Common Ground Trust had eleven years of campaign material and almost no evidence that any of it had ever been read by a landowner. The photography was of supporters in wellies holding placards. The writing borrowed from land justice pamphlets that assume the reader has already agreed. We went through two boxes of correspondence from estate offices in the West Country and Northumberland, and the word that kept surfacing, in various polite forms, was trespass.

The reader nobody wrote for

We spent that spring in estate offices — seven of them, plus two land agents in Exeter — asking what would have to be true before anyone opened a gate. Liability came up every time. Ideology almost never. We rebuilt the campaign around insurance, dogs, lambing dates and who pays for a broken stile, and gave the Trust an identity with the manners of a land agency: Ordnance Survey line work, a serif lifted from tithe maps, no green anywhere.

The petition reached 41,000 signatures in fourteen weeks, which is roughly what the previous one had managed in two years. Seven estates opened routes. Two of those signed after their agents had read the position paper rather than anything on the campaign site. The Trust’s chair told us the new tone felt like a retreat for about a month.

One thing we got wrong

Our first wordmark was set in a Victorian slab that we liked considerably more than the membership did. Around two hundred of them said so, at volume, in the fortnight after launch. The argument was that the Trust should stop performing for people who already agreed with it, and we had made that argument in the one place where it read as contempt for them. The second version is quieter. The position held.