Is there such a thing as ‘responsible trespassing’? This man walked 500 miles—and says yes

Somewhere near Carlisle, I hit the biggest wall of the walk. My feet cramped inwards like figs shrivelling on a gnarled branch, the rain came at a vindictive slant, my useless boots soaked up water like a biscuit in tea, and the blisters grew more confident with every step.

Then I saw it—a semaphore of salvation flapping in the wind; a red flag with chubby lettering promising one thing: ‘Food’. Inside what I now realized was a trucker’s café, the lights were off, but Oktay, the owner, agreed to refire the grill and prepare his most calorific bap. I punched it into my mouth, then pleaded for painkillers. “I’m all out, sorry pal!” he said, in his Turkish-Geordie lilt. It was a ‘goodbye’ from me and a wincing ‘good luck’ from him as I set off for another marathon of pain.

Three miserable hours passed before I saw a car pull up on the pavement, main beams blinding me through the gloaming. It was Oktay. He’d driven miles to the nearest petrol station to buy me paracetamol and water.

During the British summer of 2024, I walked 505 miles—1,040,360 steps—from Hastings on the south coast of England to Gretna just over the Scottish border. Along the way, I responsibly trespassed and illegally wild-camped to raise awareness—and a few quid—for the Right to Roam, a campaign that advocates for greater access to nature in England and Wales.

I find most contemporary causes so overwhelmingly unsolvable that a paralysing weltschmerz, a sort of melancholy and world-weariness, sets in. But there’s something about our medieval attitude to owning land that grinds my gears.

To understand how we’ve got to this place—and how we can escape it—we have to dust off the 1,000 year-old prism of property and privacy laws.

It’s clear that our forced divorce from the countryside actually precursors many of the hot-button subjects du jour: Poverty, mental health, biodiversity collapse… It starts with the stats. Did you know that 92 percent of England is out of bounds? That is to say, only eight percent can be accessed without permission. And of that eight percent, next to none is woodland.

People seemed genuinely moved by my cause—indignant, even. Quietly angry that we’ve been severed from the land, disconnected from the very thing that has always sustained us.

Meanwhile, 0.01 percent of the population owns half the country. The lords, the landed, the yacht-polishing classes—their legal right to exploit the soil and exclude us commoners dates back to William the Conqueror and his barons, who carved up the land for their hunting habits.

Our exclusion is not just a moral failing, but an ecological disaster. In global rankings, we’re in the bottom 10 percent for biodiversity. Even Malta, a (large) rock in the Med, has more birds and bugs. And we’re bottom in Europe for ‘nature connectedness’. The good news? Scotland and Sweden have shown us the way forward. Over there, the land is (mostly) everyone’s to explore. In England, “Trespassers will be prosecuted” signs successfully induce fear and shame, even though trespass, per se, isn’t a criminal offence. Yet.

My walk began where it all went wrong: Hastings. There, in 1066, William the Conqueror defeated Harold II, and the land-grab began. I walked up to Battle Abbey, built by William to immortalize his win, and hopped its wall for my first thrilling trespass. It was after hours, the grounds were deserted, and the buzz of doing something mildly naughty was intoxicating. There wasn’t enough cover to camp, so I pushed on, eventually finding a spot under the stately sequoias of the Beech Estate.

Its 2,000 acres were originally enclosed by two historical families, both beneficiaries of the Norman Conquest. This was my first time wild camping, and I rolled out my sleeping bag with the elegance of a toddler unwrapping a Christmas present. To stymie the scariness of being in the woods alone, I lit my first-ever fire and drifted off listening to a podcast about the Normans.

The next few days, through chocolate-box East Sussex, were a mix of public footpaths and enforced detours. Blocked trails, barbed wire and unfriendly signage are all part of the English countryside experience. On day two, my trusty Ordnance Survey (OS) map app ushered me along a public path, but I soon found it fenced off. A farmworker caught me mid-hop and laughed when I said I was walking to Scotland. “Farmer’ll ‘ave ya,” he warned, before suggesting I take a shortcut through the neighbor’s woodland. “Why not,” I thought.

