The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (33 page)

The most enthusiastic instigators of new LDPs, though, were the local authorities. When Ted Heath’s shiny new counties and districts came into force in 1974, many of the newly minted councils thought that a fine way to cement their name and identity was to create their own paths, often doing nothing more than circling their own boundary. The same has happened with many of the unitary authorities that replaced them from 1996 onwards. While it could be said that such a practice was a fine civic throwback to the notion of beating the bounds, it somehow brings more readily to mind the idea of a dog indiscriminately pissing up the fences that define its territory. All the more so when you consider that the new councils most enthusiastically pursuing the idea were generally the slightly chippier ones in areas with plenty to be chippy about. How many people ever gave up a week of their lives to walk the Solihull Way, the Barnsley Boundary Walk, the Bridgend Circular, the Langbaurgh Loop, A Coventry Way, the Stevenage Outer Orbital Path (STOOP), the Altrincham Circular, the Rotherham Ring Route, Around Corby, the Doncastrian Way, the Hillingdon Trail, the Taith Torfaen, the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk, the Crewe and Nantwich Circular or the Bolton Boundary Walk (now even more appealing since being taken over by the Rotary Club and renamed the Bolton Rotary Way)?

In local authorities, the paths strategy today remains orbitally minded, though it is literally a case of ever-decreasing circles. These round borough routes, over a hundred miles long in some instances, are now gathering dust on the back shelves, their leaflets long out of print, their monogrammed waymarks vanishing into the undergrowth. For they have been eclipsed by a favourite new toy, the short circular walk. These are routes, anything from a 20-minute leg-stretch to a half-day’s hike, that fan out either from car parks or public transport nodes. The paths are even, clean and lit. They are thick with signage, warnings, interpretation boards, kids’ treasure hunts, dog poo bins and touchscreens (occasionally, these even work). Many of the more ambitious include things that you can download prior to the walk and play on your iPod or GPS as you shuffle around the circuit. They are to walking what Turkey Twizzlers are to cooking.

These bastard creations would be fine were they not greedily snorting up such a large proportion of the steadily diminishing pot of cash, for all that reassuring gadgetry, spoon-feeding and arse-wiping does not come cheap. But we have to do it, you see, is their response, because our survey said so. And it did. All of those Rights of Way Improvement Plans contain variations on this same theme. People told us that they don’t use the footpaths because they’re muddy, or scary, or boring. There aren’t enough toilets, cafés, signposts, floodlights or car parks. They don’t know where the footpath is going. Sort all that out, and of course we’d use them. One day. Maybe.

ROWIP documents have that same tone of voice as some stalwart of
Woman’s Hour
trying to talk about urban grime music. They so desperately want to be down with the kids, but just don’t have a clue how. Presented with the choice of a way-marked woodland stroll or hanging out with his mates down the Arndale, almost no teenager is going to skip up to the woods, however many MP3 downloads may be on offer. But still the council officers try, wringing their hands with guilty despair at their own fuddy-duddy whiteness, middle-classness and middle-agedness. One of the very newest local authorities, Cheshire East, formed in 2009, thought that this point was worth highlighting in boxed large text in its ROWIP: ‘It is very difficult to find info on public rights of way in the area on the internet. If you want to increase the usage of public rights of way in the area by young people then it is absolutely vital that this changes.’ Gosh yes, you can see their point. I just googled ‘rights of way Cheshire’, and it took a full 0.18 seconds to come up with the council’s own lists and maps, the Discover Cheshire website, the exhaustive database of the East Cheshire Ramblers and a Wikipedia entry entitled ‘Recreational Walks in Cheshire’ with scores of links leading from it.

