The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths

THE WILD ROVER

MIKE PARKER

A BLISTERING JOURNEY ALONG BRITAIN’S FOOTPATHS

To my parents:
Jane, David, Anne

Contents

Many feet make one path.
I like to walk on a foot path.
I walk over the grass
and turn to see if I have made a path.
Two feet once only
is not enough.
I return to the foot path
to fill one of the bunch.
I add my feet.
I look back.
What a path we made.

Ivor Cutler

The primrose path gives way to the garlic path on Gower

Of all the things you least want to come face-to-face with on an early morning dog walk, your own hypocrisy comes quite high on the list.

It was the wooden fingerpost that caused the first twinge. Bright and shiny, brand new and leaking fresh pine sap, the arrow and the motif of the little walking man picked out in gleaming yellow paint. A Public Footpath, it screamed. But I knew that already: I’d been walking this path, across the rushing river and through the fields, for years. Along the way a tributary stream funnels down a tiny valley, crossing the path at a ford overhung by my favourite oak. Moss-covered rocks huddle around the ford, each one a warm seat on which to rest and take the day’s sunshine or rain. In eight years of walking the path and pondering life at the ford, I’d only ever been disturbed once at my special place by a fellow walker. And now everyone was going to be pointed towards it.

Over the next few days, I walked the other paths that surround the village, each one seemingly tailor-made for any subtle difference of mood, season or weather. If I need a good stretch after too many hours slumped in front of a screen, I’ll take the hill track, a steep climb up an old holloway, past thorn trees twisted into animal shapes – the guardians of the village, according to some of the older residents – and up to a lofty viewpoint that never fails to give back some perspective to a foggy brain. In the autumn, I’ll take the wooded path that forks off the back lane for its rusting colours and musky smells. If it’s a bright morning, I’ll take the short-sharp-shock path up through the forestry and on to a circular hilltop track that gets blasted by early sunshine. On a summer’s afternoon, I’ll ramble through the riverside fields, chucking sticks into the water for the dog, and then we’ll both take a dip in one of the deep pools that sparkle green in the late day’s sun. But the path over the little bridge and to the magical ford is the one I’ll do on any day, at any time, in any weather, for it combines exactly the right amount of wood and water, shelter and open skies, grass and rock.

The new signs had materialised on every single track. Out of nowhere, little yellow men had appeared all over the village, pointing eagerly down driveways and farm tracks. Brand new zinc gates, their Travis Perkins price tag still glued on, had been rammed in too, replacing those held together only by twine, rust and local know-how. An ancient network of paths, some trodden for centuries and known to generations in intimate detail, had been suddenly thrown open to the world. I was bloody furious, and felt as if a load of complete strangers had stomped into my kitchen, and were sniggering at my smalls drying over the fire. It was nothing short of violation.

Even as those first feelings of outrage bubbled up in a stew of bile, I was well aware that they were laced with the even more corrosive ingredient of raging hypocrisy. For decades, I’d been sounding off about blocked footpaths and rights of way that appear on the map in crisp certainty but which, on the ground, are nowhere to be found. I’d cursed planners and councils for their lethargy in keeping paths marked and walkable. In 2001, when the foot-and-mouth crisis closed every path in the land, I’d written angry articles about the lightning speed with which the No Entry signs had gone up and compared it with the years that it took to remove them again. In every corner of the country, I’d hurled my hands up in horror at getting lost during the seemingly simple task of spotting a good path on the map and attempting to follow it. I’d ranted in print, on the radio, on TV, and to anyone who would listen, that councils really should take their responsibilities more seriously, not only to the walking public but as guardians of the hefty weight of history that had carved out such a cherished network of rights of way on our small island.

But that was There. Beyond, away, on someone else’s patch, in places where I was a visitor and expected some modicum of consideration. And this was Here. Not for a moment did my spleen accommodate the obvious truth that my Here was nearly everyone else’s There, and that they should perhaps be afforded the same hospitality that I so noisily demanded.

