BOOK REVIEW — The trespasser’s guide to exploration in the bush — Entry and Work on Private Property: An Explorationist’s Guide

Hewson & White Printing, P.O. Box 1295, Kingston, Ontario K7L 4Y8

“It is sometimes surprising how many prized cattle a farmer may own,” says Karl Harries in one of his many footnotes, “and how prone they may be to falling into open trenches.”

Harries, a lawyer and mining engineer, makes dozens of mordant observations like this in his Entry and Work on Private Property, turning what might, in other hands, have been a dry treatment of an uninspiring subject into a lively and lucid read. Coming to fair agreements on access, acceptable to both prospector and property owner, can be difficult and drawn-out, but Harries’ book drives home the importance of getting clear and strict rules in place before the work starts.

His book, which starts with an examination of the legal basis for a prospector’s right to enter property where another person owns the surface rights, is evenhanded in its approach, showing how both parties need the protection of a written access agreement when exploration work goes on.

Harries focuses his attention on Common Law jurisdictions, and draws most of his examples from Ontario, but still offers sensible advice for those working in places with other legal traditions.

The reader might be misled by the book’s energetic prose into thinking the work itself is lightweight, but he would be wrong. Harries does not skate around the subtleties of access law, and at all times shows how the divergent interests of the explorer, the property owner, tenants, passers by, and the public at large, can come into conflict and cause legal trouble for either principal.

In listing the general principles of access law, showing how that law is itself limited, and providing examples of how problems of liability, tort and even criminal offences can arise, Harries has produced a worthwhile handbook. In treating the subject with freshness, clarity and common sense, he has produced one as sharp as a barbed-wire fence.