Re: No parking at all times

Mike Barnes wrote:
In alt.usage.english, Peter Moylan wrote:

Australian farmers aren't big on words. If they want to discourage
visitors, they just hang a couple of dead snakes over the fence.

Although I have, now that I think of it, seen the occasional sign
along the lines of
>> Trespassers: 0 Bull: 3

Fair enough if they're trespassers, I suppose. But the sign that
started this was aimed at law-abiding members of the British public,
using a public right of way over privately-owned farmland. I don't
know whether such rights of way exist in your country.

I've sometimes wondered that myself. We have walking tracks, of course,
but all of the "official" ones I know about run through public land.
Most people do seem to take it for granted that they can walk through
farmland, provided that they don't violate privacy by doing so close to
farm buildings and that they careful about things like not trampling
crops or frightening the horses. As a child I sometimes even picked
mushrooms on private land. I'm pretty sure, though, that this is not a
right protected by legislation, but simply something the farmers
tolerate as long as nobody's causing any trouble.

Quite often a gate between paddocks will have a sign saying "Please shut
the gate", which tends to suggest that the owner of the paddocks and
gate expect occasional wanderers.

I think there is a public right to walk alongside a river, even when
that river is running through private property. On the other hand, it's
not always obvious how to reach the river in the first place. Exploring
parts of our local river was something I enjoyed as a child, but the
only way to get to the river was through a paddock that was usually
occupied by a bad-tempered bull. The trick was to wait until the bull
was at one end of the paddock, and then do the 200-metre dash across the
other end. I imagine that the precise timing was something handed down
from generation to generation, because I never heard of anyone being
caught by the bull.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain
eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer
reliably receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses.
The optusnet address still has about 4 months of life left.
.

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