The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (12 page)

Then there is the fascism of the trail itself. You become flanged to it like a rusty old steam train on ancient rails, unable to branch off in any direction, or for any reason. I first became aware of this when phoning to book B&Bs in advance of the walk. When I said that I wanted to stay because I was walking the Ridgeway to the landlord of a place about two or three miles off the path, he sighed and said, ‘Well, I’ll come and pick you up in Nuffield, then.’ ‘But I’m walking,’ I said. ‘I can just walk to yours instead.’ He seemed surprised. I asked him if a lot of Ridgeway walkers insisted on being picked up from the side of the trail. ‘Yes, and taken back there the next morning,’ he said.

To many, walking a long-distance path, especially one that has been officially stamped as a National Trail, is even more like a heritage steam-train trip than I realised. Instead of seeing the path as an integral part of a much greater network, it is just a pretty, but pointless, thing in itself, a truncated chuff from nowhere to nowhere, and connected at either end to the wider world, the real world, by the inevitable car. In between, there are the official stops or stations, and there’s no deviation allowed from the one route. Nor can you skip any part of the official path: every last inch has to be religiously trudged, as if in penance. While I can just about understand this completist rationale on the wide, ancient track of the Wessex Ridgeway itself, I fail to get it at all on the eastern half of the National Trail, much of which dates back only as far as a Thursday in the 1970s when some county council twonk drew it on the map. It is quite some achievement to transform something so inherently joyous and liberating into something so tediously anal.

Conscious of having to carry everything on my back, I’d ditched all my beloved Ordnance Surveys and had invested a tenner in a kind of map I’d never used before, one of the specialist walker’s maps, made of ‘strong durable waterproof polyethylene’ and produced by Harvey’s of Perthshire. It’s very good and does everything it claims to do, but it wasn’t helping to assuage the nagging feeling that walking a National Trail was a fixed, unmovable exercise. The path is portrayed in varying shaped chunks and perfectly adequate detail, but oftentimes it’s cut off only a mile or so either side. It was a map of the trail, for sure, but with absolutely no context of the land through which it progressed. It was like having a plan of a 90-mile corridor, but with no idea of what was in the rooms that led off it.

Edging past Chiltern pony paddocks and golf courses, it was hard to conjure up images of any ancestors stomping this way. Only the gigantic beech trees, and the chalk and flint mix of the soil in which they sit, hinted at anything much beyond last month. I’d purposely decided to walk the Ridgeway in mid-April, hoping to catch that magical week when the beech leaves first open into a canopy of feathery, lime-green iridescence, before they quickly darken and harden into their summer wear. After the coldest winter in 30 years, however, nature was behind schedule, and, with a few unexpected exceptions, the entire walk was done against a stentorian backdrop of skeletal trees and bare branches. Not that it made the Chilterns’ legendary trees any less impressive: perhaps more so, in that all there was to look at were their trunks, bark, labyrinthine roots and branches, rather than the sweeter, but far more ephemeral, pleasures of buds and blossom.

Even more pleasurable was the ground underfoot, for chalk is always a treat and a novelty to me. Not knowing its lands too well, I constantly marvel at its desiccation, its dazzling Wensleydale whiteness and texture, its quiet sense of style and playfulness. A well-worn path through chalk is doubly enchanting, for there is no better surface on which to recall the words of Edwardian poet Edward Thomas: ‘And the prettiest things on ground are the paths / With morning and evening hobnails dinted / With foot and wing-tip overprinted.’ Not so many hob-nails these days, but the galloping horseshoe-prints, mountain-bike tyre tracks and the stomp of a thousand walking boots etched into the ashen track gave it the look of a massive, elemental work of art.

Where the Ridgeway burrows under the M40, near Lewknor, there are countless graffiti messages scrawled on the walls of the tunnel. None are in paint or pen: all are in chalk just picked up off the path, and where words have got too nasty or offensive, people have simply rubbed them out. As a result, there’s a lightness of touch and a sense of humorous interplay in the graffiti that you don’t normally find in an underpass, and I spent a very happy ten minutes chuckling at it as the lorries thundered by overhead.

