Tithe

By Eleanor Hill

Trespass can be many things. It can be an act of protest by a crowd, speaking with feet. It can be an act of transgression against a fellow human or creature. It can be as simple as slipping fox-like under the fence to gain passage into land that someone, somewhere, sometime has deemed is not for you. Animals, though they uphold and follow their own customs pertaining to territory, are bound by no such unnatural laws as those of private property. Unlike them, we feel compelled to obey wall, fence and hedge. We are told by our laws that the land beneath our feet is not our own. On the land, with our feet, we may refute this. In their small night-made whorls of grass, brock, fox and (less so, now) hedgehog show us the way into the hidden worlds beyond the barbed wire fence or hedge: it’s as easy, sometimes, as  going where you please. The act of trespass can be seen as an act of tithe taking: in England, medieval people were compelled to give 10% of their income or produce to the Church. By passing occasionally into privately owned places, off the footpaths, I take a tithe for myself - I offer to myself tiny portions of land, from landowners with hundreds or thousands of acres. My trespasses are infrequent, careful, quiet, and marked by none. They don’t feel political, or radical: they feel like common sense.  

The access afforded by Britain’s footpath network - one of the country’s remaining glories - is rightly regarded as a wonderful thing, but when detractors of right to roam campaigns ask ‘Isn’t that enough?’ they pose a cunning response: blame-shifting, they suggest unreasonableness on the part of the campaigners asking for more access. Yet it is not unreasonable to ask for more when such a small percentage of wealthy people own such an enormous percentage of England. At the time of writing the ancient rights pertaining to Dartmoor, the only place in England where camping outside of designated sites is legal, are once again under threat from the selfish whims of one very rich man. This right is being fiercely fought for. It is an unwelcome threat to our freedoms but, in these times, not an unexpected one. Indeed, it has been necessary for common folk to keep a weather-eye out for threats to their land rights for centuries. We talk about the Enclosures Acts as if they have been consigned to history, but acts of enclosure, official and unofficial, are happening all the time. Woods are fenced off, riverbanks are made inaccessible, field-paths are blocked.  

Small trespasses place you in the role of your own gatekeeper, redressing in a small way, the imbalance between landowners and everyday folk. The area of Derbyshire I was born in was once part of a medieval royal hunting forest known as Duffield Frith, itself an oppressive land regime, and many of the Frith’s natural and manmade features persist in the landscape - a boundary tree, a charcoal burner’s platform, a sunken drovers’ road. Such places are the small weave that make up the fabric of the land’s history, and I am heir to them, as are we all. Sometimes, to visit these places, trespass is required. One spring morning I set off in search of Carr Brook, a stream noteworthy for being the likely boundary of Duffield Frith, where once you could hop over the brook and into a  different set of laws. This boundary brook is not named on modern Ordnance Survey maps, but the 1888 map tells me that it is called Carr Brook, and that it flows through the intriguingly-named Gibbet Wood, which from above is shaped like a beckoning finger. In answer to the summons, I walked for hours through field-paths and along footpaths until I came to Gibbet Wood’s edge, where  the water of Carr Brook disappears into the trees. Barbed wire, that mean tool of the encloser, barred the entrance. Spent rifle shot and a broken mess of fluorescent orange clay pigeons starred  the watercourse in a miserable facsimile of the marsh marigolds that grow there in the summer.  

Gibbet Wood is private, out of bounds. I believe it is owned by the Chatsworth Estate, and therefore by the 12th Duke of Devonshire, who owns around 35,000 acres of Derbyshire. Despite his great golden-stoned house being a good fifteen miles north of here, much of the land hereabout is owned by the Duke. A telltale sign of Chatsworth ownership is a farm or house with its windows and doors painted in the estate’s tasteful shade of teal. There are plenty of those. I see and hear of bad land practices in the Duke’s many acres: bad woodland management, fox-hunting, statue-netting (to stop swifts and swallows nesting) and snare-laying, to name a few.  

At Gibbet Wood, after passing beneath the barbed wire, I fought my way over briars and ivy and into the trees. Not far past the wood’s border, a large branch plummeted straight to earth like a spear, not two feet from my head. I wanted to keep to the line of the old forest boundary, but it was hard going beside the Carr Brook. Because I was trespassing, an uneasiness and watched feeling had followed me under the fence; the deeply ingrained laws of the land skulk after us, even as we try to slip away. My jitters weren’t stilled by the stoving-in my skull had narrowly missed, or by the wood’s eeriness. Once inside, the place took on a magnitude at odds with its small green sliver marked neatly on the map. There was a feral strangeness to the wood that well-trodden ones often don’t possess.  

Straying from the footpath often means hard walking, but I was rewarded for my uncomfortable trespass, and not just by the wilder landscapes concealed behind fences. Shyer creatures keep to the places where folk don’t often tread, and sudden encounters with them can alter us on the spot. When the wild trespasses across the frontier of our domesticated minds it fills them, and for the brief moments it is a tenant, it evicts our mundane thoughts. As I trudged uneasily through Gibbet Wood I was caught suddenly, like a fish on a lure, by a fox looking me straight in the eye: a perfect face framed by bluebells - as if the fox knew how wonderfully violet sets off orange. Snagged on that barb of wildness, the moment was confined to fox - there was space for no other thought. Then, with a clichéd flash of tail, the fox was gone, but those few seconds have travelled far beyond themselves. When our stray attention is brought home, when moments such as this touch us, we know ourselves to be part of it all and that our separation from the living world is an illusion. The writer Iris Murdoch called this unselfing.  

I passed through Gibbet Wood observed only by its creatures; there was no trace of my passage, no consequences - excepting those to my own thoughts. The fox had a face worth a day of walking and a trespass for, and if I hadn’t tithed myself this small piece of private land, none of it would have happened. I hope that the fox lived or is living its full term of life out there in the woods and beyond, for there are many that mean the creature harm. There are snares in the wood, laid by its stewards, who have set barbed wire around it and have littered the wood and the stream. Is it them or I who make the greater trespass? 

Eleanor spends her spare time walking in the countryside and writing about it. She is interested in the histories of the land - big and small, natural and manmade. More of her work can be found on her Substack page, Old Frith.