Property Owner and Forager Reach Stalemate Over Whether 'Tended Meadow' Qualifies as Public Access

A private landowner and a local forager have reached a stalemate over whether a four-acre tended meadow qualifies as wild ground open to gathering, three weeks into correspondence in which neither party has disputed a single plant identification.

The meadow lies between a lane and a stand of alder. It is topped once in high summer and cut for hay once after, and its wet end is bound by a hedgerow the owner replanted himself in 2011. Both parties agree on what grows there and on when it was last cut. The disagreement begins at the word wild, and neither has moved the other an inch past it.

The society's access guidance offers no help. It is a two-position switch: land you may walk, and land you may not. There is no position for land that is neither public nor neglected, productive only because somebody keeps a blade on it, and a rule with no state for the thing in front of it does not return the wrong answer. It returns nothing, and both parties write their own definition into the gap.

"I have cut that hay fourteen times," said Dermot Halloway, who owns it. "If it's wild, somebody tell me what's been eating it. If it isn't, then what comes off it is mine to decide, and this year I've decided nothing comes off it."

Bea Tomlin, who proposed the outing, reads the same facts the other way. "I have never put a seed in that ground in my life," she said. "It comes up how it comes up. Wild isn't about whether people have been there. It's about whether anybody is in charge."

Both statements are true, which is the difficulty. Halloway admits one intervention: he introduced yellow rattle into the grass in 2014, on advice, to check the dominant species, and the rattle has held since. Tomlin takes this as evidence that the meadow has settled into its own pattern. Halloway takes it as evidence that he is responsible for the pattern. Nobody is arguing about botany.

Vera Pike was asked to mediate, as she generally is, and was blamed by both sides for an outcome she had not produced. "They each wanted me to say the word," she said. "Neither wanted to be the one who defined it. I said the word, and now I'm the reason it means what it means."

Nadia Evers, whose group shares about half its membership with Tomlin's, declined a position on the ground that her people gather only on public land and a private meadow was therefore not their affair. Two of her members were already in the meadow in June. Neither group has raised this.

Last week the two sides agreed on one procedure: strike the mower from the account. Left uncut, what is the place in three years? The answer both had received from the same ecologist was scrub, then thorn, and within three seasons most of the species list they had spent a month agreeing on would be gone. The test that would settle wildness in the forager's favour would delete the object she came for.

Nobody has moved to add a third position to the guidance, because a third position would require saying who is responsible for the cut. The hay will come off in August either way: Halloway will cut it whether or not it is wild, and Tomlin will not gather there whether or not it is public. Both statements were issued the same afternoon; neither has been amended.

Bench note: the failed part is not the definition of wild. The switch has no position for land looked after by someone who is not asking you, so the argument keeps relocating to botany, the one field in which either party could win, and in which neither has made a claim.