The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (3 page)

If my little local project had been such an eye-opener, just how much better could it get if I went further afield? The idea possessed me. I was desperate to go and see more, to open the circle across the whole of the country, and to discover the many stories of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as told by their paths. I wanted to see the finest, the oddest and those most steeped in their own lore and custom. It was time to bring to life some legendary names off the map: Kinder Scout, the Pennine Way, the Elie Chainwalk, Framfield, the Lyke Wake Walk, the Thames Path, Offa’s Dyke, the Ridgeway, Winnats Pass, the Tóchar Phádraig. I took the maps out, and started dreaming.

By now, I felt quite ashamed of my early churlishness. Someone said to me that the British footpath network is worthy of being listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so rare and extraordinary is it. They’re right. And there was I wishing it, if not away, then certainly where it could be seen and not heard. Some kind of penance was called for.

The answer was obvious. I must sweat my misanthropy out by working on the repair of a public footpath, perhaps clad in sackcloth. I should go out and dig, hammer and saw with one of the many voluntary footpath-upkeep societies in Britain. Without them, the network would have disappeared under a siege of bramble and barbed wire years ago, and we would be left with the kind of situation found in most other countries, namely a few well-used, showpiece paths, glistening with signs, benches and nut-brown pensioners, but very little else. Online, I found a group in Kenilworth, which seemed like a suitably Middle England kind of destination, an Everyplace that might slyly reveal universal truths about us and the land secreted in its red soil. Furthermore, it was still part of my extended back yard, in that my grandparents had lived either side of the town in post-war Coventry and then Leamington in retirement, and my mum still lived half of the time in the spa town. So, even if I learned nothing, I could see some old haunts and my old mum.

As I left hers, we discussed what we imagined the members of the Kenilworth Footpath Preservation Group (KFPG) to be like. I predicted an all-male group, mostly bearded and mostly older than me. Mum disagreed on all scores, and she was right. Swinging my van into a large car park that Sunday morning, the first thing that struck me about the cheery-looking group in fluorescent yellow tabards was just how many of them were women. Segregation came swiftly, though: the ladies were sent off on their regular task of affixing yellow arrows to everything and a little light pruning, while the men and I gruffly headed into the spring sunshine to dig out a couple of stiles and replace them with gates.

The KFPG was set up in 1974 by one man, and he runs it still today. Meeting him, you’d think he was a fit 65-year-old, but in fact, he’s passed 80. His passion was undimmed, although the increasing amount of red tape and regulation from the council was doing its best to quash it for him. His group now look after around a hundred miles of Warwickshire paths, and it has provoked a huge upsurge in their usage. He was a quiet evangelist – the best kind – for the rights of way network, channelling his drive into something so positive and constructive.

Fun, too. I had a brilliant morning with them, digging away into the cold earth and sharing jokes at each other’s expense. Many of the most ribald comments between the men were about each other’s politics, for it was evident that the group was a very Kenilworth hybrid of old-school Tories doing their bit for tradition, idealistic Liberals and dyed-in-the-wool socialists, inching forward the proletarian revolution by giving them access to the land. Love and concern for our rights of way seem to go right across the political spectrum. In the pub afterwards, I was shocked to learn that one of my fellow co-diggers, who’d left us by then, was a BNP activist. My shock obviously showed, for one of the younger members said to me, ‘Yeah, I know. If anyone had told me I’d be spending my Sunday mornings working alongside a BNP member, I’d have refused to believe it. But you know, the greater good . . . well, it’s bigger than any of us, and that’s what I have to keep reminding myself.’ After the shock had subsided, I felt quietly awed by their easy-going tolerance, and that in itself is the best argument against the likes of the BNP.

