Hi . Bryniau is Welsh for hill. We're quite fortunate in Wales that the vast majority of ancient place names still exist. They inform you of who and why the places are named. For example, which daughter of a local chief was killed during a raid by .... ect. Nice programme. Heddwch... Peace from the Cymru.
Walking paths through both public and private lands is a beautiful tradition-so glad it survives. Some cities in the U.S. have long trails but they are paved. This path is gorgeous.
Came to watch after Paul's introduction to you & enjoying your work--"gentle" came to mind--a nice pace (matches a grey morning here in the Puget Sound area in US) & nice mix of spoken & sights & birds! Thank you!
So glad this was recommended to me - I love a cross-country ramble, and always wonder about the history of the landscape / try to divine it from what little I know about looking at earthworks etc. This was a comforting and fascinating watch ⭐️
You ought to come and have a look round and explain some of the countryside on this side of the Dane Law, many of us up North would be fascinated! Perhaps it doesn't fit your channel remit due to lack of charters.
"Enedburn" is interesting because the Dutch word for duck is "eend", pronounced phonetically as "aind". Every so often I catch something that tells me that old English and Dutch were once very much closer than they are now.
I finally figured it out. Saxons come from what is now the Netherlands. They weren't just closer. They used to speak the same language. Saxons were basically proto-Vikings.
To read the landscape as one passes over it is one of the great pleasures of life. So many just walk blindly by, paying scant attention to where they are beyond some rolling vista they read about and drove to using sat nav, and not looking at the map to find the route and what lies to the side of their journey. It is there for all of us to enjoy, and I hope your videos plant a seed in some who have yet to discover the delights. Walking boots are cheap in real terms, and a small day backpack will suffice. Turn off your mobile 'phone, put it away at the bottom of your haversack and just enjoy being out and reading the fields and ditches, the hedges and the copse and spiinney, the rivers and streams, and just soak up what so many generations of our ancestors did. If you are in a town or city, switch to reading the architecture, especially if it is an ancient one, or has an old cathedral. Read the history of the buildings and see how they have changed; where different stone or brick has been used; where windows have been closed up, and just enjoy wondering how and why, and by whom it was done. Thank you for the video, and I shall now seek out more. Have a very happy 2025, and I urge one and all to get out sans tech, and just enjoy being in the real, and not some pseudo, digital one. Don't spend your time taking picture after picture, just take memories and recall them on some dark and snow-swept winter's night with a glass of port at your side, and the dog curled up in front of the fire.
I was considering something similar the other day, that because the roads I use all go around the river Pangbourne it meant I didn’t know it existed. Well I knew it existed but didn’t know it went as far west as it does. Nor did I know there was an ancient ridgeway going around it because modern engineering allows us to have roads that go direct from one place to another. Technology coincides with how we think about the world.
@@AllotmentFox Your lasat sentence rather sadly sums up how many now live. A sat nav showing you little more than the way to get from A to B, with little shown beyond the route - no ancient monuments or buildings of note as you may well see if you spread out your map and consider your route carefully. As a [now former] Scout leader specialising in navigations I will always use maps, and showed my charges how not just to to read them, but how to understand them. I still get some coming up to me from time to time when they are visiting the village and chatting with me about what they have found as a result of my teaching and my enthusiasm. We even have two who are now full ML qualified, which is rather wonderful. May I use your final sentence at some point in my writings for the local parish magazine?
Fascinating. The internet is really limited when it comes to looking for earliest sources of place names. But you seem quite knowledgeable on the subject. Saxons had variations on Hoo though, and How... it's not unlikely some kind of variation of that sort
Hi Witch, the best internet-based source is at epns.nottingham.ac.uk but you have to know your 1930s parishes to find anything: very often the things you are looking for have changed parish. But Hampshire hasn’t been published on EPNS and Haughurst is in Hampshire. I did see on an 1800s map references to Hawkhurst there so I was probably wrong in my interpretation, again showing the pitfalls of not looking at the oldest references you can find. Hoo and How come from ‘hoh’ which is a heel shaped hill. It is an enigmatic word.
@@AllotmentFox thank you. This is the danger of interpreting and ancient site isn't it. Lots of Hootons round here.. very anglo saxon. I actually like the mix of saxon, norse, and French you get.
