The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (32 page)

The paths on which you’re likely to be counted, assessed and monitored are not generally the ones that excite your average rambler. They’re often the civic showpiece routes, smooth tarmac or gravel, copious interpretation boards and signs, picnic table stops and designated viewpoints, all opened in a fanfare of photo-opportunity for the mayor, local MP and someone in a polo shirt and trackie bottoms from the health authority. They’re paths that look like a road, so as not to scare folk addicted to their cars.

That said, the National Trails love their people counters too, and have been using them for decades. The Countryside Commission produced a report on use of the Pennine Way in 1971, whose statistics depended much on ‘a photoflux counter’ and a mechanically switched totaliser placed on a gate, both at Edale. Technology was basic: the report admits that when the figures from the photoflux device were compared with ‘visual counts’ over a specific timed period, the electronic device had a counting efficiency of only 60 per cent. Nowadays, technology is hugely sophisticated, but the results might not be much more helpful. ‘The pressure pads count sheep, dogs, cows and sometimes absolutely nothing, perhaps just a heavy downfall,’ one warden told me. ‘They’re really not very useful, in my opinion, but the bosses love them.’

At the IPROW conference, I heard many people express the idea that, with local authority funding drying up, they needed to tap more from health budgets, and this has been a growing tendency over the last decade. I well recall the first time the trend made itself known to me, walking my dog around Edgbaston Reservoir in Birmingham early in the 2000s. It’s a route I’d often done before, but this time new signs had erupted every couple of hundred yards along the path that hugs the water’s edge. Each one had a logo of a big, happy heart and told you how far you had walked from the car park, and how far you still had to go if you were going to do the full circuit. Each one also stated something along the lines of : ‘You are on a Walk. Walking is Good For You. It helps promote a Healthy Heart. Keep Going! Enjoy walking to a Healthier You!’ By the time I’d read this drivel for the tenth time, my blood pressure was soaring.

In fact, paths should be one of the most generously funded arms of local government, so neatly do they fulfil the obsessions and orthodoxies of the moment. Having a walk is good for your health, both physical and mental. It is the ultimate in green and sustainable transport. It gets you out of your little fortress and into a realm where you might bump into a stranger, have quite a pleasant chat and they might not actually try to kill or mug you; it is therefore fabulous for combating loneliness, over-exposure to the
Daily Mail
and for helping foster community cohesion. And by seeing new places (and familiar places from new angles), a walk encourages us to learn about our landscape and our heritage. It’s win-win-win-win with a footpath.

The above paragraph is a précis of just about every local authority’s Rights of Way Improvement Plan (ROWIP), a statutory requirement of the 2000 CROW Act. All authorities dutifully produced these mammoth documents, intended to show what was the current situation in their area, and their ten-year plan for improvements. My local authority, Powys, managed to spin more or less the contents of that one paragraph into a 254-page, A4-sized book. I’ve seen quite a few others, and they all follow the same pattern: acres of big photos, lots of meaningless graphs and pie charts, spurious statistics gleaned from tiny, self-selecting surveys, endless repetition and a cavalier approach to good English (and, in the case of Powys, good Welsh too).

On the plus side, they all promise to make the rights of way network more accessible, open and signposted. Of course they do. In Powys, they have come up with the ambitious target of seeing 80 per cent of the network in unblocked, usable condition by 2017. That might not sound much, but it’s starting from a hideously low base: they state that only about 35 per cent of the county’s footpaths were usable at the time the report was written, around 2005. A couple of years earlier, the Countryside Council for Wales estimated it to be 31 per cent. Bridleways and byways are in better shape, but there are far fewer of them. It’s also starting from the point of Powys’s gargantuan size: there are over 6,000 miles of paths and byways in a county with a population of just 132,000.

The 80 per cent target is bandied around liberally, but other things in the report suggest that they have no intention whatsoever of reaching it. A statistic that baldly contradicts it slips in almost unannounced, and just the once, on page 117: ‘With current base-line capital and revenue management budgets . . . it is predicted to take 38 years to achieve an 80% open and easy to use PROW network.’ Ah. And that ‘does not take into account any legal costs, Definitive Map work or surface management’. Ooh. Then you remember that the report was written in 2005, before the county council lost 6 per cent of its budget in an Icelandic bank and before the cuts. Hold those boots back a while.

