The river belongs to everyone. The law should finally say so

Last Sunday I swam in a river I was not, strictly speaking, allowed to swim in. The water was clear and cold, the alders were turning yellow, a heron watched from a shingle bar, and a sign nailed to a willow informed me that I was trespassing. I have thought about that sign all week.

England has about 42,000 miles of rivers. Members of the public have an undisputed right to be on, or in, about 4% of them. The rest, in the absence of a legal right of navigation, belong to whoever owns the bank, which in practice means that a landowner can prevent you from floating down a stretch of water that has been there for 10,000 years and will be there long after their deeds are dust. Scotland abolished this nonsense in 2003 with a right of responsible access to land and water that has, contrary to every warning, caused neither anarchy nor the collapse of agriculture. Wales is consulting on following suit. England alone clings to the fiction that a river is a kind of private driveway.

The objections are familiar and feeble. Anglers worry about disturbance to fish, though the evidence from Scotland suggests swimmers and canoeists cause less than a day of heavy rain. Landowners worry about litter and liability, though the law already protects them from the latter and the former is a matter for enforcement, not exclusion. The real objection, rarely spoken aloud, is that access is worth money, and that a stretch of river with no public on it can be let to a syndicate for a sum that would make you weep.

Meanwhile the people for whom a river might actually matter, the family with no garden, the teenager in a town with a closed pool, the pensioner who has read that cold water is good for the heart, are told to drive to a reservoir with a car park and a charge. The boom in outdoor swimming has been one of the few unambiguously good things to happen to this country’s relationship with its landscape, and we are meeting it with trespass signs.

A right of responsible access to rivers would not be complicated to legislate. It would need to exclude the obvious: private gardens, working reaches, stretches of genuine ecological sensitivity. It would need a code, some signage and a little goodwill. Scotland has shown it is possible. What it needs in England is a government prepared to tell a small number of people with a great deal of land that the water flowing past their property was never theirs to begin with. That heron did not have a permit. Neither should I.

Daniel Oyelaran is a Daily Meridian columnist