9th February 2005, Land Reform Act

We don’t want to break the law. We want to change it. This bill has been talked about since the 1890s but it was never allowed to get through. It’s almost the exact halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. A cold, some may say unfriendly, time of year. Snowdrops have begun to pop up under hedgerows, carpeting our woodlands. Today, they have been camouflaged with glistening snow. Walks tend to be muddy when the ground isn’t frozen because of the sheer amount of rainfall. My boots are squeaky clean, albeit damp, looking down at Holyrood from this spectacular dormant volcano. I am lucky to hike this most days but my true passion is for Scotland at its most wild: walking it, swimming in it, playing and frolicking in it, skiing across it, climbing up it, breathing it in, and being within something bigger in the fresh bonnie air. Edinburgh is where laws are passed, but the Highlands are where your heart will be captured by the sheer audacious magnitude of what you see before you.

We always stick to the margins of a field. We’re peaceful ramblers, not reivers, or criminals, or murderers — god forbid. If there are things growing, then we wouldn’t want to trample them. If there are livestock, then we need to be mindful of them. It’s all pure and simple common sense and respect. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. People that want to ruin the fun of others. I see myself as a figurehead to protect and promote access to the wilderness in my beautiful country. Access to nature should be a fundamental human right. Some large estate owners want to deny the right to roam for hillwalkers and the local people. It’s taken years to create an awareness, a full public knowledge, of how beneficial this law will be for everyone. It has been a slow trickle. The media have supported us. Politicians and landowners befriended. I have a talent to not stick to the margins in life it seems — sticking my neck above the parapet, making enemies as well as friends in places you least expect.

I wipe my brow. I come up here at quite a speed, dodging the tourists. It gets busier on sunny days but the crowd I see are not sightseers. I hear them before I see them coming up over the crag, recognising their voices. My teammates: grinning, hooting, and sharing in this momentous day. Not everyone can be pleased at every turn. Many opposing people are unhappy. On a particular estate, not far from here, there are three locked gates and two warning signs. Today it has been agreed, legally, by our fledgling Scottish Parliament, that those gates will be unlocked and the signs taken down. Nobody can be excluded from the land, from the mountains, from the lochs and the rivers. Today we have initiated the best access rights in the world.

Helen Harradine