Two very, very different situations.

The UK is a small, densely populated country without large areas of true wilderness. Over 90% of the country's land is private. The one area of the UK where there are large expanses of land without many inhabitants is Scotland (due to the Clearances), but the land there is still mostly owned by large land barons, and so Scotland has a more permissive law that allows non-destructive access to almost all private land (Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003).

The US is almost half public land, it's absolutely gigantic, and it has numerous areas where you can be hundreds of miles away from the closest real settlement. We don't need traditional paths and easements and whatever when we have millions of acres of National Forest and BLM land that you can access freely. There are land barons in the US, but by absolute area, they did a fairly poor job of buying up the country's land before the federal government could protect it.

The public land situation in the western US is vastly, vastly different from the situation in the east. Just like you’re saying comparing the US to the UK are two different situations, you also have to treat parts of the US separately.

Almost all of the US’s public lands are west of the Rockies. If you live in Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington then you can basically throw a rock and hit some public lands. East of the Rockies, you can go your entire life without ever even seeing public lands.

https://www.backpacker.com/stories/issues/environment/americ...

Your linked source omits state and local managed land.

For example compare their map of Massachusetts with this map from the state: https://www.mass.gov/how-to/masswildlife-lands-viewer

State and local managed land is also quite a bit more restrictive than the Federal Public Land you find out West in the US.

Depends where. The Adirondack Preserve, for example, is more permissive than a lot of federal land.

There are exceptions but most state land is more restrictive. It's tedious to always put the "besides some rare exceptions" caveat on every statement.

That's not quite true. There are huge in number, small in overall size, amounts of public land east of the Mississippi. They're mostly all state forests, nature preserves, etc, etc and 99.9% of them are wholly unremarkable and barely utilized because you can only hike in so many identical forests or walk to the top of comparable hills before you get bored.

50+yr ago they were far more utilized (per capita) because they weren't closed to motorized recreation and hunting and fishing hadn't yet been regulated with intent to discourage participation.

But yes, the vast BLM lands out west have no analogue in the east.

The decline of hunting has little to do with recreation. Plenty of deer in the east. Also post COVID there was a wave of people heading out there.

Ironically this makes the lands in the east more wild, because nobody goes into them, because they're so boring. There's also some quite large areas of Eastern state land that're really far from most people, and they're not tourists destinations, so they only get a few locals.

But the comparison between West and East gets crazier. In the West, people'll drive for an entire day just to get to one specific remote area. Whereas in the East, some untouched forest could be an hour and a half away and "that's too far." You could walk through a forest which is actually 3 different forests in a half hour, whereas out West it's just miles and miles of the same desert or mountain.

We don't really know how to appreciate nature unless it's a majestic overlook.

> without large areas of true wilderness

Depends on your definition of large. You'd probably be shocked at just how much wilderness is in the UK.

Don't get me wrong, just about every farmable piece of land is growing food. However, you might be shocked at the presence of forests and camping grounds still to this day.

Either way, the right to roam in the UK is something I wish we had in the US. There are more than a few lakes, for example, that can no longer be accessed because they've been encircled by private land owners turning the lakes effectively private. Cutting off access to waterways and forests to turn them into playgrounds for the rich is gross.

    Well, as I was walking, I saw a sign there
    And on the sign it said "No Trespassing"
    But on the other side it didn't say nothing
    That side was made for you and me!

> You'd probably be shocked at just how much wilderness is in the UK.

You're right. I was shocked at just how little there is. If one's definition of large is more than a few square km, there's virtually none, for any sensible definition of wilderness, at least south of the Cairngorns.

I was watching a video of someone walking through rural england, and he kept talking about the "great forest" up ahead that was a unique and massive landmark. When he eventually got to it, it was the sort of bog-standard woods that everybody on the US east coast visits to walk their dog.

The U.K. does not have a right to roam. It's a sore point for ramblers et al.. The legal situation differs between England and Wales, and Scotland; and campaigners would like the Scottish right to be also available in England and Wales, which largely only has what is tantamount to a codification of what the common law situation used to be back in the 20th century.

And indeed in Northern Ireland, which has the most restrictive laws in the U.K. in this respect, even more restrictive than the current situation in England and Wales.

I'm gonna roll to doubt this. I live in a planned suburb with lots of cul-de-sacs which leads to long car-centric paths without sidewalks to walk through. Most of my neighbors (and myself) are very comfortable with people cutting through or around their yards to bypass this. I've gotten explicit permission to cut through when I'm walking my dog from the neighbors that own the most valuable shortcuts, but I wish there were a custom or law that covered this instead of needing to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Or maybe we could build suburbs with these sorts of walking-paths baked in from the beginning. Mine was laid down in the 70s, so too late for that now...

Don't get me wrong - I love my neighbors, and I find that most people are amenable to reasonable requests, without needing the law to lean on them, but it would be nice to codify this a bit.

