Some years ago, walking a stretch of the Pennine Way, I received the first of many lessons in the politics of the great outdoors. High on the Northumberland moors, not having seen a soul all morning, we met a countryside ranger. As we greeted each other, he said, with a kind of practised, jovial menace: “Don't drop any litter now, will you.”

In an instant he ruined our day. His words provoked in our mild-mannered souls a teeth-gnashing rage. Spoken to like rebellious fourth-formers, we had a burning desire to behave like them: to shred our crisp packets and scatter them to the winds, to drop our drinks bottle and leave a trail of silver wrapper; purely to thwart this insensitive jobsworth.

We didn't, of course, but a sense of his deep discourtesy remained. Subsequently I have met others like him, and have come to realise that our ranger was not some unfortunate one-off, but a type: the voice of a particular constituency in green places.

Welcome to the world of Woolly-hat Man; the elitist of open spaces. Woolly-hat Man has spiritual ownership, and no one else. Even in the most solitary parts of these crowded islands, he will not trust you to leave only footprints. And, like the worst kind of opera snob, Woolly-hat Man can barely tolerate the people whom he knows to be incapable of appreciating the show properly.

It all came back to me this week, when the argument against charity challenges reared its head. The authorities that oversee Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain, declared that charity climbs were “destroying” the landscape.

Hundreds of thousands of people now climb Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon every year, with visitor figures for 2008 among the highest yet, but land managers singled out for special criticism the 60,000 or so annually who attempt the Three Peaks Challenge, climbing all three mountains within 24 hours.

This challenge is a nebulous, unorganised thing. People undertake it in the same individualistic way that they trek from Lands End to John o' Groats. And because participants race on public roads through Scotland, England and Wales to beat the clock, the challenge has a fairly subterranean culture. Which, of course, only adds to its appeal.

Now in all probability, Three Peakers are slightly mad. But that is not the issue. What is at stake is their right to be mad. Most do it to raise money for good causes, some do it for personal satisfaction and everyone does it because they are entitled to do it: they use public roads and climb hills that belong to the nation.

But in the eyes of at least one guardian of Ben Nevis, the groups of fit young men who take on the challenge “can turn the mountain into Billy Smart's circus”. As opposed to what? Glyndebourne?

The Highland Council is to hold talks with the Institute of Fundraising this month to draw up a new code of conduct that will strike a compromise, it is said, between charity and conservation. The intention, plainly, is to end what are called “unsustainable” group challenges on all three of Britain's highest peaks. Two powerful forces - snobbery and an obsession with regulation - are inevitably leading to a situation where the authorities will pick and choose who can climb the mountains; and when.

Now I don't run up mountains for a hobby, but I would always, in that good old libertarian sense, defend the rights of others to do so. These runners should be as free to do what they do as others are to take part in the London Marathon: unless, of course, we intend to start charging joggers for eroding the pavements, or taxing cyclists who mount their bikes at Land's End. The argument is essentially the same.

The truth is that the very same outdoor aristocracy that preaches diversity and equal access for all, that produces a countryside safety guide and probably translates the damn thing into Urdu and Arabic; that draws up health strategies to resist obesity - these people secretly detest the end results. Deep down, they hate the charity challenges, the mountain bikers, the long-distance footpath followers - the unstoppable invasion of their green space.

For them, it is dumbing-down: not just the arrival of the great unwashed in hopeless trainers, but the threatening hordes of fit Bear Gryllses, who can handle the outdoors but just aren't respectful enough.

Double standards rule, I'm afraid. The woolly-hat brigade, free spirits to a man, would not tolerate being regulated themselves. Tell them that they could not climb a mountain when they wanted to, or must pay an entry fee, and they would revolt. But they are perfectly happy to stop others.

It is one of the great ironies of the present elitism that the original outdoor movement had working-class roots, founded largely by men desperate to escape from the toil of heavy industry at the weekends. Access to green spaces has therefore always been a great socialist cause; the kernel of the great class war over land ownership.

Funny, isn't it, how poachers always turn gamekeepers in the end?

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