With two such distinct and different halves, it is the chalk that defines and unites the Ridgeway path, for this was the dry, high route along the top of the scarp that runs diagonally across England from Norfolk to the south-west coast. It’s no coincidence that this is roughly also the country’s dividing line between the wealthier bottom-right corner and the more spartan north and west. The Ridgeway runs along this cusp, something of a last hurrah for the money as it looks down, quite literally, on its muddy, lowland neighbours.

As the miles squeaked by, and the soles of my boots whitened up, I began to love the chalk and flint beneath my feet. Together, these equal-and-opposite twins represent a much-cherished version of fantasy England. Chalk is soft, yielding, clean, pure, white, strangely coquettish and makes us think of Vera Lynn, the white cliffs of Dover and Mr Chips scribbling on a school blackboard. Flint is dark, unfathomable, unyielding, rock hard and brings to mind ancient arrowheads, rudimentary blades, the plucky underdog and some of the loveliest, yet simplest, architecture of the Church of England. Softness and toughness, purity and resolve, education and warfare, Sir and God: our favourite combinations, and those that we rather like to think define us as a nation.

Of all the chalk-and-flint districts, there’s nowhere quite as rhapsodic as the Chilterns, particularly to Londoners of a certain standing. This modest range of woods and hills shields the capital from the dirt and dullness of the provinces; its flinty little villages, topped with their red tile roofs, are the England of a painted pantomime backdrop. This is a land of chivalrous knights, swooning maidens, magical forests and lusty green-sward – even the reintroduced red kites, swirling overhead in vast numbers these days, fuel the Tudorbethan fantasy. It’s Betjeman’s ‘Beechy Bucks’, the Grand Duchy of Metroland, bulwark and avatar for all manner of medievalists, nostalgists and fantasists: Stanley Spencer, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Eric Gill, the Shelleys, John Piper, G. K. Chesterton and Sir Francis Dashwood. It’s where you’ll find
The Wind in the Willows
and
The Vicar of Dibley
, Gray’s
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
and Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
,
Three Men in a Boat
,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and the Bekonscot model village. And acknowledging the sinister shadow at the heart of the suburban idyll, it’s also where you’ll find
The Avengers
,
The Saint
,
Midsomer Murders
and Miss Marple. Darkest of all, most weekends since 1921, you might also find the British prime minister of the day, kicking back at Chequers.

The Ridgeway path makes great play with Chequers, flirting with it from all angles. Coming from Wendover, it’s a steady slog up to the Boer War memorial on the top of Coombe Hill, at 853ft almost the highpoint of the entire Chiltern range (Haddington Hill, on the other side of Wendover, is 23ft higher). Another good reason for walking the Ridgeway east–west is that this affords, as you reach the monument, a magnificent first view of the mansion, sat far below on a platform flanked between Coombe Hill and another outstretched ridge, Beacon Hill. Like the two arms of a Brobdingnagian armchair, the hills thrust out into the Vale of Aylesbury, with Chequers as the well-upholstered seat between, peering over the lip and down into a world it will never have cause to know. The next minute, the mansion looked as if it were the prow of a ship, ploughing through the waves of flint and chalk in its wake towards the calmer waters of the Vale ahead.

Huge leather armchair or ship of state, the position made perfect sense; a redoubt firmly bedded in fantasy England, yet looking out, a little shyly, a little haughtily, on to the plains of the real world. It hit me suddenly that, over the last 90 years, events of probably far greater political significance had been ignited here, where the men of power gather and relax over croquet and a vintage burgundy, than ever occur in the daily hurly-burly of Westminster and Whitehall. It was from Chequers, usually after a well-lubricated dinner, that Churchill made many of his most celebrated wartime radio broadcasts. According to Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, this was where she decided to torpedo the
Belgrano
, dreamt up the poll tax and first realised she ‘could do business’ with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Chilterns are our locum capital.

When Lord Lee decided to give Chequers to the nation, specifically to the prime minister of the day as a weekend retreat, there was much debate in Parliament and the country. Liberal peer Lord Haldane warned that the trappings of an English country house existence could prove far too distracting to chaps from the middle classes, for, after all, it could no longer be assumed that PMs these days would come to office with their own estate. The PM since 1916, David Lloyd George, was just such a middle-class occupier of the office, and he was passionately in favour of the idea, even if he never much took to the place as its first prime ministerial occupant.