> I've gotten explicit permission to cut through when I'm walking my dog from the neighbors that own the most valuable shortcuts, but I wish there were a custom or law that covered this instead of needing to rely on the kindness of strangers.

If enough people cross their land over a long enough period of time (varies by jurisdiction) without permission, that creates a "prescriptive easement," which is essentially what you're asking for. Some decent info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement#By_prescription

The majority of new-ish master planned suburban communities I’ve seen do have walking paths, bikeways, and parks baked in. Usually with some large HOA maintained pool, theater, I’ve even seen man made beaches (100s of miles from a coast). Although, they still usually have fenced yards and cutting through someone’s fenced yard without explicit permission is highly frowned upon, I would actually say dangerous when combined with gun situation being what it is.

These are often designed by people that don't ever walk anywhere.

There’s a development in the works near me that is I think more along the lines of what the OP is thinking. A developer assembled around 1000 acres of farmland and proposes to build housing with half the land being open space. There are no amenities planned, however the houses will be grouped into “dense” clusters with paths through and around them. The paths will count as open space and are going to be owned by our county forest preserve agency, who will be building and maintaining that part.

The interesting part is that the agreement is that the county will be buying about 400 contiguous acres and then the housing clusters will be placed in 500 of the remaining 600 acres, with the 100 acres weaving in and out donated once they do the platting. They’re pretty far along in the process, with zoning and approvals in place. There are still a few unresolved technical issues that could derail the whole thing, yet we are less than one month away from signing the agreement that will irrevocably force them to sell the 400 acres. I’m excited to reach that milestone and after that won’t care at all if the project falls through (the remaining land revert to agriculture zoning and a future developer has to start over from the very beginning).

> Or maybe we could build suburbs with these sorts of walking-paths baked in from the beginning.

We can. They exist. I've been in some of them.

I live in a suburban American neighborhood, built in the mid 2010's, which has ample walking paths and wide sidewalks. In fact, I cannot think of any newer neighborhood in this area which lacks walking infrastructure. Good sidewalks are a minimum. Usually there are dedicated walk and bike paths.

What is lacking is places you would actually walk to. There are numerous parks and a pool. But that's it. Don't get me wrong, it's great if you have a dog or enjoy running or walking. But I still have to drive everywhere.

This is so false I can't even begin to describe it. And I say this as someone who nearly daily wanders around National Forest near his house.

First, why would it hurt to codify land access in a clearer way. And second. There are continuous battles with private landowners of where and how to access the public lands that you claim mean we don't need traditional paths or easements. See the recent Wyoming corning crossing case.

There are some public lands within a 5 minute walk of my house that I cannot access because rich landowners have intentionally cordoned them off. They're beautiful areas that should remain public. Why should you be able to effectively buy public land by restricting access to it maliciously? Why shouldn't Americans take seriously access to our shared land resources?

Yeah same thing happens around here. A dude here bought some land which surrounded an old popular access road to Cleveland national forest (socal), and promptly put a gate up... For a while it was the only convenient way to drive into the mountains from riverside county. Alternative routes were either closed from fires, closed to vehicles, or located on the other side of the mountain range. Lots of Facebook drama between this guy and people in the area trying to access the national forest. He has a camera pointed at the gate and regularly posts altercations and threatens to shoot people.

I don't get why people do those sorts of things. If you own land your #1 enemy is the government. In that situation it behooves you to do things to endear yourself to the community, your neighbors, etc.

I don't think we really disagree. We should have better laws preventing landowners from restricting access to public land, and we should have laws explicitly allowing things like corner-crossing. But these are mostly issues in areas of public land that border developed areas. Since the vast majority of public land in this country is freely accessible to everyone via public roads that can't be blocked by private landowners, there's never really been enough political will to do large-scale land access reform like they did in the UK.

Again, over 90% of UK land is private, and large land barons control the vast majority of that. We just don't have a similarly widespread issue with land access in the US.

Another way to view the medieval approach to land is that it was tied to the people living on it. You bought political boundaries, and the people on the land were bound to it. In one sense you now "owned" the people as serfs, and as another you now had responsibility towards those people.

It's also worth noting how integral Monasteries were to society and provided many of the essential services (from medicine, education, diplomacy etc down to beer and bread). So the "getting in trouble with the church" was actually a stronger mechanism than you would think as they had a large presence and were prescient to common life.

>The American eighteenth-century enlightenment approach is an attempt to make everything tidy: it's based on the rationalist idea that a thing is its definition and nothing more. So private property is private, that means nobody else can use it: case closed.

You may be unaware, but the American legal system allows for property owners to be held civilly responsible for the actions of uninvited individuals, including criminals with intent beyond simple trepass, that harm themselves on said private property, unless the owner has taken many somewhat onerous steps to post No Trespassing signs often with requirements of details on the signs and posted in short intervals.

