A pack of a dozen mountain bikers bursts down the newly rebuilt, stone-stepped path on Roseberry Topping. Several are motor-assisted. Gravity does the rest. Gravel skitters, walkers flinch, gates are left yawning behind them. For a few loud seconds the hill is theirs, claimed by speed and noise. It looks impressive, in the way a juggernaut looks impressive on a village green.
What this spectacle hides is not simply illegal cycling on a footpath, though that is bad enough, but something duller and nastier: arrogance. Anti-social behaviour. A blunt refusal to treat a shared place as shared. The damage comes later, once the adrenaline has gone. The edges of the new path are already crumbling, after only months. The countryside pays quietly, as it always does.
This does not come from nowhere. Britain has no settled culture of access. We have laws instead. Messy ones. Contested ones. A tangle of footpaths, access land, parish boundaries and surveying bodies that make sense only to lawyers and the deeply bored. Rights of Way stop dead at invisible lines. Authority changes from field to field. The result is a landscape that feels arbitrary, and so invites people to ignore it.
Contrast that with Scandinavia, where “Every Man’s Right” is not a slogan but a lesson learned early. Children are taught that freedom comes with restraint. You tread lightly. You do not spoil things. You do not need a laminated code nailed to a gate. Custom does the work.
Here, the gaps in law become gaps in behaviour. If no one seems in charge, people make up their own rules. Some ride footpaths or access land because no one will know. Others because the route looks like a challenge. The countryside becomes a gym, a racetrack, a proving ground. Courtesy is optional.
I am not innocent. I have bent the rules myself, like many others. Age, if nothing else, brings perspective. It also brings the sobering knowledge that one can no longer outrun an angry gamekeeper.
In the end, the bill lands on everyone. When walkers feel bullied off paths, a public right is quietly stolen. Repairs cost money, and that money comes from all of us. When people stop going out because the countryside feels hostile, their health suffers. A resource unused is a resource wasted.
If land is open to all, it is not open for conquest. Freedom is not the same thing as dominance.
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