To stray from the path suggests a clearly marked line of righteousness, signposted by societal or religious doctrines. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer Author and right-to-roam campaigner Nick Hayes trespassing on Basildon Park’s historic parklands in Berkshire. Inside it is an oasis of wet rot and green life, ferns and flowers, and as it apears on the page of my sketchbook it turns into a table-topped dormant volcano, a private Eden walled from the field by its bulky outer layer of crumbling cambium and hard bark", and some moments of pure comedy - such as the joyous description of his dog's ball-licking activities. Glimpsed through trees on a warm summer evening, its magnificent portico crested by golden sunlight, it rises like a beacon, a sight from which it’s hard to tear the eyes. The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it.

Whenever I talk about a Right to Roam the response is almost always a tiresome ‘Huh, you won’t mind if I came into your back yard then’. Personally, I think guilt and shame has no part in designing a better future, they simply obscure and divide, I refuse to be held responsible for the actions of my ancestors. While one can immediately understand where this law could be useful (preventing peeping toms, for instance) it also seems somehow contrary to common sense than an adult seeking to draw a beautiful landscape should be prevented from doing so.At the time, this was primarily to restrict the hunt saboteurs, but is used in the vast majority of protests of all flavours, from fracking, to animal rights, to war. Children need to learn about dragonflies by having them land on their noses so that as adults they will find it abhorrent to see a Wispa Gold wrapper next to an orchid.

It also made me sad how us 'common people' were walked all over when it comes to land ownership and how despite all this empty space around us you'll still hear the people higher up complain that we don't have enough space! Ranging widely through different landscapes and ownership patterns (although rarely venturing in to the northern counties), Nick Hayes illustrates his own experiences of trespass with the political, economic and cultural history of the land and watercourses that have led to ordinary citizens being denied access to 92 per cent of the former and 97 per cent of the latter. They were, he says, having the kind of heart-to-heart that could only really happen in “the easy chaos of the countryside”, wandering towards a spot that, at the time, was the sole place he’d ever seen a kingfisher. As befits The Book of Trespass, it starts with the infamous Kinder Scout trespass in the 30s - a good jumping off point for a story about how the common man's right to the use of land has eroded over time to the narrow strip of a right of way. A meditation on the fraught and complex relationship between land, politics and power, this is England through the eyes of a trespasser.

Highlighting the links between land, powerful people and political interests, the history of distribution of land is explained thoroughly and in an interesting way.

For all its exuberance and erudition, The Book of Trespass is unlikely to cross our culture-war fences. I found the first part of this book to be very informative and discovered quite a bit about life in England before the Norman Conquest which I had hadn't known previously. I never used to see it in the context of politics – there was just a spot, a break in the fence, and you nip through. Even poor old anglers, those “fisher-kings” with their bought licences, get it with both barrels as lackeys of the ruling class, opposed to the free-spirited kayakers who paddle over partitions with proper revolutionary zeal. So he sits at the apex of the system of private landed property that grants total control to elite proprietors, near-zero rights of access and enjoyment to everyone else, and underpins that “cult of exclusion” that (in Hayes’s eyes) has defined and degraded our national life.Basildon Park house in west Berkshire is set amid 400 acres of historic parkland – most of which is private territory.