The physical graft made for an exhilaratingly different kind of Sunday morning to my usual one, which generally consists of bacon, eggs, tea, fags, the papers and
The Archers
. I’d managed not to smoke for the previous couple of months: that, and the up-hill, down-dale exploration of the paths in my part of Wales, had helped me feel so much fitter. It was time to get out there and explore the country along its byways and bridleways, to sharpen my body and my mind on the nation’s contours, as seen from close-up and at walking pace. As I raised my pint to the effusive path-clearers of Kenilworth, I knew exactly where I had to go next.

An unlikely crucible for revolution: the Bottoms path, Flixton, Greater Manchester

‘We’re just bolshie buggers. Especially when you see your boss swanning around on the moors, moors that you can’t even get on to, poncing around with his mates and a twelve-bore, shooting grouse.’ It’s 1931, and a determined Lancashire voice pierces through the excited chatter bouncing off the roof of Manchester’s Victoria station, as flat-capped hordes swarm forward on to the train that will take them out of the city, into the hills for an after-noon’s fresh air and freedom.

Actually, I lie. It’s 2010 in a suburban semi in Stockport, the offices of the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society (PNFS), Britain’s most venerable rights of way campaigning group, and the words are those of Clarke Rogerson, their chairman. He’s answering a simple question that has ricocheted around my head for weeks: just what is it with Lancastrians and their precious footpaths?

Almost every battle and campaign of any significance about access or rights of way has taken place in north-western England, with a few contemporaneous flare-ups across the Pennines in the smoke-and-eckythump bits of Yorkshire. The names of Kinder Scout, Winter Hill, Bleaklow and Winnats Pass roll around the mouth of a northern folk singer like a religious incantation. And in a way, that’s exactly what they have become: totemic names of battles hard fought and even harder won, their status growing with every re-telling. Each story has the full roster of Victorian melodrama heroes and villains: moustache-twirling landowners cackling with evil glee as they clout a couple of peasants round the ear and shoot a few more defenceless grouse, pitted against salt-of-the-earth workers who just want five minutes gasping fresh air on’t moors before they drop dead from a lifetime of eating and breathing nobbut soot.

Being bolshie buggers is hardwired into north-westerners, and they take enormous pride in the fact. They also take momentous pride in their landscape, the tussocky moors and rain-lashed hills that loom large as the backdrop to almost all of the region’s towns and cities. Put the two together, and you get a swank that threatens to burst, it’s that bloated with decades of padding. How did anyone ever think that they were going to keep these people off their hills? You might as well try and stop them shouting, or shitting.

To understand the place of the path in our national make-up, a visit to the north-west is essential. It is not just a casual visit, however, some light Sunday afternoon stroll, topped off with a cup of tea you could trot a mouse across. To go to the northwest seeking answers to the many questions about our relationship with paths and landscape is to embark upon nothing short of a pilgrimage, a search for some kind of holy grail that can only possibly be found here. This is where paths become no less than stairways to heaven, and I was genuinely excited by the prospect of seeing the paths soaked in the blood and sweat of those who’d fought for the right to walk them.

The starting point of my north-west pilgrimage had to be the very right of way that’s generally accepted as the birthplace of the modern footpath preservation movement. I’d like to report that, as would befit its historical stature, it’s a glorious hilltop track clambering up to a panorama of eight counties, or, failing that, at least a stony path inching its way up through the mist alongside a peaty burn. It’s neither. In fact, it’s a gentle trot across a golf course, sandwiched between two other golf courses, in one of those outer parts of Greater Manchester that would far prefer to call itself Cheshire. The story, as is the case with nearly all tales of footpath derring-do in this part of the world, is indeed a tale of class war, but not the brawny, horny-handed version of
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
– it’s much more
Keeping Up Appearances
.

For this is Flixton, in the true-blue borough of Trafford, a gin’n’Jag suburb of smart semis, Tudorbethan piles, tanning salons and the languid air of somewhere that doesn’t have to fret itself overly much, except perhaps about a broken nail extension. Slap in the heart of this leafiest of suburbs are the 218 acres of Flixton Park, once common land threaded by numerous well-walked paths and tracks. Today it’s a golf course and public park, its primroses and pansies mathematically spaced and much enjoyed by strolling families and smiling couples. Even the gangs of hoodies are polite and quiet. Yet between these two incarnations as public property, Flixton Park closed in on itself, shut itself away and inadvertently created the hydra-headed monster of the rights of way protest movement.