In dutch you have a word 'Horst'. Meaning: 1. In marshy areas, a higher ground mostly with wood/trees. 2. An Eagelsnest If I look at an old dictionary from 1924, it also mention the higher ground as being sandy and for common use. In german also -Horst- meaning a group of trees and also a birdsnest.
Hooper is doing the trick again. I think the margin of error/weighting, whatever we call it, has to be increased on those woodland edge hedges, which have been subjected to a different pressure. They’re growing out at a faster rate than a hedge in open fields. I think you got close enough to date this to the charter.
The hedge didn’t reflect the wood, thpugh it had the species. Holly was dominant and the oaks smaller than the ones in the wood. The result is what it is and I’m thrilled with it. I don’t think any of the trees apart from the holly was planted. I have one more hagan to go but I don’t think I will be as lucky this time
Another nice vid. Hooper's rule isn't actually a rule except that it is a 'rule of thumb' - an indication of age. Works a bit like ancient woodland indicator plant (and tree) species - you gotta have context. Things like your wood bank. BUT whilst hedges do accumulate woody species over time, the number of species in a hedge can be limited by soil type, elevation, drainage and source of species. Also the genesis of the hedge matters. Was your hedge planted - for instance an enclosure hedge where it was important to get a stock-proof barrier as soon as poss? Barbed wire dates from (from memory) the 1860s so an enclosure hedge would have been entirely quickthorn. Or was your hedge a result of assarting with the actual hedge being laid from trees that were along the edge to which the assart was cleared - ie they were already there in a woodland and they laid the trees along the new field edge. Or maybe your hedge was never deliberately planted but arose from cutting whatever grew up on a boundary bank when it was created. Not all hedges were planted, many arose from just cutting whatever grew up as raising the plants to create your hedge would have been expensive of time and effort. Wood banks. The ditch was on the outside because the objective was to keep grazing stock out of your valuable woodland. Ownership extended to the outside of the ditch - the boundary bank being created by digging and re-digging and re-re-digging the ditch. Big banks tend to be old. Because they were either important enough to be worth a lot of effort in creating (parish boundaries, estate boundaries and county boundaries) or the ditch was re-dug many times. 'Big' doesn't mean 'high'. May just be wide. BEWARE: Was your hedge planted since the early '80s for amenity reasons or for nature conservation reasons as a deliberate pastiche of an old (Hooper's thingy) hedge? Rhododendron is a non-native recently introduced and can be invasive. It is also cyanogenic so very few species can eat it. Not sure whether it's 'pukka' to include it and things like snowberry in a 'Hooper's' calculation. Sweet chestnut is allowable as its an archaeophyte. Holly would have been used in hedges if it self-seeded. It does well as a shrub or sub-canopy if there is heavy deer browsing. I was told years ago that in some areas it was deliberately planted as a marker for where a field drain exited into a hedge-bottom drain. Beech was often planted as a hedge tree relatively recently and 'pleached' beeches can be found in areas of Devon and Somerset and in Surrey around Leith Hill on the Greensand. BUT a beech-dominated hedge with massive pleached trees may have arisen from an adjacent beech woodland which has now gone. Saxons did things like plant whitebeams away from the chalk as marker trees in a woodland where they wouldn't be naturally. It's not simple...... 'Pleached' trees may not actually have been laid. They may arise from a hedge being repeatedly re-cut and horizontal branches not getting cut......
The consensus on the word hagan is that it is a game enclosure and that enclosure boundary is animal proof. Hagan with the help of hæge and the French haie becomes hedge, haw, haugh and hay and the purpose in the Saxon and Medieval period is to keep animals in. You can see from the footage it is older than the 80s but obviously none of the trees go back to the 1200s, but as I understand it Hooper gets that. I think of beeches as being trees but of course they make good hedge plants but I didn’t realise they could be stock-proof. I didn’t see any hawthorn or blackthorn. A very interesting comment and helpful, thank you.
You're not paying a great deal of attention to your microphone in this episode. But thank you for the information that I did not know previously. eg. A burb near mine, of Bexley, Syd., AU, is called Hurstville, and funnily enough has Forest Rd running through it, and we're also not far from Kingsgrove! Bugger me backwards if we've had Saxons or their like in Australia, but the nomenclature has seemingly (obviously?) followed we Brits worldwide.
It is curious how placenames travel with colonists, I give American place names quite a bit of thought because you can trace who is migrating where and from whence. There aren’t many villes in England though, though many hursts. It may have come to you via the states. I have a copy of Ekwall’s Dictionary of English Placenames with me at all times: does Australia-without plunging into your own culture wars-have such a thing with Native Australian place names, meanings, etc?
