The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (31 page)

My teenage years hadn’t only been about canal-side fumbles, fags and cider; I’d nurtured a pretty serious Thomas Hardy habit for a while as well. Digging out my old books, there was one I’d never read, and it promised much on the subject of paths.
The Woodlanders
is set around the village of Little Hintock, deep within the ‘fine old English gloom’ of a great Dorset forest. The characters and the paths through the wood are both carefully delineated in a strict order of respectability: on Midsummer Eve, the ‘hoydenish maiden of the hamlet’ (i.e. village bike), the splendidly named Suke Damson, lures dastardly Fitzpiers into her gusset by leading him as she ‘glided on her path, the moon whitening her hot blush away’. When hero Giles Winterbourne is forced by bankruptcy into a distant hovel, the only way his true love Grace Melbury can reach him is along ‘the mossy cart track under the trees which led into the depths of the woods’. No good can come of it, of course, and with grinding Hardyesque inevitability Giles dies shortly afterwards, having taken, all too literally, the wrong path.

Even the way of walking, and not just which route they took, becomes indicative of social status in Hardy’s highly charged microcosm. Grace’s parents fervently hope that she’ll achieve a better class of marriage than to stockman Giles. ‘Fancy her white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail-and-wamble,’ her father laments. His wife’s reply is legendary: ‘She may shail; but she’ll never wamble.’

Shailing, wambling and a whole host of other more earthy activities can be much enjoyed on what is probably my favourite footpath anywhere. Deep down in the south Wales valley of the River Hepste at Sgwd yr Eira, the ‘fall of snow’, there is a path running behind the curtain of water as it tumbles down from an overhang of rock. If you’re feeling particularly bold, you can even dive from the path, through the waterfall, and into the plunge pool below: an intoxicating thrill when the afternoon sun is hitting it square on and you have to launch yourself through a glittering wall of water. The path behind the fall is on the map as a fully fledged right of way, and was a useful short cut for drovers on their way from Carmarthenshire to the east. Cattle, and perhaps pigs and sheep too, would generally have been coaxed through the river, but some must have needed herding along the wet limestone ledge, the crash of the water drowning out the bleating, the squealing and the shouting of the drovers.

Sgwd yr Eira is a popular destination for walkers, probably the most loved of all the magical waterfalls in this narrow limestone belt at the base of the Brecon Beacons. One special ingredient is that it’s at least two miles from the nearest place to park a car, which immediately rules out the vast majority of day trippers. I once spent a baking June afternoon there, lazily cooling off in the plunge pool and idling away hours on a sun-grilled rock platform. A dozen or two people came and went during that time. Most were couples, and nearly all arrived in thunderously bad moods, at least 50 yards separating them, tense and tetchy after sniping rows and numerous wrong turns. Clouds of flies hung over every sweaty forehead. Migraines had started, relationships almost ended, for the paths to the waterfall run through dense forests, and getting lost is a near inevitability. But the magic began to work almost immediately. Wordlessly, each couple would gradually begin to gel back together. Little glances of contrition turned into broad smiles, cooler brows and – before long – furtive searches of the woods for a quiet place to cement their reinvigorated enthusiasm, perhaps even with some of their own bleating, grunting and squealing. A path and water are a fiendishly potent combination, one to stir the most primal of senses, and thank the gods for that.

‘Which way now at Woolwich?’

You’re never alone on a footpath. Really, you’re not. There are whole armies of people just out of view, dedicated to defining it, mapping it, marking it, measuring it, arguing over it, trimming it, cutting it, diverting it, refusing to divert it, promoting it, signing it, defending it and – last and, it seems, somewhat least – walking it. These little slivers of common land, wending their way across the jealousy guarded patchwork of the British countryside, might seem to the casual eye to be the physical embodiment of unchanging simplicity itself, but that is often just tricksy illusion. Our footpath network is as fought over and frenetic, as subject to the whims of fashion and fancy, as any other part of our national infrastructure.

At the front line of the battle are the assorted Rights of Way (RoW) officers employed by almost every local authority in the land. In my own county, there are around 20 of them, although it doesn’t sound quite so many when you remember that this is Powys, bigger than 31 sovereign independent nations, and with over 6,000 miles of public rights of way, the largest total, along with North Yorkshire, of any British local authority. At the other end of the spectrum are various urban unitary authorities, where responsibility for the few dozen miles of rights of way is sometimes part of the parks division or the museums.

Bringing all of these local authority workers together is the Institute for Public Rights of Way (IPROW), an organisation that, in these days of swingeing public-sector cuts, is feeling beleaguered indeed – as are its members out in the civic centres and county halls of Britain. Cutting expenditure on RoW teams is an irresistibly soft target to most politicians, for it is certain to provoke far fewer grim headlines than axing a child-care centre, a few teachers or the weekly dustbin collection.

