 A few weeks ago somebody asked me, why did you call yourself a rambling activist? And I had to explain, I didn't call myself that. It was a label I was given. But the reasons are a little more complicated. The pain is where I used to play as a child. I'd walk out of here, pick berries from the hedgerows, pick mushrooms in the fields, watch the birds, watch the wildlife, the hare's boxing, and bit by bit, over many years, it was taken away. What's your response to that? It becomes very personal. What you identify with is being taken away from you. That's what made me into an environmentalist. But more than that, it made me into an activist. Real change involves acts of transgression. It doesn't matter if your environment is being taken away or you're responding to that. To take that on requires transgression. Rambling made me transgress. It's because if you're walking on land, in England at least, walking on land is an act of transgression. You're walking on what is portrayed to be somebody's private property, even though you have a right to do so. If you look at an ordinance survey map, it shows you various paths. And it always says that a path on the map is not evidence of a real path on the ground. The problem is, as time has gone by, it's become more complex to exercise your rights in the countryside as they've tried to open the countryside up. And it's all about this battle between land rights and access rights. And now we have permitted paths and trails and your rights there aren't the same. And then you have the whole category of access land, where you have all sorts of restrictions on what you can and can't do, otherwise you lose your rights of access. Following footpath is a legal exercise. There's a thing called the definitive map. And that tells you where all the legal paths are and you have a right to walk. And by understanding that, you get to realise how local government works, how paths are created and how they're maintained. And that makes you political because you suddenly realise that how paths are maintained, how your rights are looked after is a political act. Here we have a style. It's broken. It's overgrown. Most people can be put up by this, but what can you do about it? You need to be a passive participant. It's your legal right to clear these obstructions. What the Highways Act allows, section 333, I make clear as much as the obstruction as is necessary to pass. And so when I go out walking, I take my little secretors and as I progress, I just keep the paths clear. It's my legal right to do so. The law says that. And yet many ramblers feel quite uncomfortable when they see me doing this. Here's the clear gap. The style is, of course, a responsibility of the local authority. That's for another day. And so I'll progress my way up the hill. Come to this style, and this is quite interesting. This is the county boundary. Oxfordshire this side, Northamptonshire on the other side. And what you find is, when you start rambling, different local authorities implement the law differently. Different officers implement the law differently. This is Northamptonshire's definitive map. Slightly different design. In Northamptonshire, they privatised council services. And so the officers react very differently to complaints. In addition to secretors, they also carry a small saw. A few months ago, a tree had come down. You can see people have been trying to struggle around the edge. My choice, I went through the middle of it. It only took me 15 minutes to do. You can become part of enforcing your rights. And that is what makes them real. Coming to the other side of the county boundary, you find this. This is the ancient road. Before they created the new road, this hollow way was for centuries the road. As you get into paths, you realise that the world changes. You can see the progression of things in the countryside perhaps more easily than you can in the towns. It was this process of learning, of engaging, of exercising rights, which turned just rambling activism into a greater idea of activism, of transgressing those things which perhaps we don't talk about, perhaps we let lie. Because it was a way of facilitating my access to the countryside, my involvement in the countryside, and enjoying that which I had a legal right to do, but perhaps not everybody wanted to enable me to do. Getting to the top of the hill, you get a view across Bambry and the Ironstone slab beyond. A bit cloudy today. The mists are coming in and out, but it's a very nice place to view the town on a clear day. But as I turn to carry on my way, what do I find? Barbed wire. This isn't legal. It's quite ironic that it's over the top of the footpath sign because it shows the farmer has done it quite recently. The law says this shouldn't be here. If I try and cross this dial, I could hurt myself. So as well as the secateurs and the saw, I also carry, wrapped up to keep them dry, a pair of very heavy-duty wire pippers. This isn't for clipping the wire. This is for taking the barbs off. What's illegal here isn't the wire. It's the barbs. So by taking the barbs away, I'm not only making it safe for me to continue. I'm actually making the piece of wire that's illegal, legal. Now what the law says, section 164, the High Rays Act, the High Rays Authority can tell a farmer that he has six months to remove the barbed wire. Well, that means there's six months of people who might be hurting themselves. I mean, I might get hurt as I cross the wire. You can see there's a big scratch in my arm there from the bramble as I went through the style by the bridge earlier. This is property. I have just in effect caused criminal damage because I've taken a piece of barbed wire and I've clipped the barbs off. I'm very soon after getting into footpath and access, I got into criminal damage law because you are doing certain things which of themselves are illegal. What the law actually says that you can do certain things which damage property in order to avoid harm to you or to the interests of other people. This is section 5, the Criminal Damage Act. What it says is if you have a good reason for needing to do the damage in order to protect other people's interests, property or well-being and it's required to be done immediately, then you can go ahead and you can take that action. That sounds quite obscure, quite minimal. It's actually the basis for some very major protest actions. This is the most recent where a pair tried to get at some jets which are going to Saudi Arabia which would have bombed Yemen and they were acquitted because they had a good reason for doing so. As I progressed through rambling and footpath and become an environmentalist, I certainly realised all that stuff I learnt for the innocent idea of rambling was also applicable to the idea of activism and that came to a head at nearby USAF Crownton in 1985. And today we're using a public ride, right? It's still open, they haven't closed it or they haven't yet and using the protection of the Hyros Act in 1980 to come to the side in 1949 and 1968 we are perfectly legally travelling across a front-line communication fence. Those walks across Crownton later got me involved in all sorts of other campaigns where this idea of using the law to effect change as our right as being part of this society became really useful and since then I've gone on to do many other things but it still comes down to this idea of transgression that sometimes the law itself enables you to be transgressive. For example, in 1992 I jumped over the fence into an outlying compound of the Harwell Laboratory to find the Atomic Energy Authority were illegally dumping radioactive waste. In a society where certain interests dominate to enforce the legal rights of those who have them but are ignored is a transgressive act and over history it's minorities enforcing their legal rights and the social transgression that creates which creates change. This is the inward journey of activism this is how activism allows you to express yourself, your beliefs, your ideals and make them concrete in the real world and effect change, real change that does in the end make that greater social change happen.