The West Country’s rebel campaigner with a national reputation, Rodney Legg, has died of cancer, aged 64, on Friday (22 July). Rodney was born in Bournemouth on 18 April 1947.

Well-known in the West Country for his numerous publications, on the history and landscape of Dorset in particular, he was also a national figure, serving as chairman of the Open Spaces Society, Britain’s oldest national conservation body, for 20 years (1989-2008) and on the National Trust council, also for 20 years (1990- 2010).

Through the Tyneham Action Group, which he founded in 1967, he pressed the Ministry of Defence into giving unprecedented public access to the Lulworth military live-firing range, and he persuaded the National Trust to open Max Gate, Thomas Hardy’s home at Dorchester, to the public in 1994. He launched and led numerous crusades in the public interest, fighting them in his own, outspoken and eccentric manner. He knew every inch of the Dorset countryside and wrote countless books of walks.

While chairman of the Open Spaces Society, he won public access to 640 acres of land in Dorset and Somerset (under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000) and campaigned to save many commons, greens and paths. He was sharply critical of the secrecy and lack of democracy which pervaded the National Trust, arguing that the trust should publicise all its land on Ordnance Survey maps, open up illegally-blocked paths on its land and allow public access wherever possible, as well as purchasing land, rather than stately homes, for public enjoyment.

Says Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, who worked with Rodney for 30 years: ‘Rodney was an unusual but extremely effective campaigner. You could never predict what he would say or do, but people always listened to him.

‘Although he was a huge irritation to the National Trust for many years, challenging its stuffy old ways, he made a difference, persuading it to open up secret properties and to become much more welcoming. By the time he stood down from the council the old hostility had changed to A respect bordering on affection.

‘He rarely wore a suit or tie, and arrived at formal meetings as though he was fresh from a Dorset exploration, always with an impish grin. He was impossible to ignore.’

Rodney will be buried at Higher Ground Meadow, Corscombe in Dorset.

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