I was warned, therefore, to expect dark clouds of doom when I attended the recent IPROW conference in Cambridge. This is the annual get-together of local authority RoW officers plus a sprinkling of consultants, speakers and exhibitors. Civic belt-tightening meant that the conference was about half the size of the previous year’s, but there were still around 80 of us there, and with an impressive array of job titles straight out of
The Office
: Rural Network Manager, Rights of Way Improvement Plan Officer, Enforcement Officer, Principal Access Officer, Public Rights of Way Manager, Senior Definitive Map Officer, RoW Team Leader, Access Assistant, Estates Management Officer, Public Rights of Way Warden, GIS Officer, Greenspace Manager, Countryside Access Officer and Strategic Countryside Access Officer, Head of Recreation and Access, National Trail Executive, Projects and Enforcement Team Leader. I would have liked those with ‘Enforcement’ in their job titles to have looked more the part, but everyone seemed to be drawn from a pool of quite kind, vaguely progressive types wanting to make the world a better place, even if that meant having to wear a fleece branded with your county council logo and whatever meaningless slogan they were using these days.

It hit me suddenly that, had things worked out only slightly differently, I’d have been at that conference as a mildly harassed RoW officer from some obscure unitary authority in the Midlands (‘North-East Borsetshire: Right at the Heart –
of Life!
’). There were quite a few folk there who looked like me: balding and greying fortysomethings clinging to the last vestige of their radical youth by still wearing Doc Martens and keeping an earring in. Twenty years ago, when we were tiptoeing uncertainly into our careers, the public sector RoW movement was undergoing considerable expansion, as it has continued to do up to the current era of cuts. People who liked maps, looking stuff up in records offices and a bit of a walk, and whose blood bubbled at the blocked paths they encountered thereon, charged like right-on bull elephants into the growing RoW teams of local councils, certain that they had found both a job and a cause.

One delegate, who’d come to her post after years in a dogeat-dog corner of the private sector, sighed to me that, lovely though many of her fellow RoW officers were, they were a bit hopeless at the nitty-gritty bits of the job, namely standing up to entrenched opposition, be it from long-standing landowners or other vested interests. She singled out a particular delegate for praise. ‘He’s an ex-copper, and he does the job exactly as you’d expect an ex-copper to do,’ she said. ‘He serves a 28-day enforcement order on anyone who’s wilfully blocking a path, looking them straight in the eye as he does it, and explains it in crystal-clear detail. They know that he means it, and he’ll be back to check exactly twenty-eight days later. He has a very high success rate, while many of the others . . .’ She tailed off, but I knew precisely what she meant. Someone who’d come into the job from a marketing background told me that there was a critical need to market rights of way to their potential customers. ‘Doesn’t that already happen?’ I asked. He grunted. ‘Just look at them. Nice people, but not sales folk.’

In an attempt to launch the conference with upbeat aspiration instead of depressed scythe-sharpening, the first session split us into six groups, each one given a random piece of household ephemera, boxed and wrapped beautifully in some sheets of a local authority’s definitive map. Our instructions were simple. We were to ponder the gift and see in just how many ways we could link it with rights of way and the budget pressures of the moment. Nothing was too oblique or tangential; we must think, even dream, the impossible.

Inside our box was a foot-long plastic cable tie – the sort you use to, well, affix one thing to another. There was a sheet of instructions too, but these were ignored as the group charged headlong into freeform thinking about the many and varied ways our footpath network could be compared to a cable tie. They are both flexible, suggested someone. And simple, ubiquitous and reliable, added someone else. And beautiful, I heard myself offer, not something I’d ever thought about a cable tie before. They can be used for business or pleasure, said someone else. You can join two or more together. We were an orgy of positive thinking, but not for long. ‘They’re both taken for granted,’ someone grumped. ‘Remove them and things fall apart.’ ‘If you cut and cut a cable tie,’ someone else chipped in, ‘it becomes less and less useful.’

When it came to the report-back session, our group acquitted themselves very well. I’d presumed that we’d come off quite poorly in the gift stakes, having had to waffle around a cable tie for 45 minutes, but it seemed not. The group with the AAA battery didn’t have much to say (‘we offer an AAA service,’ ‘we must have energy’), while receiving a plaster with a logo on it made another lot bang on about the idea of commercial sponsorship of particular paths. The Anusol Ridgeway, bring it on. More inspiring were the ideas from the group who had the best present, a small Lara Croft doll, which seemed to act like a shamanic totem to them, inspiring them to ever-greater heights of rebelliousness. ‘We need to break rules!’ they hollered. ‘So much of what we do is inflexible, too rigid and becomes counter-productive! We’re too bogged down by legal processes!’ I half-expected the session to end in lawless uproar, a flash mob of Rights of Way officers storming out and barricading Cambridge City Council HQ with their fleeces, but we swiftly went on instead to hear back from the groups who’d received a paper clip and a computer lead. It was a heady start.