@@AllotmentFox Not much evidence I've seen of any US influence in any place names that I know of. But they would be displaced-European names anyway, in the most. Maybe the ville tacked on to the end of names is a Victorian or late-Georgian thing? We have plenty of (bastardised) Indigenous names around Aust. also. Though if a place has specific Indigenous importance there's a fair number that have had their white-fella names being replaced for the original. The desert stretch between Adelaide and Perth sounds Aboriginal - Nullabour (I think a throwing stick might be a Nulla); but I dare say it's more descriptive Latin typical, like biology is. Null Arbour No Trees
Ooh I got “there”. I knew uti meant out in some way but didn’t say it for sone reason. If the best fruit is outside the garden does that mean civilisation is not all it is cracked up to be?
😂@@AllotmentFox well that was very philosophical! If I tell you that "å" is pronounced like oa in "boat", and "ä" is pronounced like e in "bed"...,? Växa is grow ( the moon waxes..) Have another go 😊
Google translate says (I tried and then looked it up): outside our garden there bilberries grow. Hence my philosophising over civilisation and cultivation of the best fruit. Did it mistranslate?
Rhodies are Victorian escapees, although a garden center owner friend of mine said they did exist in Britain before the last great glaciation. Personally I can't stand them, they kill off native plants. The deadline for having Rights of Way recorded in England/Wales (which was 2031, I think) has been extended indefinately as the UK Government has recognised that Councils simply don't have any money to send staff off walking around country lanes. This sounds ostensibly like good news but it also means there wil not be any attempts to update the 'definative' map and thus no new ones will be recorded ....
You do see great big village disputes where people try and establish new footpaths and you can read them on council websites, blow by blow. They are quite funny. So considering the footpaths are already officially recorded onnofficial local government maps and there is a process to update them when disputes arise, what was the point of this deadline? Incidentally the last two I looked at were additions rather than encroachments by landowners so it may be we are seeing democracy in action
@AllotmentFox Deadlines tend to set wheels (and boots) in motion. The Farmers Union say that any extension to the deadline, and thus increase in the Rights of Way simply makes the land less productive and leaves farmers in limbo as to what land they can use. In practice it usually means block the access and see if anybody complains. This of course doesn't mean all farmers do this ...
@ yes but the rights of way are already updated. If the way is blocked, complain to the council and they enforce. If the way is still blocked by the deadline it doesn’t mean the footpath doesn’t exist. What does the deadline do that is in any way useful? My suspicion is centralisation and therefore doubling records. Have a look at your own council website and look at the work put in reviewing and updating PROWs
@AllotmentFox It's a none issue in Scotland due to RtR. There are still Rights of Way but in practice they've been superseded by RtR. The landowner would have to give you a very significant reason not to be there, walking or camping Essentially the boots on the other foot ... it doesn't mean access isn't sometimes blocked. I've known manure heaps to suddenly straddle paths that have been used for years and barbed wire to appear across them (which is usually cut pretty quickly). Most farmers just smile (grimace) and wave as long as you're not damaging anything or look dodgy. It's cheaper in the long run to put in a gate and leave a clear path than have to deal with broken fences and damaged crops. I've got some sympathy for farmers who do suffer damage with over usage of a site ( The Devil's Pulpit would be a good local example to me ) as it also damages the natural eco-system but nature always wins in the end ... with or without human beings.
Hi . Bryniau is Welsh for hill. We're quite fortunate in Wales that the vast majority of ancient place names still exist. They inform you of who and why the places are named. For example, which daughter of a local chief was killed during a raid by .... ect. Nice programme. Heddwch... Peace from the Cymru.
Indeed, the anglicised version of the Cymraeg word for valley;”cwm” can be seen in the old English place names “combe”
Just love the longer videos, shorter one are great but the longer ones allows me to drift into the Anglo Saxon era for a short while!
If I need to sleep I just put on the Rest Is History and drift off.
I'm in Newbury. Love wandering around the ancient villages in our part of Mercia/Wessex. Glad I found you.
Walking paths through both public and private lands is a beautiful tradition-so glad it survives. Some cities in the U.S. have long trails but they are paved. This path is gorgeous.
