Sonder Bikes
94 years on from the Kinder Trespass, the fight for land and water access is the closest it has been to change. Here is what has been won, and what remains.
There is something about living on a small, damp island that gives its people an outsized relationship with open ground. The moors. The coast path. The feeling of standing somewhere high with the wind coming in. In our own telling, we are a people shaped by landscape: by fell-walking and long-distance paths, by guidebooks worn soft with use, by the particular joy of a clear day on high ground.
Almost all of that identity was built on 8% of the land.
On 24 April 1932, around 400 walkers set off from Hayfield and climbed onto the forbidden moorland of Kinder Scout. The gamekeepers who intercepted them turned some back. Six were arrested. Five served prison sentences for their part in it.
The sentences handed to Rothman and his fellow trespassers provoked a public outcry. Three weeks later, some 10,000 ramblers gathered at a protest rally in nearby Castleton. Roy Hattersley would later call it "the most successful direct action in British history". Three years later, on 1 January 1935, the Ramblers Association was formally created. In 1949 the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act passed, and on 17 April 1951 the Peak District became the first National Park in Britain. But the legal right to walk on open moorland itself would take another half century. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, CROW, gave the public a legal right to roam over roughly three million acres of mountain, moor, heath, and downland in England and Wales.
It was a landmark moment, but not the end game.
What was gained, and what wasn't
CROW delivered access to some of our most spectacular landscapes, the high fells, the open moors, the chalk downland. But it was a tightly drawn map. No general right to wild camp. No right to cycle. No right to swim. And critically, it covered only 8% of England's total land area. The other 92% remained, and remains, off-limits.
Alongside CROW sits a vast network of Public Rights of Way: the footpaths, bridleways, and byways that crisscross the country and are legally protected like roads. Landowners are required to keep them open. If Kinder was about forcing a way onto land, the rights of way network is about moving through it. Hundreds of thousands of miles of routes connecting communities to countryside, coast to city. It's where stories are written.
New paths are opening. The King Charles III England Coast Path, now in development, is creating a continuous walking route around England's entire coastline with a "coastal margin" that extends public access rights to beaches, dunes, and foreshore between the trail and the sea.
It is a thing of wonder, but let's not forget the pressures on our current network. The Ramblers have identified around 49,000 miles of paths that were recorded on historic maps but have since been lost from the definitive map. Under current law, any unregistered path not claimed by 1 January 2031 could be permanently extinguished, a deadline extended from 2026 by statutory instrument in 2023, buying time but not solving the problem. We are not just trying to expand access. We have to stop it shrinking.
A green and blue pleasant land
Our land is a patchwork and some of these patches fill up with water.
Unlike land, where CROW at least created a defined legal right over certain areas, rivers and inland waters have no equivalent statutory framework. There is no general right to swim in England's rivers. Paddle UK estimate that as few as 3% of rivers have a clear right of navigation, a narrow legal measure, and very much a floor rather than a ceiling, but beyond that, access depends on a patchwork of historic usage and local arrangements, none of it consistent, and all of it placing the burden on the swimmer to establish they have a right to be there rather than on the landowner to prove they don't. Blue space access was left out entirely when CROW was drawn up, a decision that campaigners have been working to reverse ever since.
When the Outdoor Swimming Society and Sheffield Outdoor Plungers arrived at Kinder Reservoir in 2021, they were making the same argument the 1932 trespassers had made, transposed to water. By 2023, around 500 swimmers had gathered there. The banner read: Free Swimming.
In Scotland, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 explicitly defines "land" to include inland waters, non-tidal rivers, lochs, lakes, and reservoirs, whether natural or artificial, whether navigable or not. Swimming in a Scottish river is a legal right. In England it is, at best, a grey area. England is lagging behind its nearest neighbour.
Where people can access rivers, they increasingly find them unfit to use. Campaigns around water access have begun linking rights with environmental quality: access is meaningless without clean, usable waterways.
There has been some movement. The government's Land Use Framework, published in March 2026, committed to designating 13 new bathing water sites in England, including rivers, responding to years of pressure from swimmers and river campaigners.
British Canoeing's Clear Access, Clear Waters campaign, the Outdoor Swimming Society's inland access work, and the Open Spaces Society's river advocacy are all pushing for clearer legal frameworks around water, fighting contested rights, ambiguous law, facing slow and fragmented progress.
Access is not equal
In that 8% available to us, something has already been proven. Open space does something to people. It shows up in the research: UCL and Imperial College studies linking woodland access to cognitive development in young people, to reductions in mental distress, to better emotional and behavioural outcomes. It shows up in the numbers: 34 million people now use outdoor recreation in the UK, generating £22bn for the economy and an estimated £5bn in savings to the NHS. It shows up in the walkers who describe the hills as essential, not optional. And it shows up most clearly in what happened when the Alpkit Foundation started supporting people for whom that door had never opened at all.
