Outdoor Recreation and the Environment

Abstract

In the context of outdoor recreation and the environment, the ‘forbidden fruit’ has long been equality of access to all rural environments: landscapes have been there for the public to see (from a distance), to read about, and to be preserved, but (largely) not to be touched, far less used for anything as ephemeral as recreation and leisure. While leisure in capitalist Britain may have brought limited rewards for the ‘good citizen’ (Ravenscroft, 1993), there was never — certainly when The Devil Makes Work was written — a question of ‘unforbidding’ the fruits of rural property for the good of ordinary people (Shoard, 1987; Stephenson, 1989; Ravenscroft, 1996, 1998a; Parker and Ravenscroft, 1999, 2001). Indeed, the rhetoric of the day was largely that rural property required a level of ‘stewardship’ that made recre ational access and use inappropriate in all but the most robust locations (Ravenscroft, 1995). This was widely contrasted with the position elsewhere — especially ‘Europe’ — where, it was claimed, people could exercise ‘citizen rights’ of access over private land (see, in particular, Shoard, 1987). However, as Curry (2002) noted in his work on recreational access in New Zealand, intercountry comparisons are notoriously hard to make, even when the countries share similar legal foundations.