It’s not just bears that squat in the woods, as you’ll discover if you ever have the pleasure of a visit from wild campers. Other disfigurements to the land have included scorched patches of grass, which luckily didn’t become full-blown wildfires, branches severed from trees (presumably for wet firewood), stakes removed from young saplings (ditto), and the inevitable beer can and ‘disposable’ barbecue pyramid. I recently found a lacy, magenta-coloured bodice hanging from a tree, but that may have been left by an even wilder breed of camper.
So I have every sympathy for my fellow landowners who have the misfortune of eking out a living in the granite-strewn wastes of the Dartmoor National Park, where a legal challenge has just upheld the right to camp wildly, without permission.
Visitors can now camp overnight wherever they please, after the Court of Appeal decided that a right to ‘open-air recreation’ included setting up a tent and bedding down.
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