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Advnture
Advnture
Pat Kinsella

OPINION: Furore over fly camping on Dartmoor misses the point

A wild camping pitch ay sunset on Dartmoor.

As someone who attended every rally and protest about the recent attempt by a wealthy landlord to remove the right to legally wild camp on Dartmoor, and a regular wild camper myself, I dread waking up to news reports such as this one, claiming there has been a surge in fly camping since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the general public retaining the right to spend the night on the moor.

The first thing that raises my hackles (after the fact that some people will stoop to such conduct) is the instant and seemingly gleeful conflation of wild camping with nuisance camping and general bad behaviour in the outdoors. Although the article does admittedly make an attempt to explain the ethics of wild camping as opposed to fly camping, the dots are neatly set out for the casual reader to join the two activities, as if one is an inevitable consequence of the other.

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