Confrontation With Landowners
Throughout its history, the Ramblers have often been involved with other countryside user groups and landowners.
Notable confrontations are:
Madonna won a battle against the Ramblers in 2004 after Ramblers were banned from the pop star's country estate for half the year because of the risk of being shot. Fifty-four acres of the 1,132-acre (4.58 km2) Ashcombe Estate on the Wiltshire/Dorset border were opened to walkers under new right-to-roam laws, but the Countryside Agency agreed that ramblers will be banned from the open part of the land from September to February—during the shooting season. During the rest of the year the small section of land will be open.
Jeremy Clarkson, the TV presenter and Top Gear host who lives on the Isle of Man, became frustrated at the lack of privacy at his home when ramblers deviated from a pathway to take photographs of his dwelling, hoping to catch a glimpse of the star. Clarkson's property bordered a small 250-metre strip of land that had no definitive status as a public right of way but was used by walkers regardless. Clarkson aimed to close access to this small strip of his land, thereby forcing ramblers to take a small diversion to stick to the official public Right of way and therefore protecting his claimed right to privacy on his own property. In May 2010 the former transport minister, Hon. David Anderson MHK, accepted the conclusions of a public inquiry that all except five of the paths claimed at the inquiry as Public Rights of Way have been dedicated as public rights of way and should be added to the Definitive Map.
Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, the millionaire property tycoon, has had a long-standing dislike of and dispute with Ramblers, describing them as "scum of the earth". In 1999 Mr Hoogstraten erected a large fence across a footpath on his country estate in East Sussex. Local Ramblers staged a protest against the erection of the fence outside the boundary of Mr Hoogstraten's estate. On 10 February 2003 and after a 13-year battle and numerous legal proceedings, the path was finally re-opened.
Read more about this topic: Ramblers
Famous quotes containing the words confrontation with and/or landowners:
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.... The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)