Really enjoyed this one. Is it a bit rambly? Sure. Did I have issues with a witchcraft section overly reliant on Silvia Federici's interpretations? Yeah, a bit. But overall it's a very readable look into the abysmal state of land access and public rights in England, and how it got that way.

Fundamentally, Hayes urges us all to consider whether the way we currently treat land – as a purely commercial entity, with its commercial value prioritised above all other potential value – needs to be revised and how this could be done. He notes that: Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.Laced in with his inch-deep dive into breadths of pop culture were his boring accounts of trespass where he intermittently described the tranquility of lying in the grass. How can the reader expect to be immersed in those moments when they’re only given a paragraph at a time, and then their mind is taken to some Anglo-Saxon folklore they’ve never heard of. The range of figures and events on the index says it all, no book should have that many different name drops side-by-side. Weaving together the stories of poachers, vagabonds, gypsies, witches, hippies, ravers, ramblers, migrants and protestors, and charting acts of civil disobedience that challenge orthodox power at its heart, The Book of Trespass will transform the way you see the land. I found the first part of this book to be very informative and discovered quite a bit about life in England before the Norman Conquest which I had hadn't known previously. The information about the Enclosure Act was also very enlightening. However I was less enchanted by the author's constant belittling of a certain national newspaper and its readers who he seems to hold personally responsible for anything that has happened in the UK to which he doesn't agree. I hadn't realised when reading the book of his connection with The Guardian newspaper, otherwise I wouldn't have been quite as surprised at his views. I was so also unsure why a trip to Calais to visit the migrant camps, however laudable, was included in a book about trespass in England. Apparently there are also some beautiful illustrations in the book which unfortunately I couldn't access on my tablet.

I'll be honest with you, I'm not much of a reader of non-fiction so in a bookstore I would totally have just walked pass the book. As it is, the book became available on Pigeonhole and the title and description of the book intrigued me so I signed up for it.

A powerful new narrative about the vexed issue of land rights . . . Hayes [is] practically a professional trespasser these days, no sign too forbidding to be ignored, no fence too high to be climed . . . The Book of Trespass is [Hayes's] first non-graphic book – though the text is punctuated by his marvellous illustations, linocuts that bring to mind the Erics, Gill and Ravilious – and in it, he weaves several centuries of English history together with the stories of gypsies, witches, ramblers, migrants and campaigners, as well as his own adventures. Its sweep is vast The first thing you should know is that the famous sign ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ is an out-and-out lie. Jolowicz [a Professor of Law] calls such signs ‘wooden falsehoods’, a neat phrase he borrowed from the arch-trespasser of the 1920s, G. H. B. Ward. Since 1694, the misdemeanour of trespass has resided in the province of civil, not criminal, law, and can only be brought to court if damages have been incurred. However, if you resist the landowner’s command to leave, if you are impolite, the police can be called and if you resist them, you can be done for a breach of the peace, or for obstructing a police officer.