So why would a property owner want to allow random individuals to cross their land if it may mean someone can sue them for damages because they tripped and broke an arm, etc.?

IANL. Under American law, if the owner doesn't enforce exclusion the land can become public through implied dedication if the public continues to use it over time.

>IANL. Under American law,

Good thing you IANL'd that because this is very much a state by state thing, not an "american" thing.

Implied dedication doesn't make the land public, it simply creates a public easement allowing the public to continue using the land in the manner it was being used that created the implied dedication.

For example, if people openly hike through part of a private property for 5 years (in CA), and the owner knows this and does nothing, then after 5 years there will be a public easement for the public to continue using that part of the land as a hiking trail and the owner can no longer prevent that. OTOH, if he puts up signs on the 12th month of the 4th year, saying "Hiking permitted by owner", then no public easement is created, and the owner can subsequently close off public access at any point.

The reason sane property owners maintain those roads is for firefighters.

Every state I’ve lived in has landowner indemnification for trails. In Colorado, the landowner must put up signs for hazards, though a local group always exists to help with this. In my experience, the rationale for such a trail to be closed always comes down to a single person ruining it for everyone else.

The second you charge money (for hunting, usually), all that protection goes away.

Crikey, I”d hardly sell the UK as good with land access! The UK is pretty awful in comparison to the nearby Nordics. Sweden, for example, has a right to roam in nature which makes the constant antagonism between footpath walkers and landowners that are a mainstay of the English countryside seem so petty.

I'll tell you what, the Nordics themselves are pretty awful when compared with the Outback or American southwest. You can just roam wherever you want, no questions asked!

Try roaming through Area 51. Or White Sands.

I've heard it's great this time of year. Lots of cool stuff to look at.

Roaming on either of these will lead to you being arrested.

You can just avoid those areas and roam on not government property. There's tons of it out there and nobody cares.

Nordics let you roam on private property.

Our national park system in the US is larger than the entire country of Sweden and Denmark and Iceland (or close enough) - depending on how it's defined maybe throw Norway in there too. I don't need to walk through someone's private property to see all this great stuff.

Maybe the Nordics should set aside more public land and catch up to the United States?

I don't want to roam in Yosemite. I want to roam starting from my house.

I don't want people roaming through my yard and stepping on my plants and stuff or god forbid they bring their stinky dogs and their urine and feces so I have a fence put up to keep them out.

Sweden has the right to roam on privately owned nature property but it is trumped by exceptions for crops and the right to privacy at home. So it’s not ok - and not done - to walk in peoples yards etc. The rules are well taught at schools and well explained for tourists and it just works nicely.

In the United States at least we don't really have privately owned nature property like you might in Sweden. I live in Ohio for example, there's nothing to go see or look at. We have no need for the right to roam. What are you going to do, roam through a cornfield? A parking lot? The woods? The mall? Well you can already do that. We have state parks, local parks, national parks, etc. to get your nature fix and it works very well here, there are no complaints about this whatsoever.

Sometimes Europeans are so convinced that their way of life is better or their policies are the best they forget that sometimes their policies solve problems that don't exist in other countries. There's no need to have a right to roam in America. There's nowhere to roam to, and the places that you would roam to are already owned by the public where you have... the right to roam! Though we are much more strict about natural preservation in those parks which sometimes conflicts with the desires of some to go "off trail", but that's a separate issue.

The UK might be a little different, granted, but the no-true-scotsman approach to someone suggesting they enjoy the UK's right to roam but they can't because the Nordic countries are so much better in this regard is annoying, to say the least.

The article is literally about how privately owned landed blocked roaming public lands. You came across very American, for sure.

Yea but the discussion happening in this thread was about something else. If you don't want to participate that's fine but please don't derail ongoing discussions.

You come across very Italian, for sure. I guess? :)

Depends of course upon which UK legal system we are discussing... The right to roam provided in Scotland under Scots law is often cited as one of the best examples of the concept. The UK is more than just England etc.

Liability and access rules in the US vary by State. For example, Maine allows open access to private land by default (owners have to post to prohibit access) and protects owners from liability (as long as they don't actively create hazards). Some coastal states have public-right-of-ways along the shore... there's a lot variation, as always.

Fun to read about the other systems and considerations in this thread.

in UK a huge amount of land belongs to a small percentage of people, crown and former nobility. 50% of the land belongs to 1% of the people.

US has similar laws that you talk about where you have to give easement or right of way.

In the U.S., you as a landowner can be sued if someone gets injured on your property while trespassing. Understandably, people close off their land.

