Stuart Maconie's message to the Save Lakeland's Forests rally in Grizedale on Sunday 30th January
"The reason I can’t be with you today in person is that I'm making a series of programmes called Ramblings for Radio 4, which celebrate the beauty and colour and diversity of our British landscape. That beauty belongs to all of us.
"That is just one of the reasons I am so opposed to this petty, shortsighted and unjust plan. The reason that this government, that any government, should not be allowed to sell off our forests is that it is not theirs to sell.
"Over the last few years we who love the countryside in all it's forms have seen a new spring come to the land in the form of Open Access legislation, making great tracts of their own country available to the people to explore and enjoy.
"These new proposals will turn back the clock to a dark winter before that welcome and overdue thaw, a winter of fenced off land, keep out notices, barbed wire and barred gates. For even the most enlightened private landlord - and there are some - who perhaps tolerates walkers will be able to banish them, from Whinlatter and Mitredale and the lovely forest around you now, on a whim. It is a chilling thought.
"Some things are worth more than money. You cannot put a price on the joy and the riches that these beautiful, mysterious, verdant, secret, proud and historic places can bring.
"Freedoms hard won should not be relinquished without a fight. If they want that fight, they can have it.
"As G K Cheterton said 'Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget. That we are the people of England. And we have not spoken yet'."