A few months on, the signs and the gates still look too new, too sharp, too much like prodnosed intruders. A couple of Welsh winters should batter them a little more comfortably into the landscape, but that’s scant consolation, for they are already doing their damned job. Neighbours who live along the newly signposted tracks tell me that the footfall of passing cagoulewearers has increased noticeably. So it seems: I keep finding complete strangers on my paths, ambling uncertainly along and fretting visibly about the cows in the next field. On my better days, I manage a smile and a hello, even as I wish they’d vanish into the sweet air. On my rather less charitable days, I do my best to look like the surliest farmer of popular paranoia and glower at them from across the hedgerows. It doesn’t work. Even my scariest facial expressions cannot compete with the signposted certainty that they are there by right – their ancient, inalienable right of way.

Is there anything that combines simple utility and quiet beauty better than a footpath? There it goes, just the lightest of touches across a field or through a wood, the sum total of countless feet over countless years. At one and the same time, it is the humblest of all our imprints on the landscape, yet one of the sturdiest too. And not just physically so, but culturally and emotionally too. We need our paths, like we need to breathe.

Britain’s network of paths is unique in the world. Nearly all countries have their waymarked trails and designated tourist routes, but we have something so much better: a filigree network of rights of way that snakes through every landscape and connects every town and village. Our paths, bridleways, byways and green lanes are threads of common land in an increasingly privatised countryside, hidden grooves of peace and beauty through the chaos, short cuts into our history and identity. They are democracy at its most fundamental, open to all, where you don’t have to pay , and they will take you as far as you could possibly wish to go. All you need are a pair of feet and the urge to use them.

In England and Wales, there are around 150,000 miles of off-road rights of way, together with over 6,000 square miles of ‘right to roam’ Access Land (about three-quarters of one of those famous international units of measurement, a Size of Wales). In Scotland, the situation is even better, for there is a natural presumption of access to all land, including tens of thousands of miles of path and track. This astounding resource is something of a shrinking violet, however. While roads and railways, airports and interchanges howl for our attention and our wealth, the paths slip by almost unnoticed.

Like most Brits, having a bit of a walk is in my DNA. It was what you did on a Sunday afternoon, wrapped up snug against the autumn winds or giving your skin a laundering in the first warm rays of spring. We weren’t, thank God, one of those rambling families, mum and dad in matching cagoules, kids moaning unheard at a distance. In our house, even the dog’s favourite walk was to the pub. But the paths, and the hills and woods, rivers and fields, were always there, and always within walking distance.

Once, my dad told me that we were all going on a walk, and that I could choose where. Of course, I rushed to the map to pick somewhere that looked interesting, and fastened immediately on the Clee Hills, midway between our home in Kidderminster and the Welsh border. ‘Are you sure?’ Dad said. ‘It’s a bit grim.’ His job often took him out that way, and he’d come back with stories of dribbling inbreds and ancient feuds. Which is almost certainly exactly why I wanted to go there.

Stubbornly, I refused to change my mind, and, good to his word, Dad packed us all into the car, grumbled only slightly, and set off for Clee. I can’t remember much of the walk, save for some filthy quarry tracks and a burnt-out 54-seater coach halfway up a hillside, the grass scorched and still smelling of petrol. As we stood, rather nervously, looking at it, someone pointed out the black sky heading our way. About thirty seconds later, a biblical deluge of hail, with balls of ice big enough to bruise, exploded over us. I wasn’t asked to choose a walk again.

Mind you, Dad had some pretty leftfield ideas of his own as to what constituted a good walk. When the West Midland Safari Park opened, we were living on a new estate only a few hundred yards away. There was great excitement in the area at the opening of something so thrilling on our doorstep; in school, competition was fierce as to who’d yet been. Those that had would swan in, flamboyantly showing off their souvenir pencil case emblazoned with a lion. The rest of us would crowd round the lucky beggar, and pump them for titbits about the animals, the amusements, the food and whether their car aerial had been snapped off by a baboon. I couldn’t wait to go, and kept begging my parents to take us there. The answer was always no, qualified with things like ‘just look at the queues’ or ‘we’ll wait until the crowds have died down’, rather than the more unpalatable truth that it was because money would have to be spent.

