This chapter is about the kinds of inhabitation of the landscape that are made possible by outdoor access rights in Scotland, with reference to walking during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic was a particularly acute example of how political and legal structures can shape the everyday experience of movement, and in some ways also brought to light the ways in which governance is reified and made real through ordinary life. In Scotland, new outdoor access rights were introduced in 2003, and they promise a kind of democratic, nation-wide equality in non-motorised mobility. The rights were severely curtailed during the pandemic, but at the same time they were enacted locally in distinctive ways, even if people were not aware of the legal basis that underpinned the way they walked, cycled and took other forms of access.

Connecting with the themes of this book, I want to argue that during the pandemic the perceived ‘margins’ of the landscape were no longer the remote rural parts of the country, but instead became the previously unthought-about and sometimes unnoticed surroundings in people’s immediate lifeworlds. Margins came much closer to home and the forms of mobility used to access them changed. At the time of writing, we are in a phase in which hopefully the worst of the pandemic is over in most of the world. This could allow us to consider anew the processes by which margins are formed and mobilities to and through them happen.

Thinking through the concept of regimes of mobility may be helpful here. Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) argue that people’s movements across the world—between countries and on other long-distance journeys—are not, of course, free of the influence of political and governance processes, and cannot simply be understood as expressions of freedom or cosmopolitanism as globalisation scholarship has tended to do. Movement and migration are circumscribed through controls that reify both stasis and mobility, enabling some forms of movement while limiting others. As they write: ‘The term “regime” calls attention to the role both of individual states and of changing international regulatory and surveillance administrations that affect individual mobility’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013, 189). Yet at the same time, this is imaginative work, as forms of controlled movement are part of discursive realms, idealisations and ‘mythscapes’ (ibid. 194) that play out across space.

Other researchers have gone on to consider regimes of mobility and their power structures in a variety of settings, often in transnational migration but also in connection with, for example, climate change (Suliman et al. 2019; Boas et al. 2022), urban traffic (Stefanelli 2021) and as we shall see the COVID-19 pandemic (Adey et al. 2021). In her study of urban commuting in Accra, Møller-Jensen (2021, 462) argues that the focus of mobilities research on migration “has to some extent empirically reinforced a normative understanding of what kind of movements [are] considered significant and noteworthy and has left the impact of smaller scale, urban mobilities ethnographically understudied”. I think this is a fair argument, although perhaps the point is not to weigh up the amount of research conducted on transnationalism as opposed to that on ‘smaller scale’ mobilities in cities or elsewhere. Of more value is understanding how forms of regulation and surveillance constitute and are in turn constituted through scales, sites and trajectories of movement, as experienced by people themselves. This is a feature both of ethnographic research on international migration and on more local forms of mobility.

One distinctive contribution of transnational research into regimes of mobility is, as Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) put it, to recognise the ‘methodological nationalism’ that has been a part of much social science research. That refers to the tendency to invoke a country or other territory as a pre-existing bounded unit, within which movement happens, rather than being open to the ways in which boundaries are negotiated and experienced. During COVID-19, however, nation states did assert their own regimes of mobility, placing new and variable restrictions on movement between countries that started earlier and lasted longer than movement controls within their borders (Piccoli et al. 2022). Movement both externally and internally became tensioned—or even more tensioned—in that it was subject to much greater surveillance and control at the same time as people moving faced the intangible risk of the virus itself. Nonetheless, the question of how the boundaries between and within countries came to be experienced as real is as salient as governance practices of different countries. In this sense, we might explore “political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes” as Suliman et al. (2019, 298) put it in their discussion of immobilities and mobilities through the lens of the Anthropocene. (Im)mobility politics happens not only through the official processes of legislation and implementation, but through the on-the-ground actions and responses of those subject to them.

