Malcolm M Combe, The Scotways Guide to the Law of Access to Land in Scotland
| Pages | 285-286 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2019.0560 |
| Author | |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
In the year 1845 – a date nearer to the Union than to our own times – was founded a society that has contributed much to the public good of Scotland: the Scottish Rights of Way Society. Incorporation followed 101 years later. Today the society bears two names, one official and long, “the Scottish Rights of Way and Access Society”, and the other, unofficial but snappy and (on the perhaps unwise assumption that this reviewer is capable of identifying such a thing) trendy: “ScotWays”.
In the 1980s it began to publish a guide to the law. It started with a twenty-eight page pamphlet by Sandy Anton called
The Scotways chair, Muriel Robertson, writes in the foreword that the book “is intended for members of the public, landowners and managers, access professionals and legal advisers” (9). That is a challengingly broad and diverse readership. Yet the book succeeds. On the one hand, it is accessible to the intelligent non-lawyer, this being achieved in a number of ways, including the use of frequent “additional information” sections that are interspersed, in small print, and which therefore are easily skippable. On the other hand, there is no dumbing-down. There is extensive and fully up-to-date reference to the burgeoning caselaw (including such recent cases as
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