Has anyone had people trespassing in your fields?

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almrc

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Well the fields I rent, One is right by the owners house then the other two span across. There's about 10 acres in all 2 fields are surrounded by lots more fields so can be a bit open. Anyway, my gate is down a lane near the main road. My vehicle was parked in the gate entrance (gate shut). I was in te bottom field and saw him clear as day clamber over the gate, walk into the field for a bit then climbed back over the gate, looked around my vehicle then went up the road. By the time i got to the road he had gone down it, my dog was barking at him!!

Then yesterday, I saw this guy walk down my neighbours field (which backs onto a foot path) climb our fence which links our two fields then start walking up the hedge of my 2 fields. Didn't have the dog today do ran over from a distance and shouted...he said he was taking a cut through?! Both of these were teenage or boys in their 20s. What can I do?

We've though of putting private property signs up but any ideas about anything we can do?
 
They were having a picnic?! My goodness. If someone's in the field I will of course shout at a distance and ask what they're doing on this private field. Think it would be bizarre not to. I only shouted across the field as I don't want to get close to them, dont know who it is!
 
I would be contacting the police and telling them of your concerns.

Just climbing over the gate then back and looking around your car. Then again the next day, is someone eyeing up the horses etc.

My local police force have notices that warn people they are being watched. These come from the countryside division. Well worth asking about them.
 
My dog discovered a couple in the long grass doing what nature intended! They were so embarrassed they were quick to leave with my haranguing following their hastily dressed backs - still makes me giggle when I saw their faces when a wet muddy springer jumped on them!!
 
A few years ago we had two New Agers with their bawling kid just show up. Opened the gate and set up with a picnic and campfire in our top field. It was a dry summer (LOL) and the grass and everything else was tinder dry.

I went in to ask them what they were doing there as it was our land; and got the stock trendy reply of "oh we don't believe in anyone 'owning' land - the countryside is there for everyone and you don't have the right to say you 'own' it", sort of thing.

So anyway, I asked them to please put the fire out as I was worried the whole place was gonna go up - the response was basically well this is how our ancestors would have cooked etc etc.

I then said OK so whereabouts do you people live (answer was somewhere in Plymouth - surprisingly they were quite specific as to where); so I said OK then so I tell you what. You've come to my place as uninvited guests, so I'll pay you a surprise visit and light up a campfire on your lawn, and drink a few cans and chuck them away, how's that?

I told them that I was going to leave them to think about it for half an hour; but that we were going to bring a tractor & trailer in as we needed to do some muckspreading and if they were still there then tough basically, they'd be getting a bit smelly.

Within the hour they'd picked up and gone :)
 
All the bleeding time. Illiterate ones, as there are 'Private, Keep out' signs everywhere that they often deny seeing. To the extent of small trees being chopped down for a campfire, or to clear the path for a tarzan swing.
 
Our fields are surrounded by a public park, which has effectively a double fence as inside the park are run-off lakes as it once was a landfill, and these are fenced off from the park proper. Our field fence boundary is barbed wire, and various sections of the field have (marked with warning signs) electric fence. At the front of the house , and our garden has a wooden fence. Variously we get dog walkers through the fields 'lost' and asking if they can walk through our back garden to get to the road - on telling them no, they should go back the way they came , onlyfor them to complain 'but we had to cross a stream/barbed wire/electric fence, we don't want to go back that way and thought this way would be much easier'

I just love saying 'Well perhaps you should have thought about that before climbing over onto private property'. I NEVER let them through the garden.

Sadly people also have climbed over the wooden fence as a short cut out of the park and then through our front garden, and often break it.
 
My dad once caught two guys picking mushrooms in one of our fields. They didn't hang around long when he sent the sheepdog after them to round them up!

Fortunately we've got neighbours who live in a static caravan and I'm sure the woman watches our fields with binoculars because she's straight on the phone the minute something seems amiss!
 
We had a little spell of kids coming in trying to pat the horsies! It stopped pretty sharpish when my two year old
discovered that humans foals make squeaky noises and run away unlike mummy who growls and tells him to bog off!! The kids very quickly stopped coming into the field once they had been chased out by a flying chestnut beast! All snakey neck and nipping teeth! Bradley thought it was great fun!
 
Now yu've got me started!!!!

Our fields back onto houses and in fairness haven't been 'occupied' until this year when we moved in. The field nearest the house is the paddock but we have an adjoining two acres at the top that we've cut for hay. When we first moved in we noticed that most the houses backing onto the field had put gates onto it. There were regular dog walkers (NEVER picked up after thair dogs) and one lovely man used to regularly have a fire.

