AIBU to be fed up with walkers trespassing on our land?

[Pricelessadvice]

We have a family farm that, unfortunately, has a footpath that runs through it.
The footpath turns and goes into some woods and off our property but many people ignore the turn and just carry on around our land. This is mostly dog walkers. They then let their dog crap on our fields and just leave it. We take a crop off the land- some years a hay crop, some years beans, others wheat- but people just don’t seem to care.
I am always polite when I see someone trespassing. I ask them if they know they have left the footpath and I point them back in the direction of it. 9 people out of 10 get really arsey about it. I get all the excuses in the book- “it’s just fields/I always walk here/I can do what I want/it’s just grass/other people do it”
Ive had off lead dogs chasing my liveries horses (who have permission to ride the headlands), sheep being worried, the list goes on.

There are plenty of signs telling people where the footpath is and where it isn’t, but they get ignored.

When I try to explain to people that they wouldn’t like it if I walked my dogs in their garden every day and let them poo everywhere, they just argue that it’s not the same coz “these are fields”
SIGH
The Covid year was a bloody nightmare with people wandering everywhere.
When did people get so entitled? AIBU to think that people just think they can do whatever the hell they want nowadays?

Because it’s expensive. I have lots of farmer friends and most say that signs are routinely taken down/destroyed and some even say fences are cut through. Fencing is expensive. Also OS maps exist, it’s up to the walker not the farmer to make sure they’re in the right place.

If you absolutely don't want people straying from the path you will have to fence it.

This post gives me flashbacks to my childhood. My dad is a keen walker and would routinely direct us across what he believed were footpaths - the problem being, he had absolutely no flexibility to accept he might possibly have read the map wrong. On many occasions we'd be met by an irate farmer insisting we were off the path, and he'd insist on continuing, or we'd find a field with warnings about farm dogs/bulls and he'd insist we carried straight on. Oddly, he's terrified of dogs, so it wasn't even that he wasn't scared - but I remember constantly being really frightened a dog would come for us.

As I got older I realised this was really not normal; there was absolutely no need for it, and he was probably just misreading the map. But since covid, I think a lot of people take the same attitude. I'm not even sure signs help much - some people are just bloody minded about it.

Do you know how much fencing is? Also what if the path goes through a cropped field?

Only an idiot would think that every footpath can be fenced.

Some of the farmers near me fenced in their footpaths during covid because people though they could just wander off and have picnics and bbqs in the woods, by the streams etc. Unbelievably rude. People have definitely become more entitled and aggressive. I asked a man to put his dog on a lead because it was bothering pregnany Ewes and his response was vile. The same twats have ruined camping by rocking up with their tv's, stereos, dick head kids who kick balls at other peoples tents etc.

i never get arsey
i stick to footpaths
and i pick up after my dog

send a man out to tell them! a farmer

We often walk on the footpaths in Devon, and one particular route skirts a farm. DH is a very experienced walker/backpacker so maps are always checked before setting out to avoid wandering onto private land. On one particular occasion, we were met at the gate closest to the farm by what we believe was one of the farmer’s sheepdogs. We knew the route was through the gate, turn right along the ridge, so just carried on, and the dog trotted along beside us for about a mile and a half. As we opened the next gate, the path took us through a field of sheep, and we were a bit concerned in case the dog followed us - what if he didn’t belong to the farm and might distress the sheep? He didn’t….just waited until we had shut the gate behind us, and off he went. A quiet but vigilant companion (I suspect we were being herded in the right direction!)

Do you not have and OS map or app?

The person who called me an idiot for not fencing the path, that’s a bit uncalled for. It’s really not that simple. It’s not just a path on the edge of a field, it runs right through the property from
one side to the other, between fields, through fields, through the farm, past the farmhouse.
There are laws about the required width of footpaths so fencing paths off that run through fields isn’t as simple as you might think, particularly if you need to access both sides with a tractor and machinery, aswell as need to be able to maintain the footpath (which we do well, I might add! We keep it mowed short for walkers and cut back any hedges or bushes so that it’s always safe and clear for people coming through)

I’ve made some really good friends from the footpath! There are some fabulous local people who respect the land and I love seeing their dogs and them on a daily basis. What I don’t love is the entitled people who think they have the right to do whatever the hell they want.
I’d love to go and take my dogs to walk around and crap in their garden, see how they like it! 😂

In my job 9 times out of ten people get arsey with a simple request of ' please don't sit on the patients bed, I will get you a visitors chair'.

They have to walk past the chairs to enter the ward. Some know fine well not to sit on the bed as they've been asked not to before yet still do it.
They huff, 'oh there's me getting into trouble again'....or stomp away and get a chair or question 'why am I not allowed, the chairs aren't comfy'..
Then when you try to explain why the hand goes up to stop you talking......it happens so often, people are so rude.