They are everywhere here but they often disappeared in deer parks, no doubt from presssure from the big house
Exactly what we did, we trecked from Blewbury to Lowbury Hill and back (Oxfordshire) - Always good fun.
Came to watch after Paul's introduction to you & enjoying your work--"gentle" came to mind--a nice pace (matches a grey morning here in the Puget Sound area in US) & nice mix of spoken & sights & birds! Thank you!
Thanks, Sus. I don’t suppose anyone ever said it the way I say it, they are only really property deeds.
Very Interesting, It's almost mind boggling but great to understand that link to the past
So glad this was recommended to me - I love a cross-country ramble, and always wonder about the history of the landscape / try to divine it from what little I know about looking at earthworks etc. This was a comforting and fascinating watch ⭐️
You ought to come and have a look round and explain some of the countryside on this side of the Dane Law, many of us up North would be fascinated! Perhaps it doesn't fit your channel remit due to lack of charters.
There’s one near Hull I was interested in. There’s a lot of Danish and Norwegian but I’m sure I’d adapt
"Enedburn" is interesting because the Dutch word for duck is "eend", pronounced phonetically as "aind". Every so often I catch something that tells me that old English and Dutch were once very much closer than they are now.
"And" in Swedish 😊
I finally figured it out. Saxons come from what is now the Netherlands. They weren't just closer. They used to speak the same language. Saxons were basically proto-Vikings.
To read the landscape as one passes over it is one of the great pleasures of life. So many just walk blindly by, paying scant attention to where they are beyond some rolling vista they read about and drove to using sat nav, and not looking at the map to find the route and what lies to the side of their journey. It is there for all of us to enjoy, and I hope your videos plant a seed in some who have yet to discover the delights.
Walking boots are cheap in real terms, and a small day backpack will suffice. Turn off your mobile 'phone, put it away at the bottom of your haversack and just enjoy being out and reading the fields and ditches, the hedges and the copse and spiinney, the rivers and streams, and just soak up what so many generations of our ancestors did.
If you are in a town or city, switch to reading the architecture, especially if it is an ancient one, or has an old cathedral. Read the history of the buildings and see how they have changed; where different stone or brick has been used; where windows have been closed up, and just enjoy wondering how and why, and by whom it was done.
Thank you for the video, and I shall now seek out more.
Have a very happy 2025, and I urge one and all to get out sans tech, and just enjoy being in the real, and not some pseudo, digital one. Don't spend your time taking picture after picture, just take memories and recall them on some dark and snow-swept winter's night with a glass of port at your side, and the dog curled up in front of the fire.
I was considering something similar the other day, that because the roads I use all go around the river Pangbourne it meant I didn’t know it existed. Well I knew it existed but didn’t know it went as far west as it does. Nor did I know there was an ancient ridgeway going around it because modern engineering allows us to have roads that go direct from one place to another. Technology coincides with how we think about the world.
@@AllotmentFox Your lasat sentence rather sadly sums up how many now live. A sat nav showing you little more than the way to get from A to B, with little shown beyond the route - no ancient monuments or buildings of note as you may well see if you spread out your map and consider your route carefully.
As a [now former] Scout leader specialising in navigations I will always use maps, and showed my charges how not just to to read them, but how to understand them. I still get some coming up to me from time to time when they are visiting the village and chatting with me about what they have found as a result of my teaching and my enthusiasm. We even have two who are now full ML qualified, which is rather wonderful.
May I use your final sentence at some point in my writings for the local parish magazine?
@@pleatedskirt18 yes you may
Incredibly interesting thank you ❤
Love the saxon talk
Fascinating. The internet is really limited when it comes to looking for earliest sources of place names. But you seem quite knowledgeable on the subject. Saxons had variations on Hoo though, and How... it's not unlikely some kind of variation of that sort
Hi Witch, the best internet-based source is at epns.nottingham.ac.uk but you have to know your 1930s parishes to find anything: very often the things you are looking for have changed parish. But Hampshire hasn’t been published on EPNS and Haughurst is in Hampshire. I did see on an 1800s map references to Hawkhurst there so I was probably wrong in my interpretation, again showing the pitfalls of not looking at the oldest references you can find. Hoo and How come from ‘hoh’ which is a heel shaped hill. It is an enigmatic word.
@@AllotmentFox thank you. This is the danger of interpreting and ancient site isn't it. Lots of Hootons round here.. very anglo saxon. I actually like the mix of saxon, norse, and French you get.
