Cirencester Park, also known as Bathurst Park, have finally introduced charges for entry to a space that has been free to access by the public since 1695. The gatehouse has gone in and from 15th March 2024 visitors will now have to pay £4 for adults and £2 for children on entry. Local residents ‘can continue to access Cirencester Park free of charge’ but must pay £10 ‘to secure a card,’ a cost which anyone on a low income at this time of crushing poly-crises will be unable to afford.
Acquired with proceeds from the slave trade and maintained with investments in the Royal Africa Company, East India Company and the spoils of colonial territories everywhere, the Bathurst Estate, including the Park, has a long and deplorable history of violent exploitation of people and the environment locally and around the world.[1] There is such ample evidence available to attest to the cruel and profiteering greed of the high Tory Bathursts that I do not need to reproduce it here. Suffice to say that, to this day, their legacy is recalled across the world in placenames and statuary, from Bathurst Island in Nunavut, Canada, to Bathurst County in New South Wales, Australia. The capital of The Gambia, Banjul, was formerly known as Bathurst. The avaricious character of the Bathursts is so deeply ingrained in their family history, it can be said to run through their very DNA. An unenviable genetic inheritance.
Two days before the charges are to be introduced, Right to Roam have been invited by locals to host a public meeting to debate whether the Park should be paywalled. The public attention is welcome and Right to Roam build an excellent case for the rights of all to access the land (an argument which the Bathursts are ingenuously trying to reflect back to their critics – just without mentioning the bit about rights). Right to Roam say, correctly, that the new commercialisation of access to green space is part of a growing trend to cash in on the public’s need for nature. Perhaps, in part, the new charging regime may be driven by the post-Brexit realities of EU subsidies loss which previously propped up estate management, who knows, but with net assets last year totalling £29,481,555 (UK accounts disclosed to HMRC, does not include extensive local land assets and wealth registered offshore in Bermuda) I venture to suggest that the Bathursts aren’t short of a penny or two. How much is not enough? It is also the case that as taxpayers we are already paying for the upkeep of the Park.
Right to Roam have invited a representative from the Estate to join the debate – it will be interesting to see if they do turn up, but hard to imagine what would be in it for them: an audience that’s already avowedly hostile to their case and a horse that’s well and truly bolted. Plans for the new charging system have been in place for at least three years. Even the BBC has been reporting on this since 2021. At best, we can hope for a lively discussion of the issues at stake, an airing of our right to free speech and protest, an illuminating case study and an object lesson to feed future campaigns, if nothing else.
None of this will salve the soreness in my heart for this banishment from the land. Living as I did on a street a stone’s throw from the gates, I grew up in this park. I spent my weekends and holidays in the woodlands and roaming its tracks, playing beneath the horse chestnuts with their fragrant candles in spring and pushing out glimmering brown conkers from their downy cases in autumn. I chased my friends around the hexagon halfway up the mile-long Broad Ride, fished and foraged in the brook by the mill, wandered the snake path and played in the old stone barns. I learned to swim with my late dad in the outdoor pool at the edge of the Park. I broke my arm (twice) falling out of trees that were far too tall for me to have any business climbing in the first place. I used to coo back at the birds in the dovecot on the orchard as they fluttered in and out of their boulins. I went through and along the boundary wall of the Park on the way to school every day of my childhood. It was the place where I learned to carry the wild within me as I snuck out of the house as a kid in the early hours to go walking in the park and cook eggs on a fire in the woods before dawn. I was distraught for months when the twin brothers who lived in the cottage at the Barton Lane gate died – a best friend’s dad was the paramedic who found them, eventually, after one had passed away from natural causes, the other had contracted gangrene from an infected wound, with no way of calling for help. A gruesome metaphor, perhaps, for where we have got to with our increasingly disconnected relationship to the land.
And this very personal history is why I am popping my head above the Substack parapet today – it may be too late to take any meaningful action to prevent the introduction of charges, but it is not too late to articulate all of the reasons why place has more meaning to many of us than a torrid transaction on a gate. Places like these live within us the way muscle memory holds bodies in ways that are not always conscious. They are points of attachment where we hang our histories. Places are repositories of our cultural identities and experiences, our personal narratives, storehouses of emplacement, displacement, placelessness and placeness. They are our home, our family, our past – as Robert Macfarlane has put it, ‘history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring.’ What’s more, for many of us, place and their specific environments hold spiritual significance as we try to negotiate a renewed relationship with the land that recognises the porosity of our boundaries and our interconnectedness with wider ecosystems.
Our sense of attachment to place, our sense of wonder and reverence for nature – even for that which is most familiar and mundane to us in our daily lives – honours the earth in a way that accepts our responsibility for what has been violated and which seeks to heal and transform our relationship. Although likely to get short shrift in mainstream debates, this profound, intimate and ancient relationship with nature is what for me is at stake here. To challenge the fragmentation and alienation of our connection to the land (however problematic the history of that land may be) and to evolve a new unity and understanding of the mutually beneficial entanglements of human and more-than-human life.
Taking the places we love away is like trying to sever the bond of a parent with their child, damming a lifeforce that cannot be quelled.
Note: if you’re interested in exploring the connectedness of human / nature in your writing, I’m running four workshops at Sladebank Woods near Stroud, Gloucestershire, throughout the seasons. I’d love you to join me. More information here.
[1] Plentiful references are available that attest to this legacy. See, for example, Historic England’s report on English Heritage Properties 1600-1830 and Slavery Connections which has had the right wing spitting feathers since its publication in 2007.
The reverse of enclosure and the ensuing truth and reconciliation process that we must commit to to understand how those gates can even exist is crucial. A mass 'trespass' and physical dissolution of the gates of exclusion by the right to roam and local people may help to bring Anthony Joseph's sentiment to life, 'The rich are only defeated when running for their lives'. Never mind the parapet, tell it like it is.
Our experience of the pandemic made it abundantly clear that the ability to access nature on our doorsteps is life-giving, both important and necessary. I enjoyed reading about your connection to Cirencester Park and sad of course to learn of the changes being made. Also loved the 'mini-stories' in this piece.