Although I decided not to graze the top paddock I did run some electric fencing round as a second barrier in case the horses managed to get out. I ran it about 18" away from the gates and put warning signs on it but it so far hasn't been connected up. In spite of this there was one neighbour who continued cutting through and walking their dog. I've spotted them a few times but they've gone inside by the time I managed to get up there but my OH caught them in the act a couple of weeks ago as their dog cr*pped on my just cut hay (no attempt to clean it up). They turned round and said "we have permission from the owner". Mmmm, don't think so! They then said that the fence wasn't on - OH suggested that they don't attempt to touch it next week and that if they continued to let their dog do its deed on our land we'd be more than happy to return the favour with ours in their back garden. Not had any issues since :D

Fencing and lots of signs being worked on at the weekend. I'm also going to use the field for schooling/jumping over winter to demonstrate ownership. It's just one hassle I can do without.
 
My boyfriend is one of those that thinks the law of the countryside is it's ok to go into fields and picnic etc, as long as you take your rubbish. He thinks my version of the countryside law, being if it's not a public right of way you do not have permission to be on it, is rubbish! Last time we were out he wanted to climb over a gate to have a picnic. This gate was chained and locked with a padlock!

I can't see his logic! All I know is if someone came into our rented field (which is padlocked too) I would be very very cross!
 
Some men stopped and asked if the could go rabbiting at the top of my fields as the person who owns the fields above had said yes.

The only way they can get to those fields is to go through mine or through the woods above.

A few weeks later I found them in my fields walking through to get to their cars. I asked them why they were there and they said that was the only way they could go back to the cars.I told them to walk back through the woods. Told they were trespassing they repeated that they had permission to be in the neighbours fields. Hence we now have notices every where and electric fencing along the top.

On another occation one of my neigbours liveries walked her dog down the lane and through my fields, when I asked her why she was doing it she said she did not think I would mind. the livery yard down the road also backs onto the woods so I told her to not come through mine and to go through the back of the other yard.

People do think they can go anywhere they want.
 
Last winter I was up at the field by myself, it was pitch black but in the distance I could see someone walking around with a head torch on. I thought it was one of the other liveries, but as he got closer I knew it wasn't (as they would have shouted out so as not to scare me).

I quickly finished up and got in my car and started driving towards him, which is when I realised it was a man playing with his dog in the field in the dark!

I told him that this was private property and he scared the S*** out of me.

He was very apologetic and said he would leave right away!
 
Have this problem when lads go lamping through our fields. The flashing lights scare the bejeezez out of my horses. Thanks goodness we live in the middle of the country and we can see the lights more or less straight away. I open back door and yell out a few well chosen phrases in Welsh and English. Lights out!!!. Wouldn't mind if they asked for permisson I could put horses in. Still I worry incase my horses run into fencing or the stream. Got two huge GS and a lunatic JR so might join them this winter!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
We have a small river bordering our fields and the children love playing in it in the summer which I don't have a problem with as I used to as child also but last summer some older boys decided it would be a good idea to pull our post and rail fencing down to light a fire with! I was not impressed, luckily my horses are wimps and wouldn't cross the river to escape!
 
We were at the field one evening and 3 men came in with two greyhounds, we told them to get out as the horses dont all tolerate loose dogs. It wasnt until my daughters two horses chased the dogs, with the obvious intention of doing them some harm that they ran, but they were very abusive.
It was some barstewards in there lamping that spooked our old, almost blind horse when we had to have him pts.
 
All the damn time. Our fields are part of a large farm and we're lucky enough to have a huge field complete with cross country jumps adjoining the top lefthand paddocks and a grass gallops bisecting the fields. We are bordered on the right by a road and to the top and the left by Forestry Commission land - we have alot of land/private fields to hack round to the south of us too. Riders and walkers can and do have freedom to use the Forestry land (in the riders' case if they buy a permit) but we get lots of walkers and other riders using the perimeter of the big arable field (where the cross country jumps are) and some riders are cheeky enough to use the gallops between our fields. It's got to be obvious that they're on private land - they can see the barn, some of the stables, all of the fields and the manege from the gallops. Frosts my butt.