In dutch you have a word 'Horst'.
Meaning:
1. In marshy areas, a higher ground mostly with wood/trees.
2. An Eagelsnest
If I look at an old dictionary from 1924, it also mention the higher ground as being sandy and for common use.
In german also -Horst- meaning a group of trees and also a birdsnest.
That’s interesting. Some old English place names have the word “hurst” in them. It means “a wooded lake” I believe
Hooper is doing the trick again. I think the margin of error/weighting, whatever we call it, has to be increased on those woodland edge hedges, which have been subjected to a different pressure. They’re growing out at a faster rate than a hedge in open fields. I think you got close enough to date this to the charter.
The hedge didn’t reflect the wood, thpugh it had the species. Holly was dominant and the oaks smaller than the ones in the wood. The result is what it is and I’m thrilled with it. I don’t think any of the trees apart from the holly was planted. I have one more hagan to go but I don’t think I will be as lucky this time
Another nice vid.
Hooper's rule isn't actually a rule except that it is a 'rule of thumb' - an indication of age. Works a bit like ancient woodland indicator plant (and tree) species - you gotta have context. Things like your wood bank. BUT whilst hedges do accumulate woody species over time, the number of species in a hedge can be limited by soil type, elevation, drainage and source of species. Also the genesis of the hedge matters. Was your hedge planted - for instance an enclosure hedge where it was important to get a stock-proof barrier as soon as poss? Barbed wire dates from (from memory) the 1860s so an enclosure hedge would have been entirely quickthorn. Or was your hedge a result of assarting with the actual hedge being laid from trees that were along the edge to which the assart was cleared - ie they were already there in a woodland and they laid the trees along the new field edge. Or maybe your hedge was never deliberately planted but arose from cutting whatever grew up on a boundary bank when it was created. Not all hedges were planted, many arose from just cutting whatever grew up as raising the plants to create your hedge would have been expensive of time and effort.
Wood banks. The ditch was on the outside because the objective was to keep grazing stock out of your valuable woodland. Ownership extended to the outside of the ditch - the boundary bank being created by digging and re-digging and re-re-digging the ditch. Big banks tend to be old. Because they were either important enough to be worth a lot of effort in creating (parish boundaries, estate boundaries and county boundaries) or the ditch was re-dug many times. 'Big' doesn't mean 'high'. May just be wide.
BEWARE: Was your hedge planted since the early '80s for amenity reasons or for nature conservation reasons as a deliberate pastiche of an old (Hooper's thingy) hedge?
Rhododendron is a non-native recently introduced and can be invasive. It is also cyanogenic so very few species can eat it. Not sure whether it's 'pukka' to include it and things like snowberry in a 'Hooper's' calculation. Sweet chestnut is allowable as its an archaeophyte.
Holly would have been used in hedges if it self-seeded. It does well as a shrub or sub-canopy if there is heavy deer browsing. I was told years ago that in some areas it was deliberately planted as a marker for where a field drain exited into a hedge-bottom drain.
Beech was often planted as a hedge tree relatively recently and 'pleached' beeches can be found in areas of Devon and Somerset and in Surrey around Leith Hill on the Greensand. BUT a beech-dominated hedge with massive pleached trees may have arisen from an adjacent beech woodland which has now gone. Saxons did things like plant whitebeams away from the chalk as marker trees in a woodland where they wouldn't be naturally. It's not simple......
'Pleached' trees may not actually have been laid. They may arise from a hedge being repeatedly re-cut and horizontal branches not getting cut......
The consensus on the word hagan is that it is a game enclosure and that enclosure boundary is animal proof. Hagan with the help of hæge and the French haie becomes hedge, haw, haugh and hay and the purpose in the Saxon and Medieval period is to keep animals in. You can see from the footage it is older than the 80s but obviously none of the trees go back to the 1200s, but as I understand it Hooper gets that.
I think of beeches as being trees but of course they make good hedge plants but I didn’t realise they could be stock-proof.
I didn’t see any hawthorn or blackthorn.
A very interesting comment and helpful, thank you.
You're not paying a great deal of attention to your microphone in this episode.
But thank you for the information that I did not know previously.
eg. A burb near mine, of Bexley, Syd., AU, is called Hurstville, and funnily enough has Forest Rd running through it, and we're also not far from Kingsgrove!
Bugger me backwards if we've had Saxons or their like in Australia, but the nomenclature has seemingly (obviously?) followed we Brits worldwide.
