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.

It is topped in high summer and cut for hay after, and a hedgerow the owner replanted in 2011 binds its wet end. Both parties agree on what grows there. The disagreement begins at the word wild.

The society's access guidance 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, so the rule 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. "Wild isn't about whether people have been there. It's about whether anybody is in charge."

Halloway admits one intervention: yellow rattle, introduced in 2014 on advice to check the dominant grass. Tomlin takes this as proof the meadow has settled into its own pattern; Halloway, as proof he is responsible for it.

Vera Pike was asked to mediate and was blamed by both sides. "They each wanted me to say the word," she said. "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. Two of her members were already in the meadow in June. Neither group has raised this.

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

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 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.