Where Does the Night Start?

In the darkening hollows of the hut circles?

Under the heels of all those boots; all those thousands of tiny, second-long sunsets?

*

In early 2023 thousands of angry, happy people found their way onto the emptiness of the Dartmoor National Park in southwest England to assert their right to camp without landowners’ permission. There was no opposing army to meet them; just that bottomless wind, and the absent presence of one of the land’s legal owners. His claims against wild camping, and the counterclaims of the protesters, have fed battles in the national courts and an emotive stalemate that has only just been broken, two years later.

For my family, the stories about that day on the moor are already fading into a comfortable fable; a self-congratulatory anecdote about how we had tried and failed to be there. My partner, my infant son and I waited in line to be shuttled into Stall Moor, in one of the organised minibuses nosing up through the lanes from the town of Ivybridge. After three hours our small boy was getting groggy in the new year sunshine, fascinated by his blueing hands. Nowhere near the front of the queue we gave up, embarrassed, our planned banner unwritten in the boot of the car:

THIS DEMON EATS LANDLORDS

We saw the pictures online, and felt jealous and pathetic not to have been part of this new legend; and the event had all the furniture necessary to become legendary. The stamping and rattling to the skylarks, the speeches on the stones; the effigy of the moor’s guardian spirit, Old Crockern, unfolded like a hired magician at a birthday party to bring hubris to the greedy.

Performing such a ritual on a part of the moor owned by Alexander Darwall, the financier who had challenged the presumptive camping rights in the first place, was no accident; and after the Supreme and High Court sessions that followed, by which rights to camp have been retained, we all congratulated ourselves on the power inherent in folklore. Here was a little bit of English banishment, paying off.

*

Between the flight feathers of the gull sat on Ugborough, absolutely nowhere near a sea: wings shuffled behind its back like cards?

Under the pigeon’s snugness, nesting behind the pub’s security lights?

*

Despite all of the publicity we (they) generated, of course in the end the protesters’ magical thinking had little to do with it. The defence of wild camping was made in the London courtrooms by lawyers beating the bounds of the by-law. Law is language, and language becomes law: and when that language is disputed, any connection to ground truth becomes incidental.

This great Battle of Dartmoor is already being compared, daringly, to the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire, in which hundreds scuffled with gamekeepers to demand access to the uplands until then kept sacrosanct for grouse shoots. The comparison, however, can be extended to the legend-making of these events themselves. The Kinder Trespass contributed to the paperwork of the 1949 National Parks Act, even if it wasn’t the whole cause; and the summoning of Crockern on Dartmoor two years ago was paralleled by courtroom negotiations two hundred miles east, talking over the protester’s songs, rather than echoing them; the sound of well-fed voices disputing a very fundamental fence-line.

In the scant 20-page PDF of the High Court’s judgement on Darwall’s case, you can feel the parentheses in those voices. They are careful, testing the tensile strength of the argument, the neighbourly disagreement between shadow and light, open and closed air; the boundaries that separate them being only thin canvas and thin ideology:

If that walker keeps his eyes open and remains awake, the pastime he is enjoying may include simply resting in the open-air in the peace of the countryside. I have then asked myself whether it makes any difference if the putative walker falls off to sleep. The only argument suggesting it might is that recreation is something one does when one is awake and sentient.

While the main question in the judgement seems to be whether an enclosed tent precludes wild camping from being considered ‘open-air’ recreation (and thus protected by the by-law), the question of sleep itself is also under scrutiny. Is sleep recreation? Where, legally, does one’s presence on the moor stray from welcome to unacceptable. What is the precise picosecond when that welcome turns sour?

In this case, the language was with us:

The Master of the Rolls said that a walker who lays down for a rest without pitching a tent would be present for the purpose of open-air recreation. It was the same if that walker fell asleep. It made no difference if the walker rested or slept on a plastic sheet to prevent the damp, or in a sleeping bag to protect from the cold, or under a tarpaulin or in an open tent or in a closed tent to protect from the rain. The fact that a tent was closed rather than open could not convert the wild camping from being an open-air recreation into not being one.

*

In the little, legendless pools on the tops of the trig points?

Tight inside a snail’s shell on the shoulder of the B3212, as pink and empty as a dreamhouse?