Access Rights in Scotland and the Nordic Countries

Before discussing pandemic mobilities themselves, I will sketch out the international dimension to my core case of an apparently national regime of mobility, the Scottish outdoor access rights—with the intention of overcoming what might be perceived as methodological nationalism. The Scottish rights were set out in legislation relatively recently, in 2003, soon after the establishment of a Scottish Parliament with powers devolved from the UK in 1999. They were however modelled on the Nordic practice of allemansrätten. This is the Swedish version of the Nordic rights that are usually translated into English as ‘Everyman’s rights’ but could also be ‘Everyone’s rights’ as no gender distinction is intended. In short, the Nordic rights enable people to enter and move through outfield, mountain and forest areas. La Mela (2020, 182) notes that the common view of allemansrätten holds it as an “age-old and stable tradition” and some scholars have continued to connect it to pre-modern Nordic legal culture and access practices. Mortazavi (1997), for example, locates the origin of the Swedish rights in the need to pass through others’ land for travel in the context of a large and sparsely populated country, which was presumably the situation in the other Nordic countries too. The existence of wide areas not used for intensive agriculture is also significant, meaning that the rights in these countries apply to forests, hill and mountain areas beyond lower lying farms. Berry and mushroom picking are also important rights within allemansrätten, although certain other derivatives of trees that may have value such as leaves, birch sap and resin are understood as owned by the landowner (Hamunen et al. 2019).

On the other hand, allemansrätten is also associated with twentieth century politics. La Mela’s analysis of Finnish parliamentary records shows how, in political discourse at least, it was initially used to describe common fishing rights introduced in the Second World War and only came to be connected with wider access rights from the 1960s. In Norway meanwhile, allemansrätten is linked to the national ethic of friluftsliv—open air living—that is morally valued as a form of citizenship with a distinctive modern history as well as a traditional basis (Ween and Abram 2012). This combining of political intervention with custom opens onto how mobility is affected through both formal and informal kinds of governance, which I will argue happens in Scotland too. While the Scottish rights do not explicitly reference the Nordic rights, my ethnographic research in the late 2000s showed that allemansrätten had been prominent in the minds of Scottish policymakers and those lobbying for reform (Vergunst 2013). The Nordic countries offered a different approach to politicians looking for alternatives to ‘Westminster’ (UK government) ways of doing things in the context of the new Scottish Parliament and also provided a response to the complex system of path designations (‘rights of way’) and trespass laws that existed previously.

In the Nordic countries, where allemansrätten traditionally supported ordinary or everyday access to the land by people who dwelt in it, the rights have come to be relevant today for tourist activities and in some cases business opportunities (and hence their presence in political discourse). Much rural tourism and everyday access to ‘nature’ in the Nordic countries is now predicated on these rights to access land and the outdoors with relatively little hinderance, and yet this is also where tensions in the access rights have occurred. Mortazavi (1997) noted that problems from increasing tourism were being felt by some communities, including environmental damage. Camping in ‘wild’ areas is generally allowed, although in Iceland this has recently been restricted to official campsites because of environmental concerns (e.g. waste, fires). Berry-picking has also become an issue in circumstances where non-local people are harvesting significant amounts of berries (Pouta 2006), or where commercial harvesting is taking place and communities feel their concerns are not being heard (Hamunen et al. 2019, Nousiainen et al. this volume). These cases show how rights of access come to the foreground during episodes of conflict or tension, moving out from the embodied and often unreflexive habits of taking access in the landscape.

The Scottish rights were instituted in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. They are amongst the most extensive national set of access rights internationally, allowing non-motorised access to the outdoors as a whole and for everyone, as long as the access taker (i.e. walkers, cyclists etc.) acts responsibly, and, having completed their activity, then leaves. In the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, which is the official guidance for access takers, land managers and land owners, outdoor space is defined as ‘mountains, moorland, farmland (enclosed and unenclosed), forests, woods, rivers, lochs and reservoirs, beaches and the coastline, and open spaces in towns and cities’. This is indeed more or less anywhere ‘outdoors’ and exceptions are relatively limited; the main ones are the curtilage of buildings (land immediately associated with a building), land around a house sufficient for privacy or enjoyment of the property by the owner (not necessarily just limited to a garden), and land on which crops are growing. Access in specific places can be temporarily restricted for various reasons, and local laws (byelaws) limiting the rights have been used, for example, to restrict camping where there has been evidence of environmental damage resulting from it. In 2017, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park used byelaws to prohibit camping outside of designated campsites in parts of the Park that had been subject to heavy and damaging usage, using powers given to them when they were set up in legislation in 2000—one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament.

