There has been coverage this week about campaigners asking for increased access to inland water. Firstly, a story about swimmers in a reservoir in the Peak District and a separate news piece regarding canoeists campaigning for the right to paddle in English rivers.

Would you break the law to go for a swim?

A quiet mountain in one of the UK’s national parks might not seem the obvious place to encounter a noisy group of protestors in just their bathing suits (flowery swim caps optional).

But hundreds of bathers from the Outdoor Swimming Society made a splash while defying civil law to go for a dip at Kinder Reservoir in the Peak District, 90 years after a mass trespass by 400 walkers helped to enshrine the Right to Roam in UK law.

This time around, the trespassers want better access to the countryside and particularly to inland bodies of water, which are often out of bounds in England because landowners don’t want swimmers on their property.

The campaigners also want to challenge outdated views about why open water swimming is not allowed in certain places in England and Wales. In Scotland, nearly all 800 reservoirs allow swimming under the 2003 Land Reform Act.

The full story in Euronews can be read here.

Canoeists make waves about right to paddle in English rivers

Canoeists are campaigning for a right to “blue spaces”, with fewer than 4% of England’s rivers open to the public. Paddlers have described being shouted at and even subjected to physical abuse for passing through some stretches of river during their exercise.

A patchwork of landowners having rights over tiny lengths of river, which makes it almost impossible to create routes for swimming and boating without land reform, campaigners have said.

Ben Seal, campaign manager at British Canoeing, said: “The law is currently unclear so we have been campaigning to get those waterways opened up so people get fair and equal access to the blue spaces around us. People don’t know if they are trespassing, they are threatened often and coerced off the river. We have a tiny percentage of area where people can freely paddle.”

There has been a large increase in the number of people wanting to use England’s rivers recreationally – membership of British Canoeing jumped from 36,500 to 93,000 in a year.

Currently, the rules about access to rivers are negotiated locally, and recreational users need landowners’ permission to pass through rivers that run through their property.

The full story in the Guardian can be read here.