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Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler

But what I did love is that Nick’s book is also a wonderful book about nature, about folklore; it’s intellectually powerful, blending thinkers from all sorts of fields. Hayes, as he would readily admit, stands on the shoulders of green (and sometimes red) English giants. Please take the time to explore our staff page hereto see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements.Section 68 criminalises the intimidation, deterrence, obstruction and disruption of lawful activities on land, which turns all protest on land not owned by the protesters into an illegal activity. Published by Bloomsbury, the deeply engaging book is a travelogue wherein the reader follows Nick on his adventures through the many private estates that take up much of England’s green and pleasant land – only 8% of the English landscape is open to public access. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in. But it offers a sharp-eyed, muddy-booted guide to the process that left the English “simultaneously hedged out of their land and hemmed into a new ideology”.

The Book of Trespass - Bloomsbury Publishing The Book of Trespass - Bloomsbury Publishing

He also kayaks on the River Kennet from Aldermaston, in west Berkshire, to the point near Reading where it meets the Thames – a journey that takes him through the estate owned by Richard Benyon who, until 2019, was the richest MP in Parliament (Benyon lives in Englefield House, which dates from 1558, and which passed to his family by marriage in the 18th century; some of their money was made via the East India Company, too). In the end, though, for all its exuberance and erudition, The Book of Trespass is unlikely to cross many of the fraudulent culture-war fences that divide citizens today. It's a shame because I am confident there are lawyers who would, for free, have gently edited the text for legal accuracy (my confidence stems in part from the fact that I am one of them). Finally, there are the offshore companies, which in 2015 owned 490,000 acres of England and Wales, meaning that an area larger than Greater London can legally avoid stamp duty and inheritance tax (the largest swathe of English land registered to offshore companies is the Gunnerside estate, whose 27,258 acres of North Yorkshire moorland are registered in the British Virgin Islands and which, over the last decade or so, received some €430,000 of taxpayer handouts in the form of agricultural subsidies).From Gypsies and Travellers who refused to be confined to one place, to the witches and the women who maintained their knowledge of healing safe from the flames of modernity that sought to destroy them. It makes no sense, he argues, to create “fairy-tale ogres as if their own personalities are to blame” for centuries of law, force and propaganda. Crucially, and ambitiously, he argues that “Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in columns of hot air to the landless”: our old friend, nationalism as false consciousness. Even when I’m walking away from it, I keep turning my head to check that I didn’t only imagine it; that it hasn’t suddenly vanished into thin air.

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes, review: A gorgeously

It is just delightful in its description of his days trespassing in countryside seen only by a small group of the very rich and their employees – a real sense of his love of nature, a sense of discovery on land and waterways. This information will never be shared with a third party For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. But his ability to turn us on our heels through 180 degrees felt like power to me, and it’s quite rare for a white, straight, middle-class man [like me] to feel the operation of power like that. Suddenly, a quad bike came chugging over the paddock, and parked itself, just a little too close for comfort, in their way.

He takes care never to demonise the keepers and estate workers he confronts on his wall-breaching escapades.