'If you think England is beautiful, you should look behind its walls.' This sentence, from Nick Hayes’s Book of Trespass, flashes through my mind as I’m scaling the gate to James Dyson’s 700-acre estate in the Cotswolds. I do think England’s beautiful – today will be the first time I explore behind its walls.
It’s Kinder Trespass Day, and I’m out here with nearly fifty fellow celebrants. It is a beautiful spring day: the breeze is fresh, the birds are singing loud, and many of us are breathing it all in with added rapture after months of stuffy urban winter. And by now, most of us are likely humming with adrenaline, as we take our first steps into this fenced-off Wonderland owned by one of the UK’s (or, erm, Singapore’s ?) richest men.
It really is like entering another world. The interstitial, sheep-sheared greenspace at our backs gives way to a terrain designed primarily for humans. The lawns feel spacious in a way no pasture ever does – their plush grass isn’t a commercial input but an end itself, and you feel this somehow, as with the picture-postcard trees. It’s magical, and subtly unlike almost anything I’ve seen.
As we wonderingly wander, leaving the footpath behind, it hits me for the first time how these paths structure both our experience of the countryside, and perhaps the countryside itself, into a kind of corridor. I am surprised by just how liberating it feels to break out of this linear predicament, transgressing from walker to roamer. You don’t ‘explore’ a footpath, you use it.
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We cross a river and then reach the main event. If you think Dodington Park’s wooded gardens are beautiful, you should see its lake. It turns out the estate was drawn up by the one and only Capability Brown, making it as much a gem of English culture as a Turner or a Wordsworth poem. Like so much lovely English heritage, this landscape has uncomfortable associations: the Codringtons shaped this land with the proceeds from some of the largest slave holdings in the West Indies, the same family ruling from the manor until 1980.
We reach the lakeshore, and about half the group takes a swim. I don’t. With my mind still grappling with the awful basis of this beauty, their pointed leisure feels beside the point – but then, perhaps it’s exactly the point.
What is the point? We haven’t brought a list of theses to nail to the Dysons’ no-doubt-gorgeous door – but if we had, it probably would have been some version of the Right to Roam campaign’s incredibly reasonable argument : in brief, that 92% of English countryside being off-limits has terrible consequences for our mental and physical health, our collective treatment of the natural world, and for our social fabric. This is essentially the same point that was made, maligned and then mythologised on Kinder Scout in 1932.
But then again: we’re not walking on grouse-moor, but a lavish English landscape garden drenched in blood and wealth. This difference becomes apparent when we meet the groundskeeper. He trundles up the driveway in a buggy, and we exchange cheery hellos. He doesn’t seem to have an axe to grind, and several of us stop for an implausibly good-natured conversation. We compliment him earnestly on his management, he describes some of the local fauna’s quirks, and then he asks us what we’re here for.
[Picture, here, of the insanely lavish boathouse]
Our group’s replies mostly forgo the abstract Right to Roam angle for something slightly more intuitive given the setting: should anyone have wealth like this? No less than in the slave era, these edifying grounds provide a sweet veneer to a gargantuan, globe-spanning network of power. Quite aside from this network’s tax-status, its size alone is enough to grant “jaw-dropping” political access . As the man himself says, “In order to fix [something], you need a passionate anger about something that doesn’t work well”. Dyson, net worth £16bn, does not appear to be passionately angry about our compromised democracy or corollary dysfunctional economy; but we are, and we think he should know.
Our new friend doesn’t see things this way, giving a dignified rehearsal of the ‘they’ve worked for it’ argument, and we agree to disagree, not least because the police are here.
This turns out to be another low-key encounter: another pair of men in uniforms, without much more insistence than the first. It’s heartening to know that though trespass law sounds scary, it’s generally too cumbersome to bother using in the face of common sense. Everybody knows we’re temporary visitors, and feeling that we’ve made our point, we make to leave.
I’m still wondering what it all amounts to when an actual Dyson comes down the drive. That is, not a premium hoover but a scion of the line – Big James’s son. He’s not so sunny as the groundsman, but is up for a chat. We have a basically similar discussion; nobody ever won an argument, but it feels good to be putting this stuff on the figurative map. As protest goes, it is delightfully direct: no meddling intermediaries, but an actual conversation with the people with the power.
As we receive our polite farewells, I come away with an expansive sense of new horizons. Where so many inequities take heroism and endurance to confront, the world of trespass is emancipatory in its very action; although a little tense at times, it’s been a lush day out.
The Right to Roam campaign, which Nick Hayes’s brilliant Trespass helped to bring to life, is growing fast. As we dispersed through Dodington, the much bigger Kinder in Colour was raising awareness about racial inequality in access to the land; another trespass is in the works for near Totnes on May the 8th, another one in Berkshire on the 14th, and no doubt many more will come up through the summer.