Scaling fences, wresting my singlet from hedgerows, missing ditches—it was Roald Dahl-coded, a bit ‘boy on an adventure’. I was discovering the footloose joy of veering off-piste, even if it came with brambles and scratches. When I returned to the path, I felt a sense of triumph: In my own little game of cat and mouse, I’d made it back to safety.

The inspiration for this walk struck during lockdown. With travel off the table and my career as a travel writer taking a nosedive, I needed something —anything—to temper the Sartrean woe. Wild swimming became the fashionable antidote to cabin fever, so I searched Google Maps for the nearest blue patch. It turned out to be a grand lake on a private estate. The wall wasn’t high, so I started sneaking in at night, plunging into a shimmering obsidian sheet beneath the stars. It was bliss. Free therapy.

The claustrophobia of COVID-19 was compounded by the knowledge that there was nowhere sensible to swim without permission. So I put my hack’s hat back on and looked into it. That’s when I came across Nick Hayes, author of the Book of Trespass. He, with author-activist Guy Shrubsole, had recently set up the Right to Roam campaign. Its central tenet was compelling: Principally, that by enshrining into law a full right to responsible access in England, we could begin to address the plights of people and planet.

Carly Butler, a researcher on Nature Connectedness, explained how 15 minutes counting butterflies eases anxiety, and a two-hour woodland walk boosts immunity for a month. We tested her ideas on a guided walk, even veering off-path to admire a sweet chestnut tree. “Connection requires access,” she said.

On the trail, people seemed genuinely moved by the cause—indignant, even. Quietly angry that we’ve been severed from the land, disconnected from the very thing that has always sustained us. Even Oktay’s heroic delivery of painkillers wasn’t a one-off, and an example of the overwhelming kindness of strangers.

Steve, a tattoo artist in Tunbridge Wells, handed me Haribo gummies and £20 for my next meal. In Hertfordshire, a museum curator bought me a pint before pointing out a trespass route onto an estate owned by an access-denying bitcoin billionaire. And in Gaddesby, Leicestershire, a pub landlady turned a lock-in into a sleepover, slinging me the keys to Bedroom 4 when she found out I’d planned to camp in a nearby coppice.

I broached this with barrister and Lawyers for Nature co-founder Paul Powlesland. We met at his narrow boat on the river Roding in East London. He and others have removed tonnes of fly-tipped waste and used a digger to carve a new path on a stretch of riverside that the landowner, Transport for London, doesn’t want people to access. “To me, this is an incredible urban nature reserve,” he said. “More people should be able to see it.” His work with Lawyers for Nature amounts to a sort of legal guardianship for the forests, rivers and wildlife that can’t defend themselves.

It wasn’t all derring-do and righteousness, though. In nearby Highbury & Islington, north London, a hundred miles or so into my trip, I nearly threw in the towel. An acute stabbing pain in my right Achilles forced me to stop on a park bench. Staring at my cankles, I contemplated failure before heading to a hostel for a 14-hour sleep. The next day I somehow managed 23 miles, the furthest I’d ever walked in a day.

Physical pain became a constant companion. Blisters multiplied. My wet socks began to smell like kombucha. Descending hills backward (I called it the ‘Jackson’) became my go-to tactic to protect my knees, and my trusty Birkenstocks made an appearance when my boots became sponges. I dropped into an NHS walk-in center more than once, where no-nonsense nurses lanced, sponged and patched me without complaint.

Limping through the Midlands, I started to pay more attention to my surroundings. My vision of the countryside as a place of Sunday-walk boredom was starting to blur. The thrill of trespass helped, but I also found satisfaction in the subtlest nods from nature: Susurrating leaves; the particular dapple of a deciduous canopy.

Carly Butler, a researcher on Nature Connectedness at the University of Derby explained how 15 minutes counting butterflies eases anxiety, and a two-hour woodland walk boosts immunity for a month. We tested her ideas on a guided walk, even veering off-path to admire a sweet chestnut tree. “Connection requires access,” she said.

