Posted by Peter H on December 05, 2004 at 18:37:17 from 213.122.207.29 user Peter_H.
In Reply to: Re: owner gave permission to camp here? posted by Mike Dennis on December 05, 2004 at 10:20:17:
I reckon it would take a team of lawyers several months to answer all Ed’s property queries. In the meantime, I will have a shot at the Pigeon Post situation.
It would be extremely unlikely that Mrs Tyson owned High Topps, the site of the prospecting. Land at that altitude in Cumbria is normally ‘common land’, ie it belongs to nobody, but local residents (ie farmers) have rights of grazing sheep over it. These rights are historical and traditional and complicated. Put very simply, various parts of a fell are traditionally grazed by the sheep belonging to the owners of connected lands in the valley. Common land can be accessed by the general public, so the SADs had every right to wander over High Topps (and this is why the Lakeland Fells are so accessible). However, in the UK, minerals under the ground can be owned separately from the surface land. In the case of common land, minerals under the surface would not belong to the ‘commoners’, but to whoever by historical or legal right claimed ownership. I have to admit that I do not have a clue as to who would own minerals in the Lakes, perhaps the Crown, perhaps the Earls of Lowther, perhaps the South Lakes District Council, I don’t know (half an hour’s search on the Net got me nowhere). Mining companies (of which there are several still in Cumbria) would have a long-term mining lease under which they could extract minerals and sell them, but paying a royalty to the mineral owner.
Captain Flint would have to have negotiated a mining lease in order to extract copper from the Gulch on a commercial basis. No doubt he did this, but AR did not want to clutter the text up with legalistic details. The children would not have been concerned with this. By the way, if Roger had found gold, the mine would have belonged to the Crown – all gold and silver mines in the UK do.
The woods above Tyson’s would not have been common land. They would probably have belonged to the Tysons, but might possibly have been owned by Mrs Blackett – I think that is very unlikely. If any of the surrounding land belonged to Beckfoot, it would be the fell above the house (see map in PP), perhaps on the basis that Beckfoot was once a farmhouse. More likely, Mrs Blackett had grazing rights. If the camp (ie Might-have-been) did not belong to Tysons, then technically the SADs were trespassers and were stealing wood, but the ‘offence’ would be far to slight for anyone to bother taking action.
This also applies to the miniscule amounts of copper pyrites that the children managed to extract. Technically they belonged to the mineral owner, but would have been too valueless in themselves to worry about. Their value, of course, lay in what they indicated about the existence of worthwhile deposits.
While the children, being AR’s creations, would certainly have been law-abiding, things like collecting firewood would not have seemed to them like theft, and this is understandable. Surely this is not worrying Ed? Ed - have you never been to a beach and taken a nice pebble home, or maybe a crab or something? Or collected fallen branches for a fire?