There was therefore a sense of nationalism or the creating of a nation—in part, if not fully fledged—in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000. The Land Reform Act also instituted a community land ownership process in the Highlands and Islands region intended to redress the injustice of a highly concentrated pattern of land ownership. In Scotland very few people own a large proportion of the land and often, it has been argued, with insufficient regard to local communities or sustainability (Wightman 1997). The outdoor access reforms were an aspect of land reform because they changed the nature of land ownership in Scotland, with the right to own land no longer encompassing the right to unduly restrict public access to it. While the community land ownership aspects of the Land Reform Act have arguably become more widely known, playing into the long conflict between landowners and tenants/communities especially in Highland Scotland, the outdoor access reforms operate in the landscape in rather different ways. The rights are not limited to a certain part of the country (as in crofting land reform) and also do not depend on an identification of ‘community’ in order to be enacted (as in the Community Empowerment Act (Scotland) 2015, which expands the earlier reforms). They are simply asserted by being present in the land. As such, they establish a different sense of the landscape of Scotland, which does not rely on distinctions between Highland and Lowland that mirror the scope of the community land ownership parts of the 2003 Land Reform Act.

We might also draw a contrast with the degrees of remoteness implied in the Scottish Government’s Urban Rural Classification used to plan and deliver services across the country (Scottish Government, 2022). This combines settlement size with driving time to an urban settlement of 10,000 people or more. The rural part of the classification goes from ‘accessible small towns’ that are between 3,000 and 9,999 population and within 30 minutes’ drive from an urban area, down to ‘very remote rural areas’ with a population of less than 3,000 and a drive time of over 60 minutes to an urban area. By this reckoning, very remote rural areas cover most of the north and west of the country (the Highlands and Islands) and parts of the south that are beyond the Central Belt conurbations of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly, most of the land of Scotland is rural—on the margins of accessibility from this perspective—while most of the population is urban.

Where urban–rural classification is based on a distinction between city and countryside and values accessibility to towns and cities, the outdoor access legislation posits a generalised right to be in and move through the landscape regardless of where in the country one is, and regardless of who owns the land. In some ways, this is of course a different ‘regime of mobility’ because with outdoor access rights we are referring to non-motorised access in and around open spaces (walking, cycling, horse riding and canoeing, for example) rather than drive times to urban areas. However, beyond the form of movement, the access rights are predicated on a democratic equality in the landscape, in which no particular kind of landscape is more or less special than any other, whether or not it is near to an urban centre, and everyone is legally enabled to take access. The rights apply to all the outdoors, regardless of whether a place is scenic or being used in a certain way, or who owns it.

This new legal reckoning of outdoor access contrasts in some ways with the traditional or customary forms of access to the landscape in Scotland. Before the Land Reform Act, rights of way existed and were formalised in the Countryside (Scotland) Act 1967, which put a duty on local councils to uphold routes that had been used by the general public without ‘substantial interruption’ for at least 20 years. These are specific paths and tracks that are sometimes signposted and catalogued by an organisation called Scotways, the Scottish Rights of Way and Access Society. Here, access is along pre-defined paths rather than to the landscape as a whole. At the same time, walkers and other access takers in my earlier research were often quite positive about access to the open hills and mountains, especially those mountains above 3000 feet (914 metres) known as the Munros, which are ‘bagged’ or collected by walkers who climb to their summits (Lorimer and Lund 2003). Focusing on the highest and iconic mountains of Scotland nonetheless plays into the wider association of landscape with scenic nature and the powerful gaze of the picturesque (Olwig 2002).

As a regime of mobility, the access rights significantly affect the ways that movement through the landscape occurs, both within specific places and in terms of the mobility required to get to certain areas in which non-motorised access is sought. This has a range of effects. On the one hand, being able by law to walk and move outdoors through Scotland’s landscape, from large, privately-owned estates to peri-urban areas, is a change that supports tourism, local communities and wider society in Scotland and brings economic, health and well-being benefits. Potential environmental benefits also exist through increased engagement of people and communities with the landscape. On the other hand, while owning land no longer includes the right to unduly restrict access to it, merely ‘taking access’ does not necessarily in itself change long standing power relations inherent in the ownership of land, such as the ability to take decisions about it and plan its future in the long term. Some land in Scotland—2.6% of the country as a whole in 2021 (Scottish Government 2022)—has in fact changed in this way too, by way of the community ownership reforms. Since the original legislation, new laws have expanded to include other kinds of community assets as well as land, as well as applying beyond the Highlands and Islands (though in different forms). In any case, inhabitation of the landscape does not lie solely in the legal ownership of land, nor simply in the legal right to access it, even if the latter may be a precondition. It is clear, though, that ‘margins’ can be defined and experienced in different ways.

