ABSTRACT
Access to outdoor adventure in the UK has a long history of power struggles between social classes. In the late nineteenth century the working classes were increasingly able to travel on the cheap railways and were gaining the right to have weekends off and take paid holidays. Some of the middle classes attempted to prevent them reaching places such as the Lake District by opposing the construction of the railways. They claimed that the working classes did not have the education with which to properly appreciate the sublime landscapes of the British coasts and mountains (Williams, 2002). The upper classes had an even more effective strategy, as they owned much of the land and excluded others from it. This led to the mass trespass movements of the 1930s (Glyptis, 1991). It was only in 2000 that the law commonly known as the right to roam restored the right of access for all to open country in England and Wales (Pearlman Hougie and Dickinson, 2000). In Scotland, the ‘right to roam’ was never lost but was bitterly fought over, nonetheless. Struggles to access land are still not fully resolved, as access to rivers and coastline continues to be a contentious issue (see also Chapter 9).