It is curious how placenames travel with colonists, I give American place names quite a bit of thought because you can trace who is migrating where and from whence. There aren’t many villes in England though, though many hursts. It may have come to you via the states. I have a copy of Ekwall’s Dictionary of English Placenames with me at all times: does Australia-without plunging into your own culture wars-have such a thing with Native Australian place names, meanings, etc?
@@AllotmentFox
Not much evidence I've seen of any US influence in any place names that I know of. But they would be displaced-European names anyway, in the most.
Maybe the ville tacked on to the end of names is a Victorian or late-Georgian thing?
We have plenty of (bastardised) Indigenous names around Aust. also. Though if a place has specific Indigenous importance there's a fair number that have had their white-fella names being replaced for the original.
The desert stretch between Adelaide and Perth sounds Aboriginal - Nullabour (I think a throwing stick might be a Nulla); but I dare say it's more descriptive Latin typical, like biology is.
Null Arbour
No Trees
I live in Sweden. Any animal enclosure is called "hage" in swedish.
There is a folk song "Uti vår hage där växer blåbär", can you guess what it means?
Is dar “there” and vaxer “cow”? No is the answer. Now Im googling it
Ooh I got “there”. I knew uti meant out in some way but didn’t say it for sone reason. If the best fruit is outside the garden does that mean civilisation is not all it is cracked up to be?
😂@@AllotmentFox well that was very philosophical!
If I tell you that "å" is pronounced like oa in "boat", and "ä" is pronounced like e in "bed"...,? Växa is grow ( the moon waxes..) Have another go 😊
Google translate says (I tried and then looked it up): outside our garden there bilberries grow. Hence my philosophising over civilisation and cultivation of the best fruit. Did it mistranslate?
Not really, but a little bit.
It means "out in our "hage" blueberries grow."
Uti = out in.
15.00
Love you ❤
No frisian word like hurst/horst, probably because we always lived near the sea.
Berkshire 'gods own'. Harrumph. former Yorkshire person, though I was actually born in Berks.
It is offensive but true
Rhodies are Victorian escapees, although a garden center owner friend of mine said they did exist in Britain before the last great glaciation. Personally I can't stand them, they kill off native plants.
The deadline for having Rights of Way recorded in England/Wales (which was 2031, I think) has been extended indefinately as the UK Government has recognised that Councils simply don't have any money to send staff off walking around country lanes. This sounds ostensibly like good news but it also means there wil not be any attempts to update the 'definative' map and thus no new ones will be recorded ....
You do see great big village disputes where people try and establish new footpaths and you can read them on council websites, blow by blow. They are quite funny. So considering the footpaths are already officially recorded onnofficial local government maps and there is a process to update them when disputes arise, what was the point of this deadline? Incidentally the last two I looked at were additions rather than encroachments by landowners so it may be we are seeing democracy in action
@AllotmentFox Deadlines tend to set wheels (and boots) in motion. The Farmers Union say that any extension to the deadline, and thus increase in the Rights of Way simply makes the land less productive and leaves farmers in limbo as to what land they can use. In practice it usually means block the access and see if anybody complains. This of course doesn't mean all farmers do this ...
@ yes but the rights of way are already updated. If the way is blocked, complain to the council and they enforce. If the way is still blocked by the deadline it doesn’t mean the footpath doesn’t exist. What does the deadline do that is in any way useful? My suspicion is centralisation and therefore doubling records. Have a look at your own council website and look at the work put in reviewing and updating PROWs
@AllotmentFox It's a none issue in Scotland due to RtR. There are still Rights of Way but in practice they've been superseded by RtR. The landowner would have to give you a very significant reason not to be there, walking or camping Essentially the boots on the other foot ... it doesn't mean access isn't sometimes blocked. I've known manure heaps to suddenly straddle paths that have been used for years and barbed wire to appear across them (which is usually cut pretty quickly). Most farmers just smile (grimace) and wave as long as you're not damaging anything or look dodgy. It's cheaper in the long run to put in a gate and leave a clear path than have to deal with broken fences and damaged crops. I've got some sympathy for farmers who do suffer damage with over usage of a site ( The Devil's Pulpit would be a good local example to me ) as it also damages the natural eco-system but nature always wins in the end ... with or without human beings.
If there is a crop in the field I expect the PROWs would reassert themselves I expect