should be accessible to walkers and ramblers, and which areas should be totally private. The police must consider how the rules would be enforced. Everyone must decide on an appropriate punishment for walkers and landowners who break the rules. Here are some examples to look at:
A large landowner
has an area of open moorland used for shooting twenty days a year. Outside of this time it is stocked with young birds and needs to be closed for heather burning for 2 weeks in the summer.
A small hill farmer
owns land on the side of a Welsh mountain. She uses the fields for raising sheep. The land is crossed by public footpaths that are used by walkers. The farmer is worried that more access will be distressing for the sheep during the lambing season.
A football player
who has often had problems with paparazzi photographers and obsessed fans owns a country estate. He is worried that giving walkers a right to roam on some of his uncultivated land will make security a problem on the whole estate.
[C] Bring the group back together and vote on some of the proposals they have come up with.
4. Plenary
Recap on the main teaching points.
Why is it hard to negotiate a change that will involve some winners and some losers?
5. Teachers' Background
- The Countryside and Rights of Way Act means a new legal right of access on foot to areas of open and uncultivated countryside.
- It will give walkers access to four million acres of mountain, moor, heath, down, and common land in England and Wales.
- Until maps showing where the Act will apply are drawn up the new rights will not apply.
- Madonna is objecting to the way her land has been mapped. Some of her estate has been classed as uncultivated downland, but she is arguing that it's actually semi-improved grassland.
- The Countryside Agency and the Countryside Council for Wales will draw up new maps showing where the new rights of access apply.
- The Ritchies appeal against the mapping is only the third by landowners to be heard against the provisional access map.
- The couple also believe the decision would breach their human rights by creating an infringement of their privacy by allowing public access to their land
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