Book Club: On The Inevitability of the Rope Swing, and How Space Becomes Place

An extract from Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, from the Right to Roam campaign.

This month’s book extract comes not from an individual, but from a collective. The Right To Roam is a group of naturalists, campaigners and artists, who since 2021 have been organising peaceful trespasses into areas of the countryside from which the public are currently excluded. One of its members, barrister Paul Powlesland, was kind enough to take me on a tour of the River Roding, near Barking, East London, last summer, and very illuminating it was too.

Last year, Bloomsbury Publishing published the campaign’s book Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, a collection of essays blending science, nature writing and indigenous philosophy, edited by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses. This extract concerns that ubiquitous mad-made landscape feature, the rope swing...

Just ask John Constable: there are spaces in nature that are so beautiful, they already seem like oil paintings. As with “desire lines”, paths forged organically by innumerable humans who all intrinsically feel the same way about getting from one place to another, there is a common understanding among us all of what constitutes a good spot, the right place for a picnic, a good nook for a snooze.

For this reason a rope swing is, and will always be, inevitable. Whether it’s by a river, or hanging over a sheer slope of a hill, if nature and climate have conspired together to create a tree whose bow offers the perfect height for a swing, at some point in time a rope swing will appear. You will most likely never know the identity of its creator, but you will know, intrinsically, what to do – a rope swing is an invitation: come over here, enjoy the spot, stay a while. But a rope swing does more than introduce swinging to a spot – it ordains it into folk custom.

A rope swing is an example of how space becomes place. A place is an area within space that has been annexed by socially constructed meaning. Fencing off an area is a relatively modern approach to designating and designing place, but for thousands of years a place has always been marked from within, not without. Whether this origin was a feature in the landscape, a grave that honours a spirit entombed beneath it, a temple that marks an earthbound portal to the celestial, or a tree whose canopy was broad enough to accommodate a congregation, once these features of a landscape have been imbued with human significance, with rituals and taboos of their own, they become place. In this way, when a rope swing appears in the countryside, it creates a new destination, and visit by visit, person by person, it becomes a place of its own; not walled by private property, but rooted by popular custom.

Rope swings can become famous. On a stretch of the River Thames between Pangbourne and Goring there are several rope swings known by locals from miles around. None of them are on the legally sanctioned Thames Path, but on the other, forbidden, bank of the river. This is not rope-swinging contrariness. It is simply because the bank opposite the Thames Path has a much steeper slope, and, covered in trees, it makes for much better swinging. The one by the “white cliffs”, a chalk escarpment cut out of a steep slope, is huge. A climbing rope extends forty or fifty feet into the canopy of the trees, where its knot can only be glimpsed in winter, when the leaves have fallen away. Whoever put this one up must have been a pro, a tree surgeon, mountain leader or caver, someone bold enough to inch up the thin, wavy trunk of a forest ash, not to mention someone comfortable enough on private ground not to get the jitters and scarper before a proper job was done. On the steep slope below, someone, maybe the same person, maybe not, has pimped the take-off, building a now half-rotten podium about three feet in the air. No sooner have you wedged its branch seat under your arse than gravity takes over, sweeps you off your toes, and out over the tops of the willows that bank the river. It’s terrifying. And exhilarating.

Swim, kayak or paddle-board up this stretch of the river on a sunny day, and whether it’s a work day or not, you are almost guaranteed to see a wide-eyed human appearing out of the green spurge, twenty feet above the river, rushing on that mild adrenaline hit at the apex of a swing. Teenagers gather there in the summer holidays, joggers and dogwalkers pause to have a go; it has become a small local theatre of experience, where relationships play out, where memories are forged, a place that becomes important not just to individuals, but to the community as a whole. It is a place that strangers share, a hearth to an invisible, numberless community.

God knows how many seats this swing has got through, but while the person who breaks it might not always be the person who fixes it, there is a collective sense of value and responsibility to its upkeep. The rope swing is like the mop whose head and handle have been replaced so many times that it is entirely different from how it first began, and, more than just an object, it represents a lineage of interested parties, who take responsibility for it. People have experienced its value, paid out in shrieks of joy and whooshes of visceral fear; in the most organic way possible, not because they are told to, but simply because they want to, they look after it. In this way, a rope swing is a haiku for the commons.

The rope swing is an assertion of belonging. It represents a shared relationship with nature that invests its users with care and overrides the construction of ownership. Its simplicity undermines the pompous and disingenuous “legal fictions” of property law, where swimming in a river constitutes an assault on the personhood of whoever owns it. And because a rope swing is not just a trespass, but an incitement to trespass, whoever puts up a rope swing has done the precise opposite of fence-building. Without any legal ownership, this tree-climbing John Bull has taken the initiative to erect a beacon that draws other locals in, operating not under common law, but under common lore. But in spite of how the law defines it, swinging is not an act of defiance against the people that claim sole dominion over not only the land, but the tree and the very air that they swing in. People do not swing as an act of political civil disobedience, they do not quote Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man while swooshing through the air, they simply use the rope swing as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which, of course, it is.

The paperback of Wild Service was published by Bloomsbury on Thursday, the 92nd anniversary of the mass trespass of Kinder Scout. Here are the contents pages:

And here, courtesy of co-editor Jon Moses, is a blurb:

“Few of us own land but does that mean we shouldn’t care for it? Wild Service is a collection of essays from the Right to Roam campaign’s cast of award-winning writers and activists, all challenging the notion that nature flourishes best when people are excluded from it. The book profiles the UK’s new generation of guerilla nature guardians; riffs on the anarchic majesty of rope swings and mountain bothies; and unveils the story of how ordinary people were separated from the land – and what it could mean to truly reconnect with it.”

You can pre-order the paperback, or buy it in other formats, from Amazon, Waterstones or Foyles now.