Untangle the deathless language, and another more sneaky puncture in the 80 per cent target appears. In the plan, it is repeated again and again that the majority of people would rather see resources put into the improved maintenance of paths that are already open and used, instead of using the money to open up blocked paths. This spurious contention comes from a stark either/or question posed in their consultative survey: the option of working towards both was not offered. ‘The results show that more emphasis needs to be placed on the maintenance of opened routes in the future,’ the report states, and not on clearing the vast backlog of obstructed routes. Yet the vote was split only 55–45 per cent, hardly enough of a majority to command such a clear and long-lasting choice. Perhaps the answer comes from the fact that amongst one sector of the survey, landholders (defined as Powys members of the CLA, NFU and Farmers’ Union of Wales), the result was 89–11 per cent in favour of quietly ignoring blocked paths. As the 266 consulted landholders accounted for a fifth of the entire survey’s constituency, their overwhelming majority was more than enough to swing it their way. Even if a majority in every other interest group surveyed (‘general’, tourist information centres, town and community councils, tourist accommodation providers) voted for the unblocking paths option, the strength and size of the land-holders’ vote was sufficient to carry it the other way. That’s perhaps what you get in an authority where over half of the councillors are returned unopposed. In my ward, there hasn’t been an election since the 1970s. Powys, twinned with Pyongyang.

There’s a high ‘no shit Sherlock’ quotient to these documents too, of course. I can only quote verbatim (the grammar and syntax are all theirs) from the Powys document: ‘The ROWIP consultation highlighted the concerns that people have over access to the PROW network by people with disabilities. Respondents were asked to rate the network in terms of access provision. Out of all the different user groups; walkers, horse-riders, cyclists, motor bikers etc, the PROW network was rated as providing the worst service for people with mobility impairments.’

Making everything accessible to everyone is the shibboleth in public services, and you can hear the linguistic squirming in just about every pronouncement on the topic. Most of the ROWIP documents beat themselves up about the lack of disabled people, the lack of young people, or the lack of people from ethnic minorities using their paths, and make vague promises to consult various forums and develop various strategies in recompense.

There’s a fine line between being genuinely helpful and plain condescending. Whilst not denying that there is a real barrier between the countryside and many black and brown Britons, it should be remembered that to some cultures, the idea of walking in the country is anathema. Hanif Kureishi said that his middle-class Pakistani family viewed it as utterly demeaning to go ‘traipsing about like peasants’. Most of the disabled people I know would not be content merely because the council have built them a nice level boardwalk going 200 yards into a wood, even if it is adorned with Braille interpretation boards and those speakers that you wind up with a crank handle to release recordings of birdsong or sanitised nuggets of local history. They are all too aware that such trails are a poor, and slightly patronising, simulacrum of the real thing.

I have a blind friend who would push me under the wheels of a passing mobility scooter if I ever took her on such a ‘walk’. She hates feeling that she is on the receiving end of some sort of Victorian paternalism, and I’m sure that such measures would sit firmly in that category. She is, however, the most wonderful person to go on a real walk with, and not because it makes me feel good to see her little face light up with grateful joy in unaccustomed sunlight, but because she comes out with the most staggering observations as we walk. In many ways, they are more visually rich than anything I ever manage: her ability to marshal all the other senses and conjure up a whole picture of where we are is quite breathtaking, and unfailingly accurate. She feels the path’s undulations and its different surfaces, stops to stroke tree trunks and rocks, sniffs and tastes the air for nearby plants, animals or approaching weather, and listens intently to where the echoes fall, the waters rush and the birds crawk. Even on walks that I’ve done dozens of times previously, I’ll see them in a whole new light when I walk with her, a light that seems richer, more vibrant and comprised of many more textures than normal. Walks with her are some of the most totally immersive I’ve had.

Come back Lara Croft, the people in charge of looking after our rights of way network need you. Every part of every process to do with our footpaths is mired in costly, opaque procedure, institutional buck-passing, multi-agency duplication, vacillating shifts in the political priorities of the day, pointless surveys and head-counting, and rabbit-in-the-headlights terror of lawyers and insurance companies. Against all that, it’s a miracle that Rights of Way officers manage to achieve anything at all. Yet they do. But they are going to have to butch up a bit.

The axe is already falling; RoW budgets are being cut by more than half in some cases. The priorities of Powys, so artfully concealed within their Rights of Way Improvement Plan, will probably become the hidden strategy of most local authorities, namely to concentrate on the named and the showpiece paths within their area, at the expense of the rest of the network. There are vague hopes that David Cameron’s much-vaunted ‘Big Society’ will mop up the remainder, and that we’ll see groups of volunteers, such as the splendid crew at Kenilworth, popping up all over the country to maintain the paths on their patch. It’s a lovely idea. But they were finding it ever more difficult to do the very straightforward work for which they had been established, simply because the forest of regulation had been growing denser and denser by the month. You cannot have it both ways.

As the cuts deepen, there’s been no shortage of siren warnings against them. The PR machine of the Ramblers’ Association has been cranking out apocalyptic press releases, baldly stating that ‘unless something is done we will see a return of the “Forbidden Britain” of the 1960s when access to the countryside was more of a challenge than a pleasure . . . when today’s cuts take effect at a local level, walking in the countryside will be taken back fifty years, to a time when you were lucky to be able to reach the end of a path without difficulty.’ Absolutely no path is safe, apparently. Adrian Morris, the Ramblers’ Association’s Head of Walking Environment, even warned that ‘we’re truly facing terrible times when simple pleasures, such as a walk with the dog, are under threat.’ Over in the Open Spaces Society, Kate Ashbrook said that ‘the paths will undoubtedly deteriorate and we shall all be the losers.’ Amidst all this unspecific sabre-rattling, the best point has been made time and again by IPROW, that cutting Rights of Way professionals is likely to prove a false economy, for without them, local authorities will end up having to spend far more on legal fees and Counsel. Though that, of course, doesn’t make for such exciting headlines in the local paper as ‘Cuts Threaten Your Dog Walk’.

Of course there is reason to worry, but isn’t there always? It certainly seems so for a particular kind of footpath fundamentalist, ever able to turn the issue of the day into a full-scale red alert that they want us all to be terrified by, furious about, or both. I’m a huge fan of the late Fay Godwin, writer, photographer and past President of the Ramblers’ Association. Her monochrome imagery of the British landscape is some of the finest ever captured, none more so than in her 1990 book
Our Forbidden Land
. Amongst the elegiac images of trashed landscapes and blocked access, the occasional glibness of her analysis sadly detracts from the bigger picture. At the time, the poll tax was the huge bugbear of the day, and this she returns to on numerous occasions, declaring flatly that it will ‘close down many of the village shops which have so far managed to survive’, that it will kill crofting and the entire Hebrides as a viable place to live. AIDS was a new panic button to press too, and she asserts, on the basis of one man’s bizarre evidence to a Commons committee, that polluted seawater can carry and transmit HIV. And she flaps that philistine Thatcherism is about to see off ‘green and thriving’ urban jewels, going into loving detail of three over which the axe was hovering: the Kentish Town City Farm and Camley Street Natural Park in London, and the Kirkstall Valley Nature Reserve in Leeds. Twenty years later, all three are still going, stronger and more loved than ever. So when Tom Franklin, Chief Executive of the Ramblers’ Association, warns us today that ‘in a year or two’s time, when the true affects [sic] of these cuts are realised, Britain’s landscape will have already started to change. Paths will begin to become overgrown, blocked, closed off and walking will slowly become restricted to a few specially designated tourist destinations,’ we should perhaps take it with a cautionary pinch of salt (and a dictionary).

If he’s right, though, and only the showpiece routes are going to survive the cuts, then there is a glimmer of good news, for at the rate we’re going, there’ll barely be a right of way left in the land that isn’t part of at least one named Long Distance Path. Their rise has been stratospheric, from the handful of National Trails set up in the 1950s and 1960s to the 1,200 plus now logged by the Long Distance Walkers Association (LDWA). Some routes were dreamed up to fit a historical theme, some a geographic feature, others were named after local luminaries, either famous and long dead or not-so-famous and just dead. They connect churches, battlefields, rivers, mountains, villages, hill forts, castles, rusty lumps of industrial archaeology, standing stones, real-ale pubs, abbeys and railway stations; in other words, anything that gets a walking Brit excited. From the Abberley Amble to the Ystwyth Trail, via the Kinver Clamber, the Myrtle Meander, the Daffodil Dawdle, the Purbeck Plodder, Offa’s Hyke, the Trollers Trot and the Seahorse/Skipton/Sidmouth Saunter, the options – and the puns – seem endless. Which of the two Limestone Links, four Jubilee Ways or five Millennium Ways do you fancy? The Dales Way, Dales Walk, Dales Celebration Way, Dales Highway or Dales Traverse? And across the OS map they all spread, a colourful riot of blobs, dashes and diamonds. Though still not Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, obviously, the most popular of them all.