We recently carried a guest posting from Geoff Guy about the enclosure of land and the benefits to environmental and outdoor education arising from more recent legislation open it up again through the ‘right to roam’. If you are interested in the enclosures, then you might like A Short History of Enclosure in Britain by Simon Fairlie which is published in the Land Magazine.
Fairlie describes how the progressive enclosure of commons over several centuries has deprived most of us of access to the land. It begins:
Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain’s land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our “property-owning democracy”, nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line. …
We also think that the illustrations, such as the one shown here, are wonderfully evocative of time and place.