Day of Access project aims to make Scotland's right to roam truly universal
The right to roam has opened up our wild spaces but there are still groups who need assistance to benefit from it, writes Roger Cox
Of all the many pieces of legislation introduced by the Scottish Parliament since it opened its doors in 1999, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003 must surely be among the best-known and best-loved. As well as making provisions for rural and crofting communities to buy land, it also enshrined in Scots law the universal right to responsible access to land in Scotland, better known as the “right to roam”, thus putting us on an equal footing with such enlightened nations as Finland (where it’s known as “jokaisenoikeus” or “everyone’s right”) and Norway and Sweden (where it’s known as “allemannsrett” and “allemansrätten” respectively, both meaning “the everyman’s right”).
When we and our Scandinavian cousins talk about access for all, though, in particular with reference to wilderness environments, how often do we stop to consider what that might look like in its most literal sense? Not just access for hearty Munro-bagging types, but access, too, for those who might struggle to get anywhere near wild land due to physical, psychological or other barriers? This is the question which first led the artist and poet Alec Finlay to embark on his Day of Access initiative.
“The idea for the project began when I was working with an artist called Chris Watson, recording fauna in the Cairngorms,” he says. “We had to drive his equipment to the top of Carn Mor in Glenshee. I got ME when I was 21, and while I’d written a lot about mountain culture I’d never been up one. Because we had to take up this equipment, though, I went along and I was sitting on top of this mountain by a Land Rover – they were all off recording – and I thought ‘this is remarkable – the tracks exist, the Land Rovers exist... but I’ve never before had this opportunity’. It meant a lot to me, and I thought ‘I want to make this happen for other people.’”
Billed as an event that would “offer ways to represent and relate to landscapes, enrich views and ensure disabled people feel that they belong in wild places”, the first Day of Access took place in 2019 and saw Finlay take a group of people with mobility difficulties up Meall Tairneachan in a Land Rover. While the pilot was a success, he soon began thinking about other groups for whom accessing wild places might also seem like an impossible dream.
“It began with vehicle access,” he says, “but then it began to be about other experiences of limit and vulnerability, and that then became very exciting – it felt that we were doing something new. We no longer just define it as a disability project. I define it personally as ‘limit and vulnerability’. That can mean people who experience chronic illness or deafness or chronic pain or domestic violence, and we’ve also started working with asylum seekers, where there are issues of belonging, and within all this there’s an enquiry into what it means to be in nature, especially wild nature.”
The core Day of Access team now includes Professor Hayden Lorimer, Chair of Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, and forager and researcher Tamara Colchester who runs Plant Listening, a community interest company based in Castle Douglas.
“As a hill runner, my own relationship with the mountains is with them as places principally to run,” says Lorimer, who was able to secure funding for Day of Access events in 2024 and 2025 via the University of Edinburgh’s ESRC Fund. “You might say that makes me an unlikely person to be involved in a project like this, but I would say the process of unlearning mobility and hyperactivity and learning more about vulnerability and limit has been really helpful. What does it mean when you can’t go as far as you might wish? What does it mean when it’s not possible for you to reach that high point that you dream of reaching?”
“Often at Day of Access events,” says Finlay, “we find that the vulnerable person, or the person with limit, has a role as a kind of guide or wisdom in the landscape in the way they see it differently. An example would be we have an almost completely blind woman who’s come to three events who lives in Braemar, and it has become a privilege to walk with her along a path and experience the landscape with her slowly.”
Colchester’s more recent work for Days of Access, meanwhile, which continues this spring, has focused on asylum seekers – not a group with physical mobility issues, but one that faces other barriers to access. “We’ve been working with refugee groups over the past year, particularly down in Dumfries and Galloway,” she says. “The idea was to create a space in which the guys in an asylum hotel could be taken into local communities, particularly farms, and meet the farmers and share stories about their own rural experiences, and also to introduce them to the landscape.
“What’s been interesting though is that because we’re doing this through a foraging lens and through slowing down, as these guys are also being introduced to the landscape of Scotland the farmers are often meeting their landscape in a very new way too. And, of course, a lot of our plants appear in lots of different countries – willow, for example, appears all over the world – so there are these wonderful points of shared experience.”
For more on Day of Access, visit www.dayofaccess.co.uk; For more on Plant Listening, including details of how to book sessions, visit www.plantlistening.com
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