These same faultlines are developing in some of the pressure groups and charities too – even in the hallowed halls of the Ramblers’ Association. In 2009, it spent £35,000 rebranding itself in lower-case postmodernism as the ramblers. Losing your capital letters is rarely a good thing. It began with companies that wanted to appear fluffy yet trendy, achingly hip yet responsible eco-capitalists: howies, purveyors of organic surf-dude wear as worn on the waves of W11, were one of the first on trend. As were innocent smoothies, palatable if pricey little bottles of puréed gunk, but almost guaranteed to come up again if you made the mistake of reading the label, with all that ‘drink me, i’m really tasty and good for you’ simpering. Tellingly, both companies were namechecked as amongst those he most admired by David Cameron, in one of his first big speeches after becoming Conservative leader (he was speaking at the Google Zeitgeist conference, no less; the words ‘pig in shit’ really spring to mind there). Even more tellingly, howies are now owned by Timberland, innocent by Coca-Cola, and the lower-case bandwagon has had its windmill ripped off and replaced with a turbo engine, courtesy of rebrands such as npower, bp and e-on. And, er, the ramblers.

Leading the charge for the new identity was Tom Franklin, appointed as Chief Executive of the still-capitalised Ramblers in autumn 2007. The whole process has become inextricably identified with him, for the rebranding was his baby and driven through on the back of surveys and focus groups that, as with the councils, were strategically nipped and tucked to tell everyone precisely what he thought they needed to hear. Respondents (it’s not said who they were) were asked what they associated with the RA, which produced a predictable roll call of ‘retired’, ‘walking boots and sticks’, ‘men with beards’ and ‘anoraks’. Asked how they should attract members, the unqualified responses included ‘modernise’, ‘make it more trendy’, ‘do what they can to make me aware of their existence’ and ‘change their outward appearance’. Shown the old logo, a simple but striking boxed pictogram of a hillside with ‘The Ramblers’ written above it, the mystery respondents chorused as one: ‘it doesn’t mean anything to me’, ‘it looks a bit cheap’ and ‘it’s dated/old-fashioned’. Bullseye!

None of this should have surprised the RA, for Franklin’s background is steeped in this kind of stuff. Student Labour politician, Blairite cheerleader and party researcher, he seemed to be heading straight for the Commons and a smooth ministerial career, having become a councillor in Lambeth at the age of 24 and the leader of the council at 30. A newspaper profile at the time quoted an ex-boss of his: ‘He cares about poverty and disadvantage, but he will be ruthless to get what he wants, and he is very ambitious. This isn’t the end of the story.’ It was, however, the end of Labour’s rule in Lambeth, for two years later, in 2002, they lost control for the first time in three decades and Franklin became Chief Executive of Living Streets, the urban-walking campaign that had begun life in 1929 as the Pedestrians’ Association. From there it was a short hop to the top job in the RA. It’s not all been politics and the voluntary sector, though; he spent a few years too in the real world. As a PR executive.

It shows. The new logo, a stylised lower-case letter ‘r’, will, according to the report, make people say, ‘Who’s that? The Ramblers? Wow!’ as it is ‘a radical step . . . desirable to make people completely reassess what the Ramblers is about’. If you think that’s exciting, just wait for the strapline that accompanies the logo: ‘at the heart of walking’ (still no nasty, spiky, unfriendly capital letters). This, apparently, is ‘relevant and motivating’, ‘gives the sense of a charity’, has ‘emotional warmth’ and is ‘effective in compensating for, or opening reappraisal, of preconceptions’.

It’s possible that the membership would have just about swallowed this guff had the rebrand not precisely coincided with something of a financial and organisational meltdown, as well as a catastrophically malfunctioning new computer membership database. Discontent rumbled like a summer storm, and broke out in a group calling itself the Concerned Ramblers. Brows were furrowed, meetings held, a website set up, the press alerted, and at the RA’s General Council in April 2010, two of the ringleaders got themselves elected to the Board of Trustees.

Their launch document, ‘The Ramblers in Crisis’, spelled out their complaints: the group, they said, ‘is composed of truly concerned members of the Ramblers who want to see a restoration of traditional values, coupled with a forward look which will attract new members to the Ramblers’. By traditional values, they may have meant national service and birching, but narrowed it down more specifically to a return to more active campaigning on clearing blocked paths and re-opening lost ones; they claim that ‘clear moves to downgrade the importance of these policies have been made in the last few years.’ The priorities of Tom Franklin – attracting more younger people, folk from disadvantaged backgrounds and ethnic minorities, running many more urban walks and groups, even joining up with gay walkers’ societies – are just not the priorities of folk who live and ramble in the leafy lanes of suburban Britain. It’s pretty certain that not many of the Concerned Ramblers were to be found on the recent RA walk around Banksy’s graffiti sites in Shoreditch.