Twenty-four hours later, I was still in Lara Croft mode, but the mood had passed. I hovered on the edge of conversations, each as impenetrable as any thicket of brambles across a footpath, about Protocol 178s, Schedule 14s, PPOs and THSs. Eyes were ablaze with passion, laced with a very real fear that not only were many of their jobs on the line, but that the painstaking work that had occurred over the past two decades in building up both the paths network and the public’s affection for it was in danger of being destroyed. And credit where it is due: it seems unquestionably true that the big battles of yesteryear are largely over now, done and dusted by the growing certainty of landowners, politicians and the public alike that our rights of way network is a Good Thing, and that it needs cherishing. They have done their job well. Goodwill, though, will not open paths and keep them accessible. The glory days of the 2000 CROW Act, and its 2003 Scottish sibling, are far behind us now, and their provisions are slowly being chipped away by legal challenges and dubious precedent from vested interests with no apparent budget limits.

You can always tell a lot about any gathering by its fringe of stalls and interest groups. The Ramblers’ Association were there of course, firmly in the thick of the action, but none of the other walking or access organisations. It’s not one big, happy, rambly family. In my after-dinner speech to the conference (the price of my admission), I mentioned visiting the Stockport headquarters of the venerable Peak & Northern Footpaths Society. There was an audible hiss from some quarters, like when the baddie comes down the stairs at a pantomime curtain call. I got a small round of applause for observing that the infamous ‘Hoogstraten path’ in Sussex was not all that interesting; one delegate later told me that he considered the high-profile campaign to be ‘mad’.

Other stallholders included salespeople for the ever-growing forest of municipal paraphernalia growing alongside our footpaths. One company specialises in path-specific gates: choose from the Worcester 2-Way (with ‘the tried and tested Prosafe Self-Closing mechanism’ enclosed in ‘an anti-vandal casing’) or the Chiltern Bridle Gate 2-Way (‘an extra handle is provided so the gate can be converted to a Milton Keynes gate if required’). They also sell stiles, kissing gates, latches, cattle grids, fences, static and retractable bollards, picnic tables and benches made of recycled plastic, and a whole range of barriers, including a strange-looking metal Motorbike Inhibitor (it blocks motorbikes ‘whilst allowing access to pedestrians and users of most sizes of mobility vehicles . . . it is recommended that local groups and disabled ramblers are consulted about the siting and the gap that is most suited to them’). I still can’t quite picture how a mobility scooter can go through a gap that a motorbike couldn’t, and the brochure illustration shows enough space at the sides of the Inhibitor to get a Mini Metro through, but perhaps it’s more impressive in reality. At £231 a pop, or £299 if you want it ‘Polyester Powder Coated in Moss Green or Black’, plus VAT and a 6 per cent increase across the board thanks to the rise in the global steel price, you’d certainly hope so.

Galvanised steel gates have been a boom industry of late, and there are numerous companies churning out variations on the same theme. On paper, they’re bland enough, but in situ, especially wedged into beautiful places and alongside the artisanal gates that they’ve usurped, they become depressingly ugly: a triumph of function over form, the physical manifestation of cut-price thinking. Even their functional victory seems woefully short-lived. Many of the new gates around my village that started this footpath pilgrimage aren’t working properly any more, little more than a year after being installed. The commonest problem is that catches have slipped, broken or seized up, so that the gates don’t snap shut and tend to bounce back open with the slightest gust of wind, leaving farmers with the furious headache of scattered livestock and even greater tension between them and walkers.

Much as it displays the same kind of one-size-fits-all approach, I was strangely thrilled by the next stall, a company flogging signs. It was just so pretty. A display wall of examples – direction and destination indicators, waymarks, pointer roundels, trail-identity badges – was a blast of bold colours, like the walls of a primary school. Looking closer, the sentiment was all quite primary school too: don’t do this, be careful of that, purty pictograms of moo-cows, baa-lambs, bunnies, birds, acorns and flowers. The computer age has made us all far more symbol-savvy, and I was particularly impressed with the various pictograms offered to tackle the age-old problem of shitting dogs. One, which I presume was exhorting people to shovel up the offending heap, makes it look as though they are whacking it with a fly swatter.

Another company offered a product I hadn’t even realised existed: electronic pedestrian counters. These – somewhat inevitably, if for no apparent reason, called ‘eco counters’ – can be placed in special bollards in order to monitor every person walking past, thanks to a ‘pyroelectric lens sensitive to the infrared emitted by the human body’. Or pressure-sensitive pads can be buried in slabs or steps, and the information beamed anywhere via satellite, Bluetooth or GPRS modem. All part of the obsession with monitoring and counting that seems to infect every public agency, as if that in itself were the definition of democracy. You’ll see it if you ever look at the website of a government department or local council: it’s nigh-on inevitable that within seconds of landing on the home page, you’ll be asked to fill in a feedback form about it. Someone, somewhere is being paid to collect these mountains of information. Just how useful is it, on a scale of 1 (pointless) to 5 (essential)? Can I give it ½?