A deaf walking group in Cumbria discovering high ground for the first time. A visually impaired walking club in Warwickshire. A wellbeing walking group for men in Bristol. Refugees building connection and confidence in landscapes they had never been told were theirs. People with autism finding space and calm in environments rarely designed with them in mind. Black Girls Hike, opening up the outdoors to Black women in a space that has rarely reflected them. Groups walking together in the Peak District for the first time, in the Epping Forest for the first time, in the Lake District for the first time. Kids discovering Blue Spaces. Not because the law excluded them. Because cost, kit, confidence, culture, and getting there did. A 2007 House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report found that 80% of CROW access land is not reachable by public transport. The law opened the land. It did not open the road to it.
These are not footnotes to the access debate. They are its point. They are glimpses, in miniature, of what happens when the door actually opens for someone it has never opened for before. If 8% of this land produced the cultural relationship with landscape that we already have; the literature, the identity, the sense of belonging to something wider than ourselves. What is the rest still holding?
The Outdoors for All agenda being pushed in parliament and on the ground is about exactly this: not just more land on the map, but more of what land does to people.
2026: The closest it has been
This April marks the 94th anniversary of the Kinder Trespass. The weekend of 25 and 26 April will bring walkers, swimmers, speakers, and campaigners back to Hayfield for Trespass 94.
But this year is different from the 93 that came before it. For the first time in a generation, there is real political momentum behind new access legislation. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Outdoor Recreation and Access to Nature has published an Outdoors for All report setting out 40 policy recommendations, including statutory rights to access inland waters, woodlands, and the wider countryside, and a proposal to enshrine nature access as a statutory public health responsibility. That it is cross-party is significant. This is not a fringe campaign. Campaigning groups including Right to Roam, the Ramblers, the Outdoor Swimming Society, the Open Spaces Society, and British Canoeing are coordinating pressure from outside Westminster. The call from the organisers this year is specific: come to Hayfield, and then contact your MP.
And government is moving. DEFRA's Minister Baroness Hayman has confirmed that work on a Green Paper has begun, with provisions for primary legislation on access, the first time in a generation that new access law has been actively drafted. The Land Use Framework, published by DEFRA in March 2026, contained two further commitments that access campaigners have noted. First, the government will work with HM Land Registry to make spatial land ownership data freely available for larger properties across England and Wales. Right to Roam's co-founder Guy Shrubsole has campaigned for that transparency personally for a decade. Knowing who owns what land is a precondition for any serious conversation about who can use it. Second, the Framework commits to consulting on making landowner liability more proportionate, applying the lower liability standard that already exists for coastal access land to other permissive and publicly accessible land. That is the kind of structural change that could quietly remove one of the most persistent barriers landowners cite when refusing access.
The 1932 trespassers had no realistic expectation of winning quickly. Benny Rothman, who led the march, was 21 years old. CROW passed 68 years later. The Kinder Pledge, launched at Trespass 92 in April 2024 and inspired by the Rivington Pledge of 1989, puts it plainly: this does not end until access is real, and shared, and inclusive.
Come to Hayfield
From the paths being quietly saved by the Ramblers to the rivers being fought for by British Canoeing, the legacy of Kinder is still unfolding. Not as a single victory, but as something ongoing: incremental, contested, never quite finished.
But here is what 94 years of that effort has already shown. On the land that was won, something remarkable happened. A people built a relationship with their landscape that became part of who they are: in literature, in wellbeing, in a felt sense of belonging to something wider than themselves. They built it on 8% of what exists.
The door was opened in 1932. For nearly a century we have been re-discovering what lies on the other side of it. What remains, for the people who have never been through it and in the landscapes still waiting, is an enormous unrealised possibility for the human spirit.
That is what Trespass 94 is marching toward. Not just more land on the map. But more of what land does to people.
Trespass 94 takes place in Hayfield, Derbyshire on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 April 2026. Talks, discussion panels, workshops, music, walking, and wild swimming. Parking is extremely limited in Hayfield. Please travel by public transport where possible.
Find out more and sign the Kinder Pledge at kindertrespass.org.uk
To support the campaigns:
- Right to Roam: righttoroam.org.uk
- Ramblers, Don't Lose Your Way: ramblers.org.uk
- Outdoor Swimming Society: outdoorswimmingsociety.com
- Open Spaces Society: oss.org.uk
- British Canoeing, Clear Access Clear Waters: britishcanoeing.org.uk
- APPG Outdoors for All report: outdoors.inparliament.uk
The Alpkit Foundation has supported walking groups across the UK, helping people who face financial, social, and physical barriers to get outdoors. Find out more about the Foundation and how to apply for a grant at alpkit.com/foundation.