P
 
I'm afraid I spent my childhood "trespassing" in the fields behind my house....we used to build rope swings in the wood, dam the stream and use the fields as scenes for epic fantasy games :D
As I've grown older I've obviously become more aware of the fact that people actually own them and that I don't technically have any right to be there! But luckily for me, the fields were sold when I was about 11 and bought by my new neighbours. They had lived there for long enough to know that my friends and I played in the fields and that I used them as a cut through to get to the farm, and gave me permission to continue. They now rent the fields to a local livery yard and I still use them as a cut through, but with the knowledge of the woman who rents them (though she didn't originally know that I used the land). I like to think that I do my bit - I help with the ragworting and over the past few years have also alerted the YO to a horse with it's shoe caught in the fence, a horse who had somehow managed to get herself stuck between a fence and a hedge, escaped horses, and a seriously lame horse who turned out to have an abscess.
So anyway, the point of this long and rambling post is that in your shoes OP (if you haven't already) I would ask the owners of the land about it. If the young men are using the fields as a cut through it may well be that they know the owners and/ or that the owners are aware that they use the fields. It doesn't sound (certainly in the case of the one who said he was using a cut through) that they are random strangers, but that they might be locals.
In my opinion (but this might just be me) this would be a bit different to random walkers and strangers wandering through the field, so make certain that the landowners don't know them before you get too worried. Despite the fact that I have sort of been "trespassing" for the last 16 years or so, I wouldn't just wander into a random field if I didn't know the owner. I have only done this once: I recently went on a walk with my parents which we discovered by using a map with official footpaths marked on it. Most of the walk was brilliant, but the final 40 minute stretch was along a track that had become severely overgrown to the extent that it was almost impassable; there were thick patches of nettles and brambles across the path that couldn't be avoided and, as it was a very hot day, we were all in shorts and so soon ended up with severely scratched and stung legs. Obviously we had never used the footpath before so couldn't have guessed what sort of state it was in, and after about half an hour with no sign of the end of the footpath, I'm afraid we climbed over the fence into a neighbouring field and walked through that instead! I suppose I'm just trying to show that not all trespassers are deliberately tromping over private land with not a thought to the fact that it belongs to someone else! Certainly, when we found our way out of the field onto a farm track which ended in a gate onto the road, we were met with angry signs declaring that it was private property and that if we were on that side of the gate we were trespassing, so I'm sympathetic to the fact that the owners had clearly had problems with trespassers, but I'm obviously aware that there may be a good reason for those problems!
 
Just last week I had my implements and 3 heavy rubber mats pinched, found the latter covered in concrete in the woods just behind my fields in a bike jump :mad: little sods.

Last yr found a man trying to lok under my tarp covering hay who told me it was his right to roam on my property, couldnt get it through his thick head not through private property and it was clear he was on the scrounge looking through stuff so dialled 999 as a lone female with a trespasser, coppers caught up with him and gave him a good talking to that if you have to climb barb wired fences covered in private property you lose your right to roam GRRRR
 
We have it all the time, electric fencing (mains!) helps to deter them, also muzzled shetland ponies that prey on unsuspecting people are quite useful! I spend many a happy time watching my shetland 'chase' people through his field that they have used as a short cut!
 
Some of your stories are unbelievable! I can't believe some
People, your stories have been a bit of an eye opener. There's def no foot path, no right of way and no one that the land owners know that's for sure. I'm going to out up private no entry signs or something. My friend suggested putting some barbed wire up on the gate (the horses go nonwhere near this) but isn't this a bit dodgy or is it allowed? My concern is being a young (ish-haha) girl up there sometimes on my own in the dark as you say and you meet a stranger in your field, may not be good!
 
Let your landowner know if he takes no steps to stop it he can end up with a neighbour claiming a right of way over his land. He should not tolerate it at all.
 
OH and I were once checking the sheep just after lambs were going out, when we met a woman walking across the field with 3 dogs off the lead (there's no right of way in that field). Our sheepdog jumped off the bike and ran up to her dogs, at which point she shouted out in an angry voice 'is your dog wormed and vaccinated!? If not please call it back! I don't want mine to catch anything!!'

OH stared in disbelief for a few seconds then drove over and said v quietly and calmly 'The only things your dogs will catch here is a bullet, unless you put them on leads and F off within 30 seconds'

3 dogs running round in a field of new lambs!! And she had the cheek to be angry with us!

Some people...
 
Although I am in sympathy with people who suffer abuse and damage by trespassers, are families enjoying a picnic who clear up after themselves, or considerate dogwalkers, or people taking a quick & harmless shortcut really such a problem?
I appreciate that there are those who abuse the rights of others but what a shame for people who have limited access to the countryside and who are only able to access crowded parks etc. more tolerance would probably be better all round.
 
Quick and harmless shortcuts can eventually end up being rights of way if you arent careful, which can devalue your property and or make it harder to sell.
Dog walkers leaving crap behind or dogs off lead in your field of livestock is a nuisance.
Picnic-ers in my fields have tended to leave rubbish behind, cut trees down and light fires. In my wood, complete fire hazard.
Ive caught people messing about with livestock.

So basically, yes, they are a problem. No, I have no sympathy and no tolerance for trespassers anymore. If they want to roam around in the countryside Id prefer they did it somewhere else tbh, where they are allowed to go and arent trespassing.
 
Siennamum - would you like it if someone turned up in your garden to have a picnic? Just because someone has a field it is still their property and shouldn't have to put up with people entering without permission.
 
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