Dartmoor wild camping ruling

A little off-topic, but thought UK OSM mappers may be interested:

The Supreme Court has upheld the legal right of wild camping on Dartmoor, after quite a long legal battle by landowners to prevent it.

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Very good news :smile:

So in our terms, it all becomes access=public, including some areas of private property?

I think that value is deprecated (access=yes is the replacement) but, unfortunately, it’s not quite as open as that.

I think what we can tag it as is:

foot=yes
horse=yes
camping=yes
(and probably bicycle=yes)

Though I think there is a distinction in the camping which isn’t reflected in our current tagging. Essentially the type of camping allowed is “wild camping” or “backpack camping”, i.e., where you’ve carried your tent in on foot rather than driven to a site, parked up and camped at that spot.

Yeah, I can tell it’s going to be a bunfight, for us as well as them! :thinking: :roll_eyes: :crazy_face:

It’s complicated, and likely won’t have an impact on OSM access tags.

Unlike Scotland, in England and Wales there isn’t a general presumed right of open access - there is a patchwork of areas, some defined by the “Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000” but some (like Dartmoor) previously defined in earlier legislation.

Paths on open access areas like these are already effectively foot=yes** (but not bicycle=yes).

Open access areas in England and Wales don’t allow wild camping. Dartmoor (see the detail of the BBC article linked at the top of the thread) was the exception and did and now does again, based on interpretation of Dartmoor’s earlier legislation.

It wouldn’t make sense to try and tag Dartmoor as “some sort of camp site” because the nuances of the legislation and the restrictions as to that use are significant.

** with some big caveats - “open access” moorland is regularly closed for shooting, and the legislation for another area that I’m familiar with says that it is open when “not required to be used for any military purpose”.