Andrew Bibby reflects on how much has been achieved, and how far there is still to go.
campaigning Andrew Bibby
Campaigning for access 25 years after CRoW
I moved to the south Pennines house where I still live today from inner-city Coventry more than thirty-five years ago. It was quite a contrast. Instead of being woken in the small hours by the noise of a fight outside the nightclub across the dual carriageway opposite I got woken up by the sound of ducks and geese on the nearby Rochdale Canal.
And of course there were now hills on my doorstep which I lost no time in getting to know. Our beautiful moors have survived all that the Industrial Revolution could throw at them and have emerged the other
Andrew Bibby reflects on how much has been achieved, and how far there is still to go.
side( almost) unscathed, even if the peat is more eroded than it should be and the water more acidic.
But at the time when I moved north there was also a big frustration when it came to walking or running on the moorland: the‘ keep out’ signs which demarcated the land from which we were all excluded( unless we had paid to be there in the Autumn with our guns to try to bag as many brace of grouse as we could). It meant, for example, that the highest land in my part of the Pennines, Boulsworth Hill, was out of bounds if I wanted to get there from my side of the Yorkshire / Lancashire border. So too were impressive outcrops of millstone grit rocks, such as the Alcomden Stones, the Dove Stones and the Hare Stones.
Of course there was always the option of trespassing. Back in the 1990s, TGO magazine actually ran a piece of mine suggesting an all-day watershed walk in the area which certainly would have involved quite a lot of surreptitious
illegality for anyone taking me up on my proposal. But by then things were changing. By then a number of us locally had begun to take action. The Access to Boulsworth Campaign( ABC) got going. We had public meetings. We had newsletters.
We took prominent Labour politicians walking on to the forbidden moors( including Michael Meacher, who was to go on to play a major role in steering the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 through Parliament). We tried to make ourselves a nuisance.
We weren’ t the only people campaigning for access of course, but in the end all the effort was worthwhile and those‘ keep out’ signs had to come down. The CRoW Act didn’ t by any means give us everything we’ d like in terms of countryside access but it did mark a historic moment in terms of access to upland areas in England and Wales.( Scotland’ s history is of course different).
This November will mark the 25th anniversary of the CRoW Act receiving its Royal Assent and entering into law, and – although ABC is now a distant memory – some of us involved in the campaign then have got together again to mark the occasion. We’ re organising a national Freedom to Roam: the Next
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