Inhabiting Local Landscapes in COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, new, and yet at the same time old, forms of inhabiting the landscape were performed. While access rights in Scotland were initially focused on the iconic Highland landscapes of Munros (Scotland’s highest mountains) and similar scenic settings, COVID-19 lockdowns meant staying close to home. Many people took the chance to explore their local landscapes in more detail and in ways not previously considered. While most would have been unaware of the legal basis of this kind of access taking, many people seemed to develop new relationships with their local landscapes. New paths were formed simply by walking, with new habits of local exploration. Even in urban areas, regular walks became a way of not just getting exercise during lockdown, but appreciating small details of the neighbourhood that were previously unnoticed. Evidence from media, my experience and the experience of those I was in contact with through 2020 and 2021 suggests that encounters with plants and wildlife, architectural details and the discovery of new routes provided a means by which people connected more closely with the places they lived. Writing in a more or less post-pandemic period, it seems useful to reflect back and consider the relationships with landscape that were made during the enforced localisation of people’s lives.

I kept some fieldnotes of our lockdown walks, without any particular purpose in mind to start with other than to keep a record and see where it led. I noted places and the occasional other activity or game played with our children, then 11 and 12. As warm weather turned into a beautiful spring in 2020, flora and fauna that caught my eye were recorded too. A few examples of my brief notes follow:

Down to Co-op, down to Heritage Centre, along railway line to Kennerty/Millside.

Johnston Gardens, Bucklerburn Road. Just J&D. Very warm. Neighbours talking to each other in Johnston Gardens from a few metres apart.

Down Malcolm Road to railway line, along towards Camphill and back along Lovers’ Walk / river. Flowers and plants further on here than Hill of Ardbeck, comfrey and so on. Sweet Cicely. Couple of butterflies.

Down to the bridge and further up road towards Easter Anguston, played basketball with J in forest track.

What I want to draw out here are the small explorations of the urban–rural fringe that were happening. The places we walked were not completely new to us, but we often made new routes that were improvised daily, and sometimes along new paths. Indeed, there were literally new paths in the landscape, as we were not the only ones making our way through the woods and along the small rivers and burns where we live on the edge of the city of Aberdeen. Called ‘desire lines’ in an urban context, here they were newly marked or enlarged paths through a wood or on the edge of fields or the waterways. Cycling became more common in the pandemic in Scotland as it did elsewhere (Whyte 2022), and as well as riding ourselves we saw more bikes than we would normally when out and about. When off-road the bikes added to the path marking that was happening in the landscape.

Improvising walks in this way happened almost automatically after a while. From having a sense of destination and direction—to visit a particular wood, or an area of grass, or a shop—the walks moved to simply heading out and making choices according to whim or opportunities that seemed to arise (‘let’s try this way’ or ‘we haven’t been that way for a while’). Walking in lockdown was more reminiscent of the drift, or dérive, in the tradition of psychogeography. Guy Debord, French writer and critic, wrote in 1958: “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they might find there” (Debord 2007). This almost motiveless way of walking, created as cultural critique through avant-garde arts movements such as Debord’s Situationist International, works quite well as a way of understanding lockdown walks. Not to get anywhere in particular, they were simply a way of being outdoors for short while, drawn by whatever one found.

While the UK government COVID-19 regulations stipulated ‘exercise’ as a reasonable excuse for being outside, it seemed that physical exercise in a narrow sense was not the prime or even main motivation for those I met or was in touch with during lockdown. Instead walking created the opportunity for a change of scene and mindset from what for many became very restricted domestic spaces—especially perhaps families with children, and, as I learned from students I taught, those in shared occupancy housing. Outside, random elements and chance encounters in a less structured environment became possible. I played a little with psychogeography directly in a couple of our lockdown walks. Recalling other psychogeography events I had taken part in during my research on walking and art (Vergunst 2020), I suggested we take turns in leading the walk for two minutes each. Each leader could choose the direction and any activities as we walked along, which made for a fragmented but not completely zig-zag walk as we mostly built on the direction of the last person.

