The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users. Hayes frequently argues in a totalising, maximalist vein, with property rights as key to the “entire dynamic of elite power” that fuels racism, patriarchy and inequality of all sorts. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day.

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes

It's a shame because I am confident there are lawyers who would, for free, have gently edited the text for legal accuracy (my confidence stems in part from the fact that I am one of them). When they do ask you to leave, you don’t necessarily have to retrace your steps; it is your right to leave at the closest available exit. But it also raises the question: why does it still matter so much to landowners if people cross their land? Font adjustments – users, can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more.Crucially, and ambitiously, he argues that “Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in columns of hot air to the landless”: our old friend, nationalism as false consciousness. Splendidly eloquent nature-writing evokes the woodlands, the wildlife, the landscapes and ecologies of the countryside that the post-Norman millennium of property law – or, if you prefer, “violence and theft” – has shaped, for good or ill.

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes | Waterstones

A meditation on the fraught and complex relationship between land, politics and power, this is England through the eyes of a trespasser. As the author takes us through the history, he also takes us with him as he trespasses on vast country estates to explore and to reveal something of what we the people have lost. The Book of Trespass will make you see landscapes differently' Robert Macfarlane'A remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths' George MonbiotThe vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. But for anyone already within Hayes’s palisades, or tempted to traverse their usual limits, it will quicken the mind and lift the spirits.

The vast majority of the UK is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it.

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes | Waterstones The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes | Waterstones

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work. In a pivotal, and timely, chapter, Hayes links subjection overseas to servitude at home: “Slavery was an extreme version of a time-honoured hierarchy in England: its impetus was profit, its disguise was race, but its mechanism was class”. Trespass is a mechanism for seeking redress for damage, and it would be absurd to suggest we are damaging anything. This information will never be shared with a third party For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript.Using his sketching as an excuse to explore proscribed land, Nick takes us with him over stone walls and locked gates to discover the hidden vistas beyond.

Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler

Released into an entirely new context to when it was written, a world of lockdowns, limited exercise, a situation where people were finally rediscovering the paths and open country of their local neighbourhood, it caught a zeitgeist, a spirit that was alive but long dormant in English society – the idea that we should have greater access to our countryside. As well as some fascinating and well-reasoned arguments, there is some beatifully descriptive language to enjoy ".

Symbolic animals – badger, fox, hare, stag, pheasant and so on – head the chapters and populate the stories within them. Hayes often argues in an all-or-nothing revolutionary vein, with property rights as key to the “entire dynamic of elite power”. Children need to learn about dragonflies by having them land on their noses so that as adults they will find it abhorrent to see a Wispa Gold wrapper next to an orchid. And the most fundamental link between the physical world of trespassing and its moral parallel, is the origin of the word itself.