The Flixton Footpath Battle hissed and spat for three years, from 1824 to 1827. Ralph ‘Vegetable’ Wright provoked it, after making big money in agriculture and ploughing it into the creation of a small stately home, Flixton House, in the first few years of the nineteenth century. This flat, fertile plain southwest of Manchester, a world away from the mills and smokestacks, was already dotted with medieval mansions: Flixton House, and Wright himself, were the Johnny-come-lately neighbours to Shaw Hall (dating from 1305), Davyhulme Hall (c.1150), Newcroft Hall (c.1270) and Urmston Hall (c.1350). Flush with his fine new house and bulging bank balance, Wright fully expected to be welcomed into their drawing rooms, but it was not to be. Old money, as ever, peered imperiously down on new money, and Wright grew increasingly bellicose as their doors continued to remain shut to him. Every Sunday, the big house families would sweep past him stuck in his pew at the back of Flixton’s twelfth-century parish church, as they made their stately progress up to their ancient family boxes at the front. ‘Vegetable’ Wright sat and stewed in the cheap seats, dreaming up ways of getting his revenge.

The parish church, in whose graveyard Wright lies buried within the most massive mausoleum of all, had already acted as the cauldron for Flixton’s petit bourgeois tensions. In 1804, a public appeal was launched to recast the church’s four bells, but such was the urge amongst the local gentry to outdo – and, more importantly, to be seen to outdo – each other, the appeal raised way more than was needed, and it was decided to have eight brand new bells cast for the church instead, at a cost of over £750 (around £60,000 at today’s prices). ‘Vegetable’ Wright ostentatiously paid for the biggest bell of the lot, setting him back £101 12/6. No-one had thought to check that the fabric of the church could take such weighty munificence and, seven years later, the walls fell in. Less than a decade after they were rebuilt, the tower threatened to collapse. It was partially rebuilt, and then declared unsafe again in 1863. This time, it was obvious that the overly heavy bells were the culprit, and they were silenced until 1888, by which time a new and reinforced tower had been built from scratch.

After the first rebuilding of 1814, a row erupted about a stove that had been placed in the church’s chancel for ‘the accommodation of the congregation generally, and the scholars attending Sunday school in particular’. One prominent parishioner, a Mr Norris, objected, but nothing was done, so he persuaded a friend, Conyers Bale, to attempt to prove legal ownership of the chancel by dint of the fact that he was a parish lay rector. This was ignored, so Norris and Bale employed a gang to rip the stove out. The churchwardens sued at the Police Court for trespass and ‘wilful spoil’, and won. Norris and Bale appealed to the Sessions, who overturned the decision, which was then subject to an appeal by the other side and finally settled, nine expensive years later, at the Lancaster Assizes, Bale having turned the charge of trespass back on to the churchwarden for installing the stove in the first place. The great Church Stove Battle, chased through every court and getting a lot of people in a fierce palaver about – quite literally – a lot of hot air, was a prescient pointer to the footpath struggle ahead, for it was evidently the Flixton way of doing things. Looking at the place today, I suspect that little has changed.

When Flixton House was finished in 1806, ‘Vegetable’ Wright acquired, in various parcels, some 15 or 16 acres to go with it. Flushed with the notion that he needed to hone it into a parkland befitting his newly acquired status of gentleman, he sealed his land piece by piece, despite the fact that it was crisscrossed by a network of old paths. Some were little missed, but one in particular, known as the Bottoms, was the only dry path to church for people of all classes on the regular occasions that the nearby River Mersey flooded. The Highways Act of 1815 ruled that a path could only be extinguished by the signed order of two magistrates, but this proved no problem for Wright, who was also on the bench. The odd dinner for fellow JPs (church-stove battler and inveterate litigant Mr Norris being a regular) was held in Flixton House’s gaudy dining room, before some fine port and a footpath closure order slipped in to follow. Oftentimes, he barely even bothered with that perfunctory process, shutting up the paths, even ploughing and planting them with oats, before any official decision had been made.