Other artistic or creative responses opened up the aesthetic aspects of lockdown walks—and indeed the ‘local walk’ more generally—in interesting ways. Collections of small, brightly painted stones started appearing, for example, along an old railway line in my neighbourhood now used as a leisure route for walking, cycling and horse riding, and in a collection along a beach front in a nearby town in Aberdeenshire. They were sometimes painted as animals, or cartoon characters, a Scottish flag, or just with patterns. Decorations (small coloured balls, little bird houses) sometimes appeared in trees in the woods. In another coastal town, artist Robert Lawrence installed “Covid Clouds”, small white cloud-shaped signs hung from trees along a path, with reflective messages for those out walking: “Time has a different meaning”, “Most people are at home and yet the streets are quiet”, “So, are we hoping for a kinder, cleaner, safer future?” The signs now hang in an exhibition in Aberdeen’s City Art Gallery, entitled “Imagined Landscapes”, a collection of contemporary mostly Scottish art with landscape and environmental themes. The opening text asks whether the visitor’s own relationships with landscape were changed during COVID-19.

Wandering through local neighbourhoods in lockdown was not of course entirely novel, as people are on the move in all kinds of ways in ordinary life as well. But the aesthetic reckoning of local landscapes during lockdown is worthy of note. While it sometimes resulted in art-making by amateurs and professionals, it was also apparent in the more personal valuing of being and moving outside and the appreciation of small, usually overlooked details. This is an environmental aesthetics that connects with everyday experience, as John Dewey shows—not just looking at things, or even recognising beauty, but an integrated “whole self” in its surroundings (Dewey 1934, 61) that Dewey argues is the basis for universal aesthetic experience.

The distinctiveness of lockdown mobilities was, of course, also in the way they were constrained by the unprecedented intervention of government in personal habits, movements and everyday lives. We can identify a tension between the aesthetic experience of engaging with local landscapes and the structures of micro-level governance in lockdown. COVID-19 rules certainly comprised a unique regime of mobility that curtailed movement in different ways at different stages of the pandemic. At its height, exercise was to be taken from the home directly, with no motorised travel to anywhere else allowed for this purpose. At other times, a restriction to the local council area (the City of Aberdeen in our case) held, with a five kilometre leeway to the boundary that led to maps being created and shared that showed the possibilities for walking. This was of course policed, with the police following a policy of moving from informal to formal intervention if required. Regulations were also internalised for many who were out and about as well, and, it seemed on occasion, amongst people who saw those of us ‘drifting’ around. On one bike ride, my son and I stopped at a shop in our neighbourhood and he went inside. I was approached by someone asking where we had come from, which surprised me as lockdown cycling was pretty common here, and I gestured in the direction of our street, ‘just around’. The person seemed reassured and said they thought we might have come from ‘town’. That would not have been against the COVID-19 regulations but perhaps had a sense of travel beyond what was necessary, where town (the fully urban core of Aberdeen) might be the source of infection and danger to this outlying suburb.

This feeling of drifting, with the constraint of surveillance by means of the police or one’s fellow residents, was something of a contradiction. Slipping between the ordinary movements of everyday life and the extraordinary circumstances of disease and state intervention, boundaries between what was possible, allowed, acceptable and perhaps on a personal level, ‘needed’ were negotiated through walking and cycling. Noel Salazar picked up on this early in the pandemic in writing of the ‘existential vs. essential mobilities’ of lockdown (Salazar 2021). Essential mobility, from this perspective, entailed the state’s definition of requirements for work, shopping, exercise for physical health or other outdoor activity that had a ‘reasonable excuse’. Formulations of essential mobility were common in regulations and guidelines, with the message that no other purposes for being outdoors were acceptable. Existential mobilities, for Salazar, refer to the more open-ended movements of ‘becoming’ in which a person’s wider sense of well-being are at stake. Despite the official emphasis on essential mobility, movement for existential reasons was in some ways just as important: “For them, it simply felt good to be able to do this while they had to spend so much time confined inside the walls of their house or apartment” (Salazar 2021, 28). Where physical activities could be essential or not from a public policy perspective, they were often existential on a personal level for many practitioners.

