The trouble with wild campers

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.

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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. As one campaigner from the charity The Stars Are for Everyone said: ‘Access to a night under the stars… now does not rely on the whims of individual landowners but is owned by ordinary people.’ As though those who steward the land are somehow not ordinary and that they exist to frustrate the lives of those who are.

In fact, few landowners would want to ban visitors outright; the warp and weft of rural living has always been enriched by a cast of hermits and eccentrics. In my childhood, there was an old lady named Miss Paulet who would roam the highways and byways in a gypsy caravan, pulled by a skewbald cob named Magpie that was nearly as old as her. She would occasionally call on my parents for a glass of sherry and a bath and once gave my father a piece of paper with the address of her next of kin scrawled on it – a marchioness with many acres of her own – in case she was found dead one day.