredibly important paths. Teaching ourselves and our children that land is a common good, requiring care, will make us all healthier and happier. Reconnecting with land – our own form of Kinder Trespass – helps those of us who are Settler be better prepared as Treaty partners with those whom our ancestors also “cleared” from the lands we call home.

See my article on “Why Canadians Need the Right to Roam” at: https://theconversation.com/why-canadians-need-the-right-to-roam-100497

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The Myth of an Empty Land

fullsizeoutput_6580
sketch by R.B. Nevitt, surgeon with the NWMP in the 1870s

Despite recent attempts to sensitize Settler-Canadians to the brutal non-mythologised realities of our arrival and eventual colonial dominance in Canada, many stories of settlement still contain some version of the words “into a wild and uninhabited land came our brave ancestors.” Narratives based on an understanding of pre-Settlement Canada as “empty” or “wild” consciously or unconsciously serve an unjust political agenda. They ignore the ways in which First Nations were relied upon and then cast aside by the early Settlers. They conveniently excuse the economic and political machinations that were used to isolate and disempower Indigenous peoples in Canada, to metaphorically and literally starve them, and to seek their eventual destruction by death or assimilation.

In part because of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canadian myths of origin are changing. But it is not yet clear how they will evolve, and it is much less clear that their evolution will lead to a greater willingness on the part of non-Indigenous Canadians to see land in new ways – ways that might foster the Treaty relationships. In  November 2018 the government of Saskatchewan, responding in part to pressure from its Association of Rural Municipalities, significantly tightened rural trespassing laws.[1] This is a significant setback to public access, a backlash many think will only further damage relations with Indigenous peoples.[2] This summer I plan to walk – and camp – in Scotland and Finland, using the jokamiehenoikeus, or “right of responsible access.” These are countries in which a robust “right of responsible access” exists, and also countries from which Eastern and Western Canada derived some of their Settler populations. By studying how national myths are related to positive experiences of public use of land in Scotland and Finland, I am hoping to find resources in our own cultural histories that will help Settler-Canadians rethink their relationship to land, and thus to First Peoples.[3]

[1] https://sarm.ca/about-sarm/news/item/?n=194

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/saskatchewan-trespassing-plan-racial-tensions-1.4891278

[3] Anderson, 2018. “Pilgrimage and the Challenging of a Canadian Foundational Myth,” in Pilgrimage in Practice: Narration, Reclamation, and Healing, edited by Ian S. McIntosh, E Moore Quinn, and Vivian Keely, 148-163. Wallingford, UK: CABI Press.

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Fences Don’t Make Good Neighbours

classic fence photo of pilgrims

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Right of Responsible Access, or the “Right to Roam”. A friend of mine in Saskatchewan recently said her farm was broken into a number of times despite the fact they installed cameras. “I don’t think Right to Roam is a good idea,” she wrote me. That’s terrible. But the fact is, “Right to Roam” doesn’t allow people to break into buildings. Unfortunately, putting up more NO TRESPASSING signs won’t stop crooks, either… they already know what they’re doing is illegal. Whether the government of SK adopts responsible access, or (as seems more likely) accepts the association of rural municipalities’ request for tighter trespassing laws, either way, nothing changes when it comes to farmer’s yards and buildings. Breaking in is illegal already. In countries like Scotland, if anything, the laws got tighter when the Right of Access came in.  The two problems in Saskatchewan, and elsewhere, are a “they can go to hell” culture, and a lack of enforcement of EXISTING laws.

THE EVIDENCE            The idea is to reduce property damage and theft and to live in healthy communities. Everyone agrees. So what’s the evidence? Evidence-based arguments show that, in Finland, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, and Iceland, countries that are quite similar to Canada with northern climates, and small populations spread over big areas – in those countries increasing access, rather than decreasing it, is what decreases rural crime, vandalism and littering. Increasing access actually puts more sympathetic eyes on the land, rather than fewer. It increases public interest and public attention. Criminals don’t work out in the open. They dump their garbage, or deface a wall, or break through a lock, when no one is looking.

CHINOOK PARKWAY   I grew up in Swift Current SK. There’s a trail along the Swift Current Creek called the Chinook Parkway. It wasn’t there when I was a kid.  I spent a lot of time along that creek looking for garter snakes and later, golf balls. But the area was always dirty and dangerous. There were too many broken beer bottles in the long grass – no one cared. If Swift Current had put up a fence along the creek and increased fines tenfold it wouldn’t have stopped kids from breaking bottles and starting campfires and leaving garbage. Police can’t be everywhere. But creating a public access space in the Chinook Parkway where people walk and jog and cycle has put more people out in the open. It’s made the river’s edge – and the city – healthier, and better, and safer.

GRADUAL CULTURAL CHANGE           You don’t make a rule and expect it to change everything, you try to change the culture gradually. What option will create greater, and healthier community for Canadian people? Does the higher the fence mean the better the neighbour, really? In Norway and Sweden and Scotland and Finland and Austria and some other countries, there’s a whole culture where people are trained up, from childhood, to know how to be on the land – how to respect crops, and animals, and fences, and private buildings. They know how to pick berries or mushrooms and respect property at the same time. Sure, it doesn’t happen overnight. But the question to ask ourselves is: what will be the direction that bringing in a new piece of legislation will take us?

LIABILITY:        Some landowners will say: well, we could never have the Right of Responsible Access in Canada because some city person would come out here and fall down a badger hole and before you know it I’d be sued. FALSE. In Scotland and in other countries where they’ve brought in such laws, at the same time they passed laws protecting landowners from lawsuits. It wasn’t difficult. In those countries, it’s nearly impossible for someone to sue a landowner for personal injury while exercising responsible access. The only exception would be if the landowner willingly and intentionally set some kind of trap for walkers. Shy of that, they’re protected. For more on this, and on the evidence for crime rates, see “This Land is Our Land” (a terrible title, but a good book), by Ken Ilgunas.

THE QUESTION:          So the question is: what kind of future makes for better community? Do you want to live in a land where there’s more fear, more danger, where if you break down on the road you’re afraid to go and ask for help? Or do you want you and your children to grow up in a land where landowners are respected and yet at the same time, everyone feels a connection to, and a responsibility for, the land? Where people can stop by the side of the road and pick chokecherries or saskatoons or raspberries, or have a picnic (making sure to pick up their garbage). Where city dwellers understand some of the problems of farmers and ranchers, because they actually know something about the land and have met the people? The more people feel a connection to the land, the way farmers and ranchers do, the more everyone – even urban people – act as allies. Fences don’t make people safe. Good relations do.

 

 

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CBC SK interview about the Right to Roam in Canada

quarry plaque one

CBC Saskatchewan’s Garth Materie interviewed me on The Afternoon Edition on August 2, 2018, about what it might look like to bring “The Right to Roam” to Canada, and specifically to Saskatchewan! (click on the link below to listen)