Same in the UK - it is called the Occupiers Liability Act. It's not black and white but the liability is on the Occupier. I know this because I own an area of ancient semi-natural woodland which I'm restoring back to the natural NVC type (basically, oak standards and hazel coppice). As part of my duty I have to go and survey all the boundary trees once every "reasonable period" and after storms or significant weather events. There's some nuance to in the liability I've got when considering the harm to trespassers, but staying on top of duties and having your auditing ducks in a row helps.

During the Highland Clearances in Scotland _many_ people were kicked off land.

And what happened when that doctrine was ported to America was that they used that doctrine to incrementally take the natives land and started a war in only the span of one generation.

Americans happily signed treaties with the natives and reneged. The law didn't matter as the law was ignored.

I'm talking about King Phillip's war a century and a half before most of the treaty violation stuff started happening in earnest.

Wasn’t King Philip’s War about a treaty that insisted natives be disarmed?

I don’t know if I want random people walking through or camping on my land.

You might be more willing if you see it as a kind of reciprocity, your part in a scheme which allows you to hike or otherwise relax on land other than your own.

And even if you never set foot on other's people property, I think it's fair of the government, which ultimately enforces land owners' property rights, to say that they won't support you excluding other people from natural land.

Honestly in the US it has never been a problem since there is so much land. The laws are also unambiguous here. If I’m on someone’s property I can get shot but on public land we can shoot each other :)

I have to admit that Americans seem to have a different perspective on land use, with the sheer scale of the country and a willingness to drive for hours to get places. If someone told me that I have to travel from Prague to Germany to go hiking or even just let my kids play in a forest, I'd be pretty mad.

In rural areas many Americans can go on a hike or play in the forest in their backyard.

Most Americans live in urban areas, though.

I have to say that according to this PDF I found [1], a lot more US families do own forested land, but it's still a minority.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250420022718/http://www.family...

The pattern around me is that the kind of people who ignore trespassing signs also ignore fire bans.

... the last time the UK had large herds of wild grazing animals was several thousand years ago. There's absolutely no way any herd of wild bison could exist in the UK's current "much more intelligent approach".

It's been a long time coming, but wild bison are being reintroduced to Britain right now:

https://www.kentwildlifetrust.org.uk/projects/wilder-blean

https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/why-rewild/reintroductio...

This is mirrored by reintroduction schemes of red kites and beavers in the UK, as well as similar projects with bison, wolves and other species on the European mainland.

That's not to mention deer, which are both wild and doing really well - partly because of the lack of wolves, ironically!

Visit Scotland. We've plenty of wild deer. There are even herds in Glasgow. Highlands are covered in them. We have road signs to warn drivers.

There are herds of wild deer a half hour outside NYC. Deer seem to be able to thrive anywhere as long as there aren't many predators.

The continental US (i.e. excluding alaska) has some 20+ mil wild deer, 200k bison, 1 mil bears, 3-4 mil coyotes, 13,000 wolves, 5 mil alligators, 10k+ mountain lions, etc, etc. Yes, most are in the vast western states. But deer and bears are common even in areas a just a couple hour drive outside of NYC. Thankfully no gators near NYC (except in the sewers, of course :-)

Why do people create new accounts for posting contrary opinions?

I created an account because I didn't have one. I just thought I'd correct a comment which was ignoring what actually happens in the UK. We have wild herds. In the Highlands they can be massive herds. I've known a few people to be involved in serious accidents as a result of hitting deer.

I’m fairly contrarian so I’m not surprised to get banned on occasion but I’ve noticed in the past few months completely innocuous statements are triggering the “you’re posting too fast ban”

Just own it and steamroll with it. No need to try to appease anyone. F HN and dang etc for knowing about downvote abuse and being OK with it.

check my post history, I don't think I hold back. I will back dang and the HN moderation on the point that I have not been perma-banned, so they are not complete authoritarian moderators like most social media sites. And if I am being entirely honest some of my temp bans were deserved.

I just wanted to point out that it seems that the sensitivity for what is ban-able has been turned up

Probably because of how aggressive the down-voting of unpopular opinions has become. Joke comments get upvotes, and thoughtful objections get flagged these days.

Not only can you kick people off in the US. You are allowed to kill them in some places. Castle doctrine.

Castle doctrine doesn't apply outside your home and its immediate surroundings (like your fenced-in yard), and it's not clear how it's relevant here.

In texas it is merely your property not the building, and tresspassing is a valid reason.

Nonsense. The castle doctrine only lets you kill trespassers if they are threatening your life.

> Nonsense. The castle doctrine only lets you kill trespassers if they are threatening your life.

Depends on the state. In Texas using deadly force is permissible to stop crimes like robbery. https://legalclarity.org/in-texas-can-you-shoot-someone-on-y...

And there was a case where it wasn't even the homeowner, it was the neighbor who shot the burgulars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Horn_shooting_controversy

You the survivor are the only witness however. I suppose Trayvon Martin is old news at this point.