What the lockdown rule-breakers can teach us about outdoor access

On 16 January this year, with travel more than five miles outside local authority areas strictly verboten, four men in their 20s drove from somewhere in Midlothian to Crianlarich in order to climb Ben More. They might have gotten away with it, too, those crazy kids, had it not been for the fact that they got into difficulty while they were up on the mountain and required somewhat conspicuous assistance from a coastguard search and rescue helicopter. In the end, the men managed to descend safely, guided by phone calls and text messages from police and a mountain rescue team. Still, by this point their cover had been comprehensively blown – “Name? Address? Begpardonwheresorry?” – so they were all handed fixed penalty fines to go with their red faces.

Plenty of locked-down, mountainloving urbanites who had been doggedly sticking to the rules would have read about this incident with a certain degree of serves ’em right schadenfreude, but it turns out the Ben More Four were by no means the only people risking fines to access the countryside during our most recent period of enforced confinement.

At the end of last month, Police Scotland released figures for travel ban breaches from the end of December to the middle of May, along with details of some of the excuses people gave for making cheeky wee jaunts. My favourite of these by far is the story of eight people in three different vehicles who gave “ghost hunting” as their reason for travel – presumably they had already swept their own local authority area very thoroughly for spooks before drawing a blank and concluding it was time to start looking elsewhere. However, it will surprise precisely nobody to learn that many of the people who breached travel restrictions were hillwalkers and campers, and particularly popular destinations were Ben A’an (stunning views and not too much of a climb) and Conic Hill, (stunning views, not too much of a climb and very handy for Glasgow).

Now, Final Words doesn’t do fingerwagging – for those who feel the need to cast the first stone, or even several stones, there are plenty of coronavirus “name and shame” groups on Facebook. But there are lessons to be learned here, I think, and perhaps the most important one is this: that there are many people in Scotland for whom access, not just to the outdoors, but to wild, out-of-theway places in particular, is hugely important. So important, in fact, that they are willing to take big risks in order to get their fix.

Let’s take the example of our four twenty-somethings climbing Ben More back in January. True, they were planning to spend much of the day on a well-ventilated and almost certainly coronavirus-free mountainside, but in the event that they encountered other people, they would have risked spreading coronavirus outwith their local area, and they would have risked contracting it themselves. Even if you choose to think the worst of them, assume they’d seen the graphs, understood that the chances of a twenty-something dying from Covid-19 were very small, and didn’t much care about anybody else, they still faced other risks. Not only did they risk a fine from the police (fines for breaches of travel restrictions start at £30, doubling to £60 if not paid within 28 days, and repeat offenders can face fines of up to £960) they also risked getting "outed" on social media, and all the opprobrium that would bring. Any way you slice it, then, a trip to the hills in January was a gamble – and yet they still went ahead. All the other hillwalkers (and mountain bikers, and skiers, and kayakers, and surfers) who made similar journeys over the last few months will have made similar calculations; and whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of their decisions to go rather than stay, the fact that so many chose to go shows just how vitally important time spent in wilderness is to people’s sense of wellbeing.

The Police Scotland figures tell us something else, too: that wilderness activities are not just some narcissistic “look at me” exercise in racking up likes on Instagram. During lockdown I saw a lot of social media posts from climbers, skiers and snowboarders living in the Highlands (and therefore allowed to access the mountains) with messages like “Amazing day in the hills today – looking forward to sharing these views with those who can’t get here soon.” But what I didn’t see, or even hear about, was people posting pictures from illicit trips that broke lockdown travel restrictions and bragging about how they’d managed to get away with it.

If, at some point in the future, advocates for our wild places need hard evidence of how much they matter to people – for example, when lobbying for more national parks, or for better funding for our hardpressed outdoor education centres – they could do worse than to point to lockdown and say: “look, see, here are the lengths people will go to for a bit of fresh air and some big horizons.”

There are many people for whom access to wild, out-of-the-way places is hugely important