Yes, my friend’s mother had no problem getting that court order. As I recall – and this was long ago, in the 1970s – the surrounding landowner did not charge her a fee for access.
Land doesn’t have to be taken, the public just need to be given right of way across it. My local council has a map of rights of way in the county, and they all cross land that’s still privately owned, but where the public have right of access and travel.
Property rights is like a bundle of straws. Taking any of those straws is the taking of a property right. An easement across your property is a taking.
In Newport, Rhode Island, there’s the Cliff Walk; a public access trail that runs along the seaside behind some of the grandest mansions in the country. Newport is where folks like the Vanderbilts and Astors built their summer homes in the late-19th/early-20th century. I’m not sure if the legal situation is quite the same as the OP describes. I think most of the mansions aren’t residences anymore, but are owned and maintained by a preservation society that keeps them open for tours.
Basically, the answer to your question is : No, America doesnt have these.
America also doesnt have “ramblers” --America has hikers.
And the difference is that, while both ramblers and hikers are going on a long walk, a hiker usually has to drive a good distance to a large nature reserve, which is totally owned by the government and specifically declared as public land. There will be nice trails there. They may be hundreds of miles long through rugged mountains (think:the Appalachian trail), or they may be only a few hundred yards long, smoothly paved with asphalt and flowers planted alongside (Central Park in New York City.)
In England it is common to “go rambling” and walk through fenced pastures with cows grazing. When you need to cross a fence, you climb over the “Style”–which is something totally unknown in America.
A style is a set of steps designed to allow the public to climb over the fence and onto someone else’s land.In America, this is called trespassing. 
Nitpick: It’s “stile”.
So that’s where turnstile comes from.
In the UK, some of these rights of way go right back to the enclosures in the 18th century. Prior to that most land outside towns was ‘common land’ and some of it still exists to this day. When land was enclosed, it was usual to leave paths for people to access churches and neighbours and those paths have become enshrined in law.
Nearly all roads in the UK are owned, either by the local council or, in the case of major ‘trunk’ roads, the Highways agency (ie. the government.) A householder may be a part owner of the road outside, but that usually means that the road will be in a poor state because they don’t want to pay for repairs. Generally a householder’s rights and responsibilities end at the boundary between their property and the edge of the pavement (sidewalk). This includes all the services as well.
In Montana, where fly fishing is a major industry, we have a similarly generous stream access law. The public has free use of any “navigable waterway” from the high water mark on both banks. The state supreme court has held virtually any waterway (even some ephemeral ones) to be navigable and so, in practice, there’s a huge amount of dry land along the shore or on bar islands that’s open to whatever one’s personal definition of recreation is. There’s also a similar thing where landowners have to make reasonable accommodations to stream access through their land.
Many of the celebrities and ultra-rich folks who bought vacation houses in the state when it was trendy back in the 90’s and 2000’s learned this to their chagrin since there’s nothing stopping the locals from drinking beer and fishing on the shore next to their zillion dollar mansion-cabins.
We usually don’t have the quaint steps, but gates that are designed to allow people through but not cars or cattle are very common in the US. Private landowners allowing recreation on range, timber and farm land is also very common. I don’t know if it’s different in other parts of the country, but at least where I am public access to privately-owned wildlands is usually presumed to be allowed unless the landowner takes certain steps to make clear it’s not.
Wildlands, maybe. Not so much cultivated fields or pastureland.
For one thing, the absence of the tradition, IME, tends to mean that interlopers on private land don’t respect it and leave trash.
As noted, public rights-of-way in England typically derive from a time when private lands were “taken” from common land, not the other way round.
Some in the thread are generalizing about the whole UK. Scotland has its own law/tradition about access to land. The Land Reform Act (2003) codified the very long held notion of universal access to the landscape. It basically boils down to: you can wander and camp wherever you like, but don’t be a dick about it, and tidy up after yourself.
At least in the west, there’s usually a lot of grey area between “wildland” and fields and pastures. I’ve certainly done lots of field work and recreating in places that would probably qualify as both and were marked as open access. I’ve also quite often been in areas where access to somewhat more wild areas went straight through cultivated fields.
In a technical sense (the best kind of sense here on the SMDB :)) that’s not really all that different than what happened in the US. As the country moved west, most of the country was public land until it was parceled off and sold or given away. Some of the public land today was indeed formerly private and bought back, but lots of it was just never parceled out in the first place and has always been public (aka common) land. (Of course, this is ignoring the circumstances under which the original inhabitants were relieved of it.)