We must have all nagged pretty thoroughly, because Dad one day announced that we were finally going to the Safari Park. I very nearly combusted with excitement. At last, I was going to be able to hold my head up high at school, and join in the exclusive conversations about whether we preferred giraffes or tigers. Off we walked down the road towards the entrance, before suddenly turning off too soon and heading instead up to the perimeter fence. We then spent hours, largely in the rain, being frogmarched around the park’s outer limit, peering through the fence at occasional intervals and trying to work out if that distant blur was a cheetah or a leopard. Or perhaps an Austin Allegro.

Only gradually did the realisation dawn that some paths were allowed, and some weren’t. As a child, I roamed as free as I dared, by bike and on foot, out into the woods and fields around the town, along canal and river tow-paths, country lanes and muddy bridleways, with no thought as to whether it was officially sanctioned or not. Occasionally, I’d get shouted at by someone, but that happened most days anyway, so I thought nothing of it. Thanks to my growing collection of Ordnance Survey (OS) Landranger maps, I was soon aware of what the little lines of red dots and dashes meant, that these were official rights of way, as intrinsic a part of the Queen’s Highway as any trunk road or motorway. Learning that was fascinating, and tracing their route across the map and on the ground was a joy, but it necessitated a loss of innocence that would never return.

These rights of way have only been marked on OS maps for the last fifty years (and only in their entirety for the last twenty-five or so), but today, they are unquestionably the main reason that anyone still buys paper versions of the Landrangers (1:50 000) and Explorers (1:25 000). The orange-covered Explorer maps, in particular, have become the walker’s best friend, as they are at the smallest possible scale where field boundaries can be shown, an essential help on the many occasions when the dotted line on the map refuses to reveal itself on the ground.

Where better to start an inventory of the state of our rights of way than on your home patch? I sat by the fire one winter’s night and gazed at the local Explorer map, mentally totting up the little green dashed lines that wriggled and wormed their way across it, picturing the routes and their views that I knew as I followed the map. There were so many – but just as many again that I didn’t know. Whole footpaths and bridleways that I’d never once tried, of which I had no visual image or memory. As the fire crackled and spat, I resolved to draw a circle on the map, centred on my house, and to walk every single right of way – or at least, attempt to walk every one – within it. I pictured myself sallying forth from the doorstep like an ocean-going liner down the slip-way, plunging with a happy splash into the fields, forests and hills that surround me. I would conduct a thorough audit of my own back yard.

I started by drawing a five-mile circle around where I live, and swiftly realised that it presented a little too much of a challenge, one that looked as if it would take many months to complete. I pulled the circle in a little, taking a three-mile radius instead. Three miles sounds nothing. It
is
nothing: I habitually walk four-and-a-bit miles into town, and it’s a doddle, taking only a shave over an hour if I go at a decent lick. But looking at the six-mile-wide circle on the map was really quite disorienting. Within it, there were whole valleys, farms and woods that I’d never been near, whose names I’d never even consciously digested. I had no idea who lived there, what their lives were like, who they were related to or were friends with and – most pressingly – whether they’d welcome a map-wielding rambler or set their dogs on me.

Every day for the first week of my audit, I set off on foot in a different direction, and found footpaths and bridleways that I’d never seen before. I still can’t quite believe it, for I’ve been in this house for nearly a decade, and have been out walking almost every single day (the lot of the dog owner: so bloody what if it’s lashing with rain). Yet, here were old holloways and green lanes, paths bumping down through woods and tell-tale darker lines of grass winding their way across fields that I’d never clapped eyes on before. It was nothing short of thrilling.