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By Root 383 0

members have invariably been drawn from the radical fringes of the Liberal and Labour parties, and often faced considerable opposition on their own benches, let alone the scarlet-faced opprobrium of those on the opposite side of the chamber. At every measure, Tories have spluttered indignantly and tried to bat away progress with a well-worn litany of disingenuous half-truths, perverse speculation, scaremongering and a persistently nasty seam of hatred towards the lower orders. As a result, it has taken well over a hundred years of constant new legislation to reach the point we are at today, with a half-decent public footpath network and a modest right to roam, mainly on uncultivated land, in England and Wales. In Scotland, there’s a rather bolder presumption of access to the land (and, importantly, to waterways too), one that brings the country into line with the age-old Scandinavian ideal known in Swedish as Allemansrätt, or ‘every man’s right’.

The first parliamentary attempt to claw back some of the land came in 1884, with James Bryce’s Access to Mountains (Scotland) Bill. Scotland’s story is even more remarkable than that south of the border, for the most liberal access rights today have come out of a background that was the most generally repressive anywhere in these islands. With the infamous Highland Clearances fresh in the popular memory, the late nineteenth century saw something of their ghostly echo, as vast swathes of the Highlands were cleared and closed off for deer forests, in which a growing numbers of wealthy industrialists, from America as well as Britain, would hunt. Ghillies and stewards policed their perimeters, and innumerable instances were recorded of people being forcibly barred from entering land and using old paths that had been open to all since anyone could remember.

As is nearly always the way, it took a startling headline to bring the situation to a head. The ‘Pet Lamb Case’, as it became known in the Fleet Street papers that covered it with breathless excitement, came about when a lamb owned by Highland crofter Murdo Macrae strayed into the 300-square-mile deer forest rented as a shooting estate by American railroad millionaire William Louis Winans. Bearing in mind that Winans’s estate (although called a ‘forest’, it was mainly mountain and moor) engulfed the small hamlet where Macrae and his family lived, the lamb needed to go not much further than the end of the garden to be on forbidden turf. Winans turned the full force of the law on to Macrae, ultimately unsuccessfully. Worse, he made himself a laughing stock – even the landowner from whom Winans rented the estate publicly denounced him. Not that it much dented his swagger: The Times reported that, while he was travelling through the Highland village of Tomich, some stones were thrown at his carriage. He stopped and immediately offered a reward of £500 – a quite unimaginable sum to Victorian crofters – for the capture or discovery of the guilty people.

It was at this time that Bryce was attempting to introduce his bill to Parliament. Public opinion could not have been more on his side. Editorials in The Times and other newspapers detailed the historical grievances in the Highlands and used the ‘Pet Lamb Case’ as the ultimate example of how skewed the situation had become. The time, it seemed, was ripe, but no-one had told members of Parliament. Bryce presented his bill, but it was dismissed without debate.

A year later, in 1885, James Bryce’s constituency of Tower Hamlets was abolished and he headed to Scotland for a newly created one, becoming the Liberal MP for Aberdeenshire South until 1907, whereupon he took up the post of British Ambassador to the USA. The first MP to have his name scribed on the walkers’ roll of honour was a fascinating individual, fulsomely bearded, fearsomely intellectual and a prolific author on topics as varied as botany, ancient history, sociology and modern political theory. In his earlier years, he’d walked and climbed much in the Alps, Scandinavia, Russia and beyond, even climbing Mount Ararat in an 1876