*

But there is an unappreciated detail in this absurd picture of highly-paid women and men thinking microscopically and for days about a hypothetical camper, and their hypothetical coziness: in this forensic lawnmowering of the law, something is overlooked.

Darwall has made himself a very useful boggart for the land rights movement: the fact that the case has been brought by both him and his wife has been eclipsed by his late middle age, his maleness, his background, his privilege, and his very public grievances. Thus has he been stripped of the Alexander and joins the ranks of other mononymic villains, rendered as shallow and as irritating as bogwater in the boot. But his symbolic value as a monster to the protest movement makes him impossible to understand: in fact, it is forbidden to understand him, in case his cause is somehow justified in the process.

But in the line of attack that his lawyers chose, trying to bifurcate sleeping in a tent as a special activity for which it is necessary to obtain permission, his forgotten humanity winks back at the protesters, alongside the humanity of all those quieter, less well-resourced landowners across Dartmoor (and England) who aren’t quite so bluffly despised.

The grievances at the heart of Darwall’s argument are not necessarily abstract questions of stewardship, ecology, wildfires or latrine ditches; of the public as an erosive force to rank alongside acid rain. The ecological impact of nature tourism is something to consider, but we must not forget that the lawyers were asking a different question: a question of quite primordial boundaries. It is a question deeply lodged in the hypothalamus; a creeping question, beyond modern concerns and beyond the frontal lobe.

*

Where does the night start?

In the tiny tomb-complex made where my back, calves and the nape of my neck all touch the heather at once?

In Moretonhampstead?

*

The night isn’t mentioned explicitly in the High Court judgement: but sleep, and the pitching of tents, are not daytime activities. Before dusk we’d call such things napping and picnicking, and I find it hard to believe that Alexander Darwall would have a problem with a family on his moor eating their sandwiches under canvas, to protect themselves from the sun on a bright July day.

It’s when that sun sets that a presence transmogrifies: when the daytrippers disassemble, and the caravanners flash their permits, and the hot heads under pub umbrellas go looking for dinner. It’s then that those left behind – after opening hours – become a problem.

The wild camper is not a productive unit of livestock for any industry: what use are they to the landowners, gloaming into the moorland after every shop till has been rung out, and every alarm set? What could they be doing up there, without a point of sale for miles around? What are they looking at, in the moonlight? How could anybody be up to anything good, or wholesome, at such an hour?

Law is language, and language is law, and a lawyer can argue that the night is just a word. A word has a beginning and an end, and a grammar that adheres to its rules: and that grammar can prohibit usage, as well as allow. Just because the night cannot be sold, why give it away for free?

*

Under my eyelids and your eyelids, when we shut them for longer than is strictly necessary for a blink?

Inside the pheasant, sat like earthenware on the mantlepiece of the field?

*

It is easy to see the distrust of wild campers as something fuelled by economics. Alexander Darwall is reportedly keen to set up a glamping business on his land, to complement his pheasant shooting: and of course its value will be diminished by scroungers and scrumpers of time and space tasting all that juicy acreage for free. But the protesters must be careful not to commit the same mistakes of which they accuse the landowners themselves: to see them as just economic agents, with no perception beyond their assets and liabilities. They have a humanity that is inconvenient to face when fighting against their interests, just as fearful and angry and irrational as everybody else’s.

To pay tens of thousands of pounds to argue the case against camping shows us that this fear is alive: that in his or her warm bed the landowner sees the camper, in the trackless darkness, as a thing that goes trek in the night.

The protesters are not the only ones who have their folklore, their spirits and their monsters. The night brings on archetypes as surely for the landed. Though it was the protesters who summoned Old Crockern that day, it may well be the landowners who see themselves as the spirits of the moor, though they might not use that word. Many will claim their rights to be as foundational as the granite, their nature to work the land and work upon it; loving it more than the public ever could, and ready to rip out the pockets of any monsters who come to transgress it. 

