ABSTRACT
In early 1997 British politics produced a most unlikely hero, known as Swampy. For the first few months of that year, Swampy was one of the most talked about figures in British political debate, and his popularity endured throughout 1997. Swampy was one of five protesters against a road-building scheme on the A30 in Devon who managed to get themselves down an extensive network of tunnels they and others had constructed when their protest camp, Fairmile, was evicted. Swampy was the last of the tunnelling protesters to be pulled out of the ground by ‘rescuers’ employed by the bailiffs to clear the way for the road, seven days after the five had gone underground.
