On a blustery summer day in Oxfordshire, Nick Hayes began trespassing in Lord and Lady Rotherwick’s estate of Cornbury Park. Setting out on a short stretch of public footpath through fields and wooded canopies from the tiny village of Finstock, it wasn’t long before the 38-year-old illustrator veered towards the depths of Wychwood Forest, and on to private land.
Hayes looked like every groundskeeper’s nightmare: burly, bearded and bedecked in red Adidas tracksuit bottoms and a torn black T-shirt. Two fresh cuts on his upper arm glistened after a scramble over barbed wire. Yet his intention was not to poach, vandalise or rave. Hayes was retracing one of the trespasses he describes in his latest work, The Book of Trespass, to demonstrate the injustice of England’s land laws.
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