The last Liberal PM might not have been a huge fan of Chequers, but his Labour successors most certainly have been, more so even than most of their Tory counterparts. Ramsay MacDonald delighted in playing the country gent: Harold Nicolson recorded in his diaries turning up to Chequers to find Britain’s first socialist prime minister sporting a full set of tweeds, plus-fours and a fob watch, while carrying a log in one hand and an axe in the other. The house and estate, said the Cabinet Secretary of the time, was having ‘a marvellous effect on these Labour people’.

Three Labour PMs have loved the place so much that, on leaving office, they’ve bought nearby properties to prolong the dream. Telling us all that we need to know about the progress of the Labour Party since the war, these have gone from Clement Attlee (left office 1951, bought Cherry Tree Cottage on the outskirts of nearby Great Missenden), to Harold Wilson (1976, bought Grange Farm on the other side of Great Missenden) and Tony Blair (2007, bought the stately baroque pavilion of Wotton House, just north of Thame. To complete the illusion, the Blairs even employed the housekeeper from Chequers in their new home, and completed the double by buying a London home in Connaught Square, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Number 10).

In an even more stunningly accurate metaphor for his entire premiership, Blair’s successor Gordon Brown finally creaked into office having made loud protestations that, as the fabled son of the manse and cheerleader for prudence, he would be the first prime minister since Andrew Bonar Law in 1923 to forgo the delights of Chequers. This was intended to underline the difference between himself and the Prince Regent excesses of the Blair regime, under which Chequers was regularly used for get-togethers with casts drawn from all sections of politics, the media and showbiz. Like so many other of his gruffly shouted Puritan principles, it didn’t hold for long, and Brown became a passionate convert to the place, going there most weekends and holidays, and hosting parties every bit as lavish as his predecessor’s.

From Coombe Hill, the path descends to skirt around Chequers, passing through the grounds. Of course there are CCTV cameras everywhere and signs warning that you mustn’t stray from the right of way, but in fact it was all a great deal less hysterical than you’d expect. These days, when you have to go through everything but a strip search just to get into a local BBC studio or the offices of a minor insurance company, it was a reassuring and quite charming surprise to find that the prime minister’s country residence was behind a fence that consisted of wooden posts and a bit of wire strung between them. Once you cross the drive of beech trees planted by Churchill, the fence becomes even more cheerily rustic, in that it is made of old railway tracks chopped and upended into the soil.

When the PM’s in residence, however, security is far tighter and has been so since the early days. The handover of the house finally happened in 1921, just as the partition of Ireland was taking place. When Lloyd George was occupying the house, IRA graffiti was found just down the road and a group of Irish students walking nearby were arrested and held in police cells. When the Ulster Troubles re-ignited in the late 1960s, a footpath across the estate was deemed to be too close for comfort and an application made for its closure. According to Norma Major, who wrote a book about Chequers while husband John was its prime occupant, this resulted in an ‘inevitable public enquiry’ and ‘four years of wrangling before the footpath was moved’. All the more amazing, perhaps, that the Ridgeway still passes through the grounds, clipping across the main drive just inside the gates. Mrs Major’s purse-lipped opinions on the world are unintentionally hilarious, and none more so than when she tells of her husband’s surprise elevation to the top job: ‘To become Prime Minister just a few weeks before Christmas, as John did in 1990, was not ideal timing. For one thing, it threw the Christmas cards into chaos . . .’

On the desk in the prime minister’s study at Chequers sits a silver inkwell designed and inscribed by Lord Lee, the benefactor of the house. Its Latin motto (‘Stare Super Antiquas Vias; Videre Quænam sit Via Recta et Bona, et Ambulare in Eá’) is helpfully translated and inscribed into English, presumably for those very same PMs from the middle classes who not only failed to have a country estate to call their own but who may even have lacked a classical education. It’s a lovely motto, one that seemed to sum up even my small effort in ambling the Ridgeway, and it echoed through my head as I skirted the estate: ‘To stand on the ancient ways, to see which is the right and the good way, and in that to walk.’