Again, I only really have experience in the rural west, but at least here there’s sort of a strange interplay of traditions when it comes to private land. A lot of this is in the hunting and fishing community, since they’re usually the ones who are doing their thing in areas likely to be private land. On the one hand, private property rights have always been held as inviolable but, on the other, there’s still sort of a frontier attitude of open access to all open land. For the most part, the way these are reconciled is that there’s a sort of unwritten understanding that private land should remain open so long as people aren’t trashing it. It mostly works but, yes, there are definitely bad apples out there that have the sense of entitlement to access, but not the respect for property rights or the land itself. A lot of times, that’s what results in private land being closed.
So, long story short, there are most definitely parts of the country where public access to private land, although not codified, is the norm.
Pennsylvania’s Clean and Green Act allows rural landowners to have their properties taxed at use-value rather than fair market value. It’s an enormous tax savings if you’ve got a couple hundred acres of forest or cropland that could easily be developed in to a valuable pile of houses.
One of the requirements for participating in the program is allowing public access to what Pennsylvania called “Agricultural Reserve” lands, as in open fields and pastures that could be actively used in agriculture but aren’t currently.
If you’re actively growing crops on the land then of course you don’t have to allow access, and you’re allowed to set reasonable limitations like no motor vehicles or no access after dark.
That said, I’ve never once encountered anyone trying to enforce the requirement. I’ve certainly never had anyone from the county show up to check out my property.
I haven’t read the thread, but I recently read an article about an app that maps ‘secret’ access points to Malibu beaches. There’s no such thing as a ‘private beach’ in California. Beaches are public from the water to the high tide line. But…
There is supposed to be public access to the beach every thousand feet, but the article says you can go miles without seeing one. The app shows users where the access points are.
All thanks to former Governor Tom McCall (R), who helped beat back developers who wanted to privatize them.
Anchorage has many public rights of way, particularly along a bike path along Campbell Creek. There was one right across from our condo that passed between two single family homes, and you could find them all along that route.
I haven’t hunted out west in quite a few years, but the state course I took (as a prerequisite to my license in Arizona) quoted laws that guaranteed access to BLM land, even though it meant crossing privately owned property. In this case, I believe it’s far beyond an “unwritten” agreement. The instructor was pretty emphatic that we could open any gate, and cross any property if it was the only (reasonable) way to access the BLM land beyond. Their explanation was that the rancher was leasing it for his stock, just as we were “leasing” it for our hunting. IIRC the only legal requirement was, no messing with stock and leave gates as we found them (presumably the rancher had them open or closed for a reason).
The instructors claimed this was backed by law, but I don’t know the actual code though.
In actual practice, I showed considerably more deference than the law required. I stopped and introduced myself at any occupied property I intended to cross. I also inquired as to the current locations of his stock, lands he’d prefer did not get crossed by truck, etc. This worked out quite well, as the landowners responded in every case with some good advice on where they’d seen the various critters I was after. One of the results of those conversations still has a cherished spot above my fireplace. 
BLM = Bureau of Land Management… essentially the public lands in the US. Here’s a map.
I think if someone’s land is the only way to access a chunk of public land, a court could compel them to allow transit through their land, but unless that’s some sort of weirdo Arizona thing I don’t think you’re allowed to just take it on yourself to cross land if it’s marked “no trespassing.” The way it works in Montana (and I gather most other western states are similar) is that you’re allowed to cross any private land that isn’t posted “no trespassing” and there’s specific rules (which do vary from state to state) that say what a landowner has to post in order to properly mark his land no trespassing. You would also still need to get permission to actually hunt or do other recreational activities even on non-posted private land.
Anyways, the takeaway message to the various British dopers who posted here is that in the US, stepping onto private land will not always result in encounters with enraged shotgun-wielding hillbillies and is perfectly permissible in many circumstances. And, at least in my experience, once you get past of the outskirts you see a lot more “No Hunting” signs than “No Trespassing” ones.
I know, doesn’t anyone read Piers Anthony anymore? 
In Vermont, you can assume access is allowed unless there are “no trespassing” signs posted. Even hunting is allowed on private property absent posting.
(obviously damaging property isn’t legal, but I’m sure that’s true in England as well).
In Missouri, there’s considerable disagreement whether the property line ends where the shore begins or in the middle of the stream. And some landowners are willing to shoot you to defend their interpretation.