I heard this also amongst students I teach. When asking a small class of undergraduates to talk about landscapes that were meaningful for them, some chose places they had walked frequently during lockdown two or three years previously—a rural coastal area near their home, Aberdeen beach front, a forest on the edge of Aberdeen. These were not just walks for exercise, but became a kind of solace and self-care in a holistic sense. Despite the number of times the walks were undertaken, they were not, it seemed, being ‘repeated’ in the narrow sense of the word. Instead, they felt more like accumulations of experience with each walk enabling something new and different to happen, layering a memory upon others. This is a theme that has often cropped up in my research with people reflecting on their walking, as they notice small changes and details of the places they move through, over days, seasons and years.

Rethinking Margins in Pedestrian Landscapes

Michel de Certeau describes pedestrian walking, or in other words, walking that is ordinary, as an enunciative practice that ‘speaks’ a relationship with place (De Certeau 1988). It gives expression to a way of inhabiting. Pedestrian activity from this perspective is indeed more than just a walk, a way of becoming a walker that lives in and through a landscape, whether urban or rural. Enunciation, for De Certeau, involves the appropriation of the topographical system (the city in his case) much as a speaker appropriates a language for their use. It is a spatial acting-out of the place, and it also “implies relations among differentiated positions’ of the walker / speaker, other people, and the place they are in” (ibid.: 97–98). The creative and aesthetic responses that I have discussed here—both the more formally artistic and the ordinary drifts through the landscape—expressed distinctive kinds of meanings through interactions with place. Notions of existential well-being emerged in these lockdown walks. For many, they comprised the everyday tactical response to the structures imposed by a new and indeed unprecedented regime of mobility.

We might think about how the boundaries and margins of local landscapes are enunciated in these terms. I have shared in ordinary walking practices taking place in a range of landscapes, from urban city centres such as Aberdeen, to rural settings of coast, farmland, forest and hills, and have often experienced the significance of local places whether or not they are ‘iconic’ examples of Scottish landscape. These kind of walked landscapes are therefore distinctively pedestrian in the double sense of the word—both experienced on foot and purposefully ordinary. Such places are inhabited by ordinary means. This is not to say that they may not also be special, beautiful, scenic and so on, but they are not exclusively so. They are also sites of everyday mobility, and ordinary aesthetics, as part of people’s inhabitation of the landscape.

In the pandemic, however, access to these ordinary routes came within a regime of mobility in ways not usually, if ever, experienced before. Where before, walking was often unreflexive and unremarked upon—whether for ‘essential’ reasons of practicality or more existential everyday well-being—now, it seemed there was a lot at stake. The margins of the landscape were no longer the remote mountains or a quiet beach. They were a side street that had not been walked up before, or often. A woodland on the edge of town, or a route around a field. Mobilities on the margins came much closer to home. In a sense, this was an archetypal demonstration of the Scottish outdoor access rights applying to ‘everywhere’, enabling access not just to the supposedly high-value recreation assets of forests, mountains and coasts, but to the places around where people actually lived, and at a time of pandemic when access genuinely mattered. The ability to drift around cities, urban fringes and the countryside in the pandemic was underpinned by the access rights, whether or not the drifters and other access takers were aware of it specifically. In so doing, they gave expression to the access rights as a relationship with the landscape, at the same time as their own existential states of seeking exercise, well-being and so on.

The visible and invisible qualities of the access rights and pedestrian walking play a role here too. The rights are, for the most part, made present in language through law and the various guidance documents (e.g. leaflets) and webpages that exist. There are very few signs in the landscape itself—unlike in places such as England where specific and limited areas of ‘access land’ may be entered into and left. One more visible result of the outdoor access rights is that funding has been available for access schemes like local path networks in peri-urban and rural areas. These are initiatives that give people the chance to walk more easily in their local areas, while also being attractive to visitors and tourists. Prominent way-marked route networks, information panels and maps can be found in many more areas compared to some years previously. Examples in Aberdeenshire are Tarland, Ballater and Aboyne amongst others (though Aberdeen city is arguably still lacking in this regard). There is however a tension between the open-ended nature of the access rights, which promise access to the outdoors as an entirety, and the manner in which way-marked trails guide the walker through a specific route through the landscape. They provide a certainty of route, usually arriving back at the start point, and time spent on the walk. Yet, they lose the creative quality of the drift that relies on a willingness to walk without a map or signposting.