And there, squatting in their hindbrains, amongst all their dreamed acres and acres held in trust, unpatrollable, unfloodlit, hangs the monster: the camper, a collective, faceless devil that cuts fences, shits on SSSIs, flattens swarthes and injects plastic into the peat.The camper is a monster in the way that Grendel is a monster in Beowulf, the European landowner’s foundation myth and cautionary tale. Despite the difference in altitude, there’s a similarity between Dartmoor’s high bogs and the flat-flowing marshes of Zealand where that story is set, and from its very first word it conjures the nightmare of Darwall made language: the ravishing of the warm hall in its demesnes by Grendel, the sceadugenga or ‘shadow walker’: the roaming, feckless murderer bootless in the marshes, hatless in the rains, pocketless and jealous of the landed warmth of men: a thief, a stepper over marks, and an un-christian trespasser.

Up Grendel bubbles from the text and from time, taught in schools, inspiring derivatives, language making law and lore: a folklore belonging to a very specific folk. The camper at the centre of these court cases excites a sort of vestigial panic-gene of the landed in their halls. They are the descendants of the last sheep-eating wolves extinguished in Scotland; of the blackened faces of the poachers in their murderous envy; the ravaging estovers and slaughtered deer. The wild camper is a monster in the way that plants are weeds: that is, out of place.

*

In the dark blue rinse of all the chemical toilets, behind the painted panels of all the motorhomes: Kon-Tiki, Ridgeline, Sunchaser?

Where I say it does?

*

The court cases ended today, as I write this, with the final Court of Appeal dismissal of Darwall’s case. The limits of the darkness are legislated, and the protesters have recreated the right to a scant, 200,000-acre playpen, while most of the rest of England and Wales remains closed to them. It may well be the turning point for a proper right to roam in this country: a way to fix the camper in language, on the statute books. But the fever dreams of the landowners will only become more nightmarish now: the Grendels getting closer, and bolder, with more misplacement and misunderstanding.

Many want that understanding to be found again: for landowners and campers to come together for the good of the landscape, and for this ruling to be seen as a victory for all, and not a defeat for people like Darwall. As the protesters insist, the vast majority of campers are good citizens of the moor, sometimes better citizens (it is argued) than the landowners themselves.

But is the landlord’s fear completely unwanted? Isn’t it that feeling of being somewhere we shouldn’t that gives the night its tang? We don’t go to the moor just to be civilised: it’s a place to look back at civilisation, and its perpetual lights, from a high, dark distance. Though it’s anything but, we want Dartmoor to be a wilderness where we can be a form of wildlife. Out there in our tents, what’s magic is being tolerated, and still a little feared, rather than permitted: whether that permit comes from the landowner or the law.  

There is another sort of outcome we might trial: the treading of an even more delicate boundary than that between night and day. There’s another sort of contract that might be established. This contract would go beyond existing laws, and the Countryside Code. It may not even be possible to write it down. It may only exist by consensus, like a playground game. The game would be simple, with few rules, no winners, losers or referees: just a set of players, and an ongoing state of play.

On one team will be the campers, still coming under the turning moon: to step the marks, to walk the shadows, to be Grendel for no more than two consecutive nights: stealing nothing, and leaving no taint, but still a little monstrous and a little feared. On the other team will be the landowners, not deigning to be permissive, but courageous enough to let the arrangement remain unspoken and a touch wild, outside the closed air of the courts; a different sort of trust.

It’s a strange fear, the fear of the dark. On Dartmoor it is both destructive and productive: driving the landowner’s forbiddings, while enticing the public up and up onto the land. To extinguish that fear through the law, even if it safeguards the ability to camp, will come at the cost of the vital, vestigial naughtiness of wild camping. In such a domesticated country – where camping usually means card transactions, toilet tokens, concreted pitches and broken bottles in the long grass – this would cream off the magic entirely. If there’s to be any creativity in this recreation, we can’t entirely shrug off the role of trespasser.

Such a game – half acceptance, half enmity, campers and landowners playing at creatures of shadows and light – must be managed as carefully as an ecosystem. Too much darkness, and the landowners unkennel the lawyers again. Too little, and the game is spoiled for the rest of us. It may be impossible to balance things just so; to let the public sport at being responsible monsters, while weaning the landowners off their permissiveness. It may be too hard to show Darwall and the others how to park their fears of litter, arson and burglary, and to just let the public dream the woody, foxed dream of the burglar instead.

It’s only a dream. The camper does not want to burgle their chickens, their turkeys or their cider: only their moonlight. They weren’t doing anything with it anyway.

Dark Mountain: Issue 25

Our Spring 2024 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.

Read more