We have problems with people walking through our yard (no prow) or making up their own routes across the fields, it is a little better now than it was in Covid. We find that walkers can be quite aggressive when asked to stick to the bridleway ( OH had a notable interaction with a group one Boxing Day who were nowhere near the ROW, and thought nothing of walking through the area we were shooting!)
Our main issue is with dog poo, particularly one person in the village (a former farmer) who has taught his dogs to only poo in our fields, or when walking through the village at night flicks the poo into our field with a trowel. He no longer speaks to us after we asked him to pick up after his dogs and continues to allow the field pooing which is awful when you get off a tractor into a pile of poo.

As a fellow farm worker, OP, I feel your pain- and also wonder about the solution! Permanent fencing is extortionate, and not always practical when you need gates big enough to accommodate combine harvesters and things, and you can just duck under electric fencing or push through hedging. We have a bird scarer, and that still scares the living daylights out of me when it goes off! There was even a film made about Right to Roam last year.

I've worked on farms where a family from a neighbouring housing estate encouraged their many children to chase the lambs, where people damage fencing, gates get left open by walkers, livestock gets killed by loose dogs, and we were accused of ruining EVERYTHING by putting cows in a field with a footpath in it (for 2-3 days, as they ate the grass in there quite quickly). As for dog muck, we were told that cows and sheep poo in fields, so why can't their dogs? It is frustrating when you just want what's best for your livestock and land, but we are obviously all stupid, grumpy farmers who know nothing!

So far, the only successful non-livestock-related ways of getting trespassers to leave was approaching with a Huntaway (which is trained to bark on command), with a muck-spreader (it's amazing how quickly trespassers can run when at risk of being pelted with manure!) and with my grumpy farm manager's reputation for kicking up a stink...

Oh we had the picnicking family during covid times. We even had a family cycle through our wheat crop because “the kids were just having fun”, and a young couple caught getting a little, er, excitable. They looked horrified when I loomed up behind them on a horse 😂

I have an app but sometimes the right of way isn’t clear. Sometimes the issue is that the ‘official’ path goes through the crops so you keep to the outside and end up stuck, or having to cross the crops to get the the fence or style. This isn’t often but sometimes some (and not many) land owners don’t make it clear. I think sometimes it’s because not many people walk on some of these paths and occasionally it’s to discourage walkers.

I live next to lots of land that has access through them, farmer land, I have no idea where the paths are supposed to be as they are not sign posted. I normally walk around the edge to find the next public right of way entrance.

Apart from clear, polite signs, there's not much more you can do other than fence it off.
I feel your pain though. I have farmers in the family, who breed sheep and cows on the Welsh border. There isn't a public footpath through their land, but that doesn't seem to stop them!
They do have a few pretty tough sheepdogs though, and one of those running full-pelt at you, barking at the top of it's lungs, is enough to send most people scarpering!

This is awful op. We live rurally and the amount of dog owners who let their dogs run through crops crapping everywhere never ceases to surprise me.,

I'm a dog owner, we stick to paths I'd never barge through farmer's fields.
Sadly so many are entitled and selfish.

All you can do is keep bollocking them every time you catch them at it. If you know who they are I'd even pop round and ask them if they insist on trespassing can they at least pick their dog crap up.

from being in the same boat as OP 9/10 is about right, people are unbelievably entitled. If anything being nice tends to lead to them arguing back more.

This ^ would be my advice too

Ask local PROW officer for suggestions - particularly on improving signage and making the path boundary clearer to walkers

Most townies & suburbanites are idiots, and have no idea about actual farms. They think because they live in a "naice" village, wear Hunters, & listen to The Archers occasionally that that they are countrysiders. They're not. They're just suburbanites.

YANBU. I used to live backing onto a National Park.

I remember the time DS called to me to say a couple had set up their picnic in what was effectively our front garden. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

Tbf it's the locals round here who are the biggest culprits, they seem to think as they live here it's a free for all.

This annoys me. I am a walker but I don’t have a dog. I would love to see ‘free to roam’ rules but because dog walkers let their dogs sh#t everywhere it will never happen. I don’t understand why people can’t pick up after their dogs, and I don’t understand what anyone would drop litter/leave a mess. We should all be respectful of the countryside and peoples land.

You could use fencing either side of the path but I am guessing that would cost you a fortune.

To be constructive here, and just in case, do your signs tell people what is private / where they'd be trespassing OR do they show where they can go? I hike a lot, and some trails obv go through private land, and I find it much easier to follow when the signs are frequent and are telling me where I can be, not where not to go. I think some landowners do that latter but not enough of the former so it gets confusing and stressful. Other thoughts: for fields, put up a fake 'bull may be in the field, stick to public footpath' sign; get someone visiting you to try walking through it and work out if you are actually in need of signs in some specific locations (user testing) because i think sometimes people think things are obvious which just aren't if you've never been somewhere before. assuming that a proportion of the people trespassing are doing so accidentally, those actions will at least lower the amount of it you're dealing with, if not erase it due to occasional idiots.

England represents a massive amount of land - 8% of that is still an enormous load of public-access land.

A huge proportion of the countryside is working land - where farmers grow the food that we all depend on. It makes as much sense to say that the public should be automatically free to wander through it as to say that all factories should be free to roam through.