Nick Hayes is the author of The Rime of the Modern Mariner, an updating of Coleridge’s famous poem, and the visual biography Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl Ballads, both of which are among the most highly regarded of recent British long-form comics. But it offers a sharp-eyed, muddy-booted guide to the process that left the English “simultaneously hedged out of their land and hemmed into a new ideology”. The basic thesis is this – that our private property laws in England are designed to exclude us from the land to which we once had a right and should have a right again. Originally a royal hunting ground listed in the Domesday Book, Cornbury’s 5,000 acres of ancient forest and farmland and its 16th-century manor house are today a green and pleasant land of private profit.

By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, Nick Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land. In this part polemic, part wanderer’s journal, part history lesson, Hayes organises chapters loosely around particular trespasses he has committed, exploring the history of the land he seeks to access, the beauty of nature and the way words and laws are used to guard land that, arguably, should be common land. Counter to this, of course, there is another philosophy, one that says that you don’t leave this world with anything in your pockets, and you don’t come into it with anything in them, either. There’s constant stream of fury over historical injustices – with no context or attempt to understand why societies thought or behaved that way in the past. However, he does finish with a note of positivity for the future, looking at other models of land rights.Shockingly, Nick Hayes’s book about the “cult of exclusion” that keeps people in England off our land shows that recent statutes really do make some kinds of trespass criminal.

It ends on an optimistic note, detailing some of the progress that is being made towards giving more people access to this currently inaccessible land. Another example is the reference to Rousseau's "Discours sur L'Origine et les Fondements de L'Inéegalité parmi les hommes in which he quotes the first part of a critical passage while ignoring the second part and therefore wholly distorting Rousseau's message with which, had he read the text,, Hayes would surely agree.

It was more a case of wanting to support my feeling intellectually that it’s the wall that is the crime, not the climbing of it,” he says. Each chapter also includes a striking black and white drawing of the place Hayes trespassed in that chapter.