A practical result of the outdoor access regime in Scotland has been the removal of many a ‘private’ sign in countryside areas. I remember one personally: when volunteering for a community group at a popular walking area, we carried out path repair work that included the removal of a large, metal sign on a post next to a path, which had been made redundant by the rights. In some ways, this makes it hard to actively notice the access rights that now exist—replacing material ‘private’ signs and locked gates with rights that exist in law and guidance that probably few people have read. The rights have certainly affected the landscape, but through an invisibility and the removal of hinderances rather than, in most cases, actively marking out the rights. Instead, they are most clearly and visibly enunciated by the very practice of access taking itself, by people walking, riding bicycles and so on. Marking out a path on the ground, or being seen out in the streets or along the beach, means others may follow. For De Certeau, this is the ‘speech act’, the communicative act, of walking.

Future Landscapes, Future Margins

Allemansrätten in the Nordic countries is, as we have seen, practiced both as a historical tradition and as current political concern (La Mela 2020). In this volume, Nousiainen et al. reflect on how tourism mobilities in Finland enact a national version of allemansrätten but also lead to the valuing of local community practices in the face of the commercialisation of tourism. In Scotland, there have been conflicts too in the years since the outdoor access rights were introduced in 2003. As well as cases around blocked paths and locked gates, these have included landowners seeking to enforce privacy rights around their homes in the countryside, and sometimes on curtailing rights to camp in places where intensive and irresponsible camping (e.g. leaving camping gear behind after the trip) had been taking place. These issues highlight how access rights are not simply one-off pronouncements that are made in law and then set for all time, even in Scotland where there was a specific legislative process. Rather, they are the subject of ongoing negotiation both legally and in the landscape itself. They rely on a kind of landscape politics that is acted out in different arenas—along paths in woodlands and in local council meetings, as well as in national government and legal discourse. As such they are created through the body politic as much as through formal law, as Olwig (2002) discusses in relation to the history of landscape in northern Europe. There is, therefore, an openness to the future and future change that is important to recognise. This is the shift from the ‘rights of way’ approach—in which specific routes are available for use on the basis of historic practice—to a holistic landscape approach that makes no distinction between routes or value of the land, other than what is can be regarded as responsible activity by the access taker. Where a ‘regimes of mobility’ approach has been useful to gaining entry to understand the Scottish outdoor access rights as a legal system that impacts upon the landscape, we also need to recognise, with De Certeau, the tactical responsiveness of ordinary mobilities. Walkers, and other access takers, create their own futures through path making, new routines and, sometimes, new concepts of locality and marginality.

Given this openness to the future, we might consider whether lessons for ordinary mobilities and outdoor access can be found in our collective pandemic experience. Could walking during the COVID-19 lockdowns be a model for better planning of local mobilities, to the benefit of both residents and those who choose to travel to an area and experience a landscape there? During the enforced localisation of the pandemic, walkers responded by discovering new, close-by margins, finding existential and aesthetic value in what otherwise might have been very ordinary landscapes. For the majority of city dwellers, access to the urban and peri-urban landscape became important—these ‘margins’ are in many ways undervalued, not necessarily easy to access, and not widely known about (in contrast to the scenic, remote uplands for those with private transport). If we could recognise the worth of our ordinary landscapes more clearly, perhaps the divides between city and countryside, Highland and Lowland, margin and centre, would be less pronounced.

A final lesson might be to think further about an element of the Scottish access rights that, to me, has always seemed slightly painful, though no doubt legally necessary. The rights are appended in legislation with the phrase ‘and then leave’. So the access taker has extensive rights to enter and move through the outdoors landscape, but cannot stay there, even if responsible camping is usually allowed. This seems like a significant limit on what inhabitation of the land through access rights can really be. As noted, the parallel process of land reform has led to an increase in communal ownership of land in Scotland, but the access rights do cover the country as a whole. The rights are, of course, not meant to allow permanent habitation, still less undermine planning and housing laws. And yet I have tried to suggest that local accumulations of walking experience, through well-trodden routes, drifts, and nearby explorations of the margins, do constitute a kind of inhabitation in movement, not simply a passing through by people who ‘then leave’, as if never to return. This is a way of walking that might be encouraged through urban and rural landscapes much more widely.