This was just the opportunity that Wright’s many enemies needed, and when the Manchester Society for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths was founded in 1826 in direct response to the Flixton case, virtually every local bigwig queued up to join. Although a similar organisation had been founded for comparable reasons two years earlier in York, the Manchester one continues to this day. Its considerable funds were used as the basis for the foundation of the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society in 1894, making it by far the oldest extant footpath campaigning group in the world.

The newly formed Society eagerly took on ‘Vegetable’ Wright. Court cases galore ensued, many of Wright’s witnesses being bribed or plied with drink to get them to attend. He tried to raise the spectre that enemies of footpaths always fall back on, namely that the Bottoms path was a hotbed of immorality. To that end he persuaded the governor of Flixton workhouse, William Eccles, to give evidence, which proved perhaps less than helpful to his cause. ‘I think use of the Bottoms encourages vice,’ simpered Eccles in court. ‘I only see disorderly ones going that way.’ He paused, and continued: ‘I once saw Mr Stephenson the clergyman going that way to church.’

After huge legal costs had been racked up on both sides, the ultimate result was defeat for Wright. A delighted party broke into his parkland and walked the paths that had been off-limits for two years. Archibald Prentice, proprietor of the
Manchester Gazette
and a committee member of the Society, arrived to witness the end of the celebrations. Although he wrote that he had been sad to miss the moment when the fences were smashed through and the paths walked once again, he was moved to say that ‘I experienced a higher pleasure in observing the fresh marks of the saw, the little two-feet wide opening, and the newly made track through the tall grass, than such sights might be thought capable of giving.’ So intoxicated was Prentice by the result that he published a 60-page victory pamphlet on the Flixton Footpath Battle, and gave it away with copies of the
Gazette
.

Wright had reaped a tailwind of trouble, but perhaps not quite all of it of his own making. The industrial towns of the north-west had ballooned in size in recent decades (Manchester’s population had risen sevenfold to 150,000 in just 50 years), but the endless boom and expansion had hit its first set of buffers, and times were fearsomely tough. The Napoleonic Wars were fresh in every mind, especially those of the nervous authorities. Manchester was still simmering from the brutal attack of August 1819 that became known as the Peterloo Massacre. A massive crowd, estimated to be around 70,000 people, had gathered in St Peter’s Field in the city centre to hear radical firebrand Henry Hunt speak in favour of sweeping political reform. A jittery set of city magistrates – Ralph Wright amongst them – unleashed the militia on the unarmed demonstrators, whom they scythed through mercilessly. Between ten and twenty people were slain, and hundreds injured. It was a defining moment in British history and, overlain with the lacy snobbery of Flixton society, made for a toxic cocktail.

Despite being blessed with an advanced sense of the melodramatic, even I couldn’t whip up much emotion from the Flixton footpaths as they stand today, however historic their significance. In my head, I imagined a Soviet-style monument to the victory of common access, but instead there’s a very modest little plaque, placed by the PNFS, half-way up a lamp-post, halfway along the Bottoms path. This is the track that caused the kerfuffle in the first place, although the building of the railway from Manchester to Warrington in the early 1870s necessitated its slight straightening. The railway, and the golf course on the other side, have hemmed the path right in. Each side is policed by a massive fence, with the footpath low between them, just wide enough for two people to pass if they angle themselves correctly (if they don’t, Mr Eccles at the workhouse might just have had a point). Walking it, you feel as if you’re in the perimeter noman’s-land of a high-security prison.