In Northamptonshire, I trespassed Rushton Hall with explorer, mountaineer and campaigner Emma Linford. Once the seat of Sir Thomas Tresham, Rushton Hall is infamous for the Midlands Revolt of 1607, when Tresham’s illegal enclosures led to an uprising that ended in bloodshed. The leader of the rebels, Captain Pouch, claimed to have divine protection from a magical pouch—though it failed him in the end.

As Emma and I made our way through a field, a farmer intercepted us. His initial hostility melted when Emma calmly explained our cause. Liability, he admitted, was his main concern. “If someone gets hurt, it’s me who gets sued.” Emma later said, “Getting caught trespassing isn’t a failure—it’s a chance to start a conversation.”

“In Scotland, you can walk anywhere, camp anywhere. It’s powerful. It changes how you see the world.”

- Nadia Shaikh, co-director, Right to Roam

In Sheffield, I joined photographer Leigh Rose of Trash Free Trails, a group that uses litter-picking as a way to connect people with nature. He snapped me camping in a woodland behind a Harvester restaurant and we spent the morning talking about ‘purposeful adventure’—the kind that benefits the environment while boosting mental health.

We then met Maxwell Ayamaba, whose work on rural England’s forgotten Black history blew me away. Did you know the African-born Roman Emperor Septimius Severus probably built some of the roads we still use today? “The story doesn’t begin with Windrush, like most people think—we’ve been here longer than you!” Maxwell’s passion for reframing the countryside as a shared space—one that belongs to all of us, not just the tweed set—was inspiring.

Later, Issy from the Sheffield Outdoor Plungers invited me to trespass-swim in Royd Moor Reservoir. A full 97 percent of our inland water is privatized and the ‘danger of death’ signs on reservoirs are the semiotics of liability rather than safety. “It’s safer than swimming in the sea,” Issy pointed out, wading in. “When I swim,” Issy said, “I don’t need wine to relax!”

As I moved north, the views, all bruised skies and Brontean moor, began to feel freer. Yorkshire’s vast estates lacked the endless ‘Keep Out’ signs I’d grown used to, and the open-access areas gave me a taste of what could be. In the Dales, I tackled my longest day: 60,000 steps over Ribblehead Viaduct and Whernside before collapsing into a pub in the mint-tin village of Dent, where live music and Guinness were the perfect panacea.

Near the border, I met Jamie Norrington, a senior figure at the Wildlife Trust, who explained how managing land for game-bird shooting harms the environment. Shooting, Jamie told me, is becoming an increasingly popular status symbol activity with “bankers from London”. Controlled burns (done to promote the growth of heather, grouse’s favorite food source) dry out the peat beneath ground—a vital carbon sink—and illegal traps kill predators to protect game birds.

Now that I know this, the landscape suddenly felt  artificial, like a backdrop for a Victorian shooting party. Earlier that day, I’d spoken to a gamekeeper who defended these practices, claiming they help protect ground-nesting birds like curlews. Jamie wasn’t convinced: “Curlews are a convenient cover for bad practices,” he said. “An overabundance of any one species usually signals poor biodiversity.”

Finally, in Gretna, I crossed into Scotland, where land access is enshrined in law. Nadia Shaikh, conservationist and co-director of the Right to Roam campaign, welcomed me with a hug and a smile. “In Scotland, you can walk anywhere, camp anywhere,” she told me. “It’s powerful. It changes how you see the world.”

This walk gave me more than blisters and pub stories. It gave me confidence—to follow my curiosity, to veer off the beaten path, to see the land as something that belongs to all of us. The kindness of strangers and the quiet joy of nature reaffirmed my belief that adventure doesn’t need an exotic backdrop.

I’m conscious, being a noisy white man, that the countryside is a less daunting place for me than others. Solo trespassing is a privilege. But I urge you to grab a friend, a tent, and a Tesco meal deal, and explore your local area. It’s startling how much of England none of us see. As Nick Hayes writes in The Trespassers’ Companion: “It’s time to reclaim what’s already ours.”

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