As Americans, I think we're used to the idea that land can be owned, whether it's a beach

front or, say, a streambed, and if you own the land, you can just, for example, build

on it, or sell its water rights, or you can keep other people from ever accessing it.

We just accept it as the way that things naturally work.

Like a lot of our laws, we inherited this way of looking at land ownership from England.

When I went there, I found that a growing group of people are thinking about ownership

of land and access to land, very differently than Americans are.

And they're thinking that, well, property might belong to somebody.

It doesn't mean other people shouldn't be able to walk on it or picnic or camp on it.

It's a vision of land and the outdoors that's so radically different from ours, that I had

to go see it for myself.

My name is Brooke Jarvis, and I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.

This week's Sunday read is about a group of English activists who are pushing for more

rights to explore England's natural spaces.

One way these activists do this is through mass trespasses, which are actually a kind of

protest that dates back more than a century.

They're pushing for something that a lot of other European countries already have, a

right to roam.

I went to England this past spring, where I joined two of these events.

One was at the Kinder Reservoir in the Peac District near Manchester.

The lies underneath a tall plateau of Moreland called Kinder Scout, which is where one

of the most famous trespasses of the 1930s happened.

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