Inevitably, the Concerned Ramblers became slightly drunk on their own invective. Stepping up a gear, they let rip in the authentic language of fully capitalised Ramblerhood: ‘A nambypamby tendency led by the CEO to talk about “the walking environment” rather than rights of way, footpaths and freedom to roam has developed.’ It ‘is clear is that the CEO has no business running an organisation which purports to be democratic’ and that ‘management . . . is contemptuous of our democracy and unwilling to share problems with the membership.’ The minutes of a meeting between the rebel group and the RA’s trustees include this even more arch complaint: ‘And then there was Tom’s presentation at General Council 2009 – the last slide with a supposed Darwin quotation from
On the Origin of Species
– about change in evolution – whereas in fact the quotation did not come from
On the Origin of Species
, was not written by Darwin, did not represent a correct principle of evolutionary theory and anyway the same principles don’t apply to organisational change.’ I can imagine that would have made Tom Franklin absolutely furious. Not so much the opposition, but the fact that they thought his sleek PowerPoint presentation was a slide show.

The unedifying spectacle rolls on, each side hunkering a little further into its own fortress of intransigence. Savage staff cuts, particularly in the Welsh and Scottish offices of the RA, have resulted in numerous calls for the RA north and west of the border to break away from the London headquarters, but the situation’s no happier in England. This battle for the soul of Britain’s foremost walking organisation, just as it celebrated its 75th birthday, has been repeated, to some extent or other, in the National Trust and the Youth Hostel Association too, the other cornerstones of an RA member’s holy trinity. These battles are always presented as reactionaries versus radicals, but in truth, it’s a clash of almost equally conservative orthodoxies: a fussy obsession with hierarchy and tradition in the one corner, and a smug, metropolitan authoritarianism in the other. I can see both sides. But I don’t fancy joining either of them.

An ancient holloway in the Olchon valley, Herefordshire

It was the overpowering whiff of gin that hit first, especially as it was not long after eight in the morning. The source of the smell, a proper Borth
grande dame
wrapped in a shabby kimono, gazed blearily at Mary and me. ‘Ah, good morning,’ she slurred. ‘You have company today, I see. And good morning to you too.’ She nodded to the film crew standing behind us, as if this kind of thing happened every day. We all stayed frozen in our positions for a good ten minutes, as Mary and the kimono lady chatted animatedly, even though her pickled logic made no discernible sense. I was fascinated by the movement of her dressing gown, which kept slipping down to reveal acres of leathery embonpoint, before she’d haul it back into place with a rattle of her many bangles and a throaty cough. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Emyr flick the switch on the camera; the ramblings of a drunken madam, while potentially worthy of the Christmas out-takes tape, were not going to make the final cut.

As we walked away, I asked Mary why she made such an effort with someone who’d been practically incoherent and had most likely already forgotten that we’d called. ‘I’m probably the only person she’ll see all day, you know,’ she replied. ‘It’s really important to have just that little bit of human contact.’ Mary is the postwoman in Borth, an old mid-Wales fishing village strung out between the sea on one side and a peat bog on the other. Her round, of nearly 500 addresses, is the village’s one long street, ruler straight, permanently windswept, and about a mile and half long. I’d wanted to paint a picture of proudly eccentric Borth, and thought that tracking the postie, on what must be one the most difficult rounds anywhere, would be a good way to do it, for none of the houses, their now separated annexes or the little cottages filling tiny courtyards and salty alleys behind, has a number. Everyone’s address is Name of House, High Street, Borth.

It was her job as a postwoman that inspired many of the observations of Flora Thompson, author of the
Lark Rise to Candleford
series. The Oxfordshire footpaths were her research ground, for it was there that she saw all life parading by, picking up titbits of gossip as she went. The same paths that echoed to the sound of men crashing