Taking the Brunt

Mr Brunt has angered the ramblers, which tends to make me like him a bit.

A millionaire farmer who sparked national outrage when he put up a 300ft metal fence in the middle of a beautiful ancient meadow has told walkers ‘they bring it on themselves’.

Defiant landowner Alun Brunt, 73, said Somerset’s Iron Wall would not be coming down any time soon because it ‘does the job’ in Rodden Meadow, Frome.

Nature activists slammed him as selfish for closing off the field to the wider public almost a decade ago but this week Mr Brunt was adamant he had done the right thing.

They criticised him for turning a ‘beautiful park into something resembling East Germany’.

Yet Mr Brunt told MailOnline: ‘They make it bad for themselves. They think they can do what they can on your land.’

He has a point. Many, many years ago, a friend lived in a house where the driveway was a part of a footpath. We would be in his garage working on bikes when people would just wander up and take a good look at what we were doing. That they were walking on private land poking about in someone else’s business didn’t seem to bother them.

You could argue that if you have a property that is on a footpath, then that comes with the territory, which is what my friend’s family accepted. Personally, it would piss me off and I wouldn’t buy a place that allowed complete strangers to walk in my garden, but that’s just me – I’m an antisocial bugger.

Mr Brunt does have a point here.

‘People were using [the meadow] as a 30-acre footpath – riding motorbikes, dogs, everything was out there.

‘I thought, ”I’ve got to restrict the people to the footpath.”

‘They wouldn’t want me to walk on their gardens and lawns would they?

‘I bought the field and if I wanted to put cattle out there, I couldn’t because there were so many dogs out there.

‘It had to be under control.’

Mr Brunt said since the fence went up he has used the field for cattle and to make hay for horses.

He added: ‘We don’t want dog poo in hay.

‘A footpath is not a green space. That’s why I did it.

‘You speak to a lot of landowners with a footpath through their fields and it’s a big problem.’

Quite so. If a path crosses arable or grazing land, then that should be respected, but all too often isn’t, hence the friction between landowners and the right to roam crowd.

Right to Roam’s Jon Moses told MailOnline that Mr Brunt had turned ‘a beautiful park into something resembling East Germany‘.

He said: ‘People in Frome were using the field beyond the footpath for many years.

‘It’s his property but that’s not the same as exclusivity.

Actually, that is precisely what it is. That is what property rights means. Brunt has to allow people to use the footpath. He does not have to allow them to ruin his grazing land or trample all over his hay.  His solution is a perfectly reasonable compromise. If Moses thinks differently, he can always put in an offer to buy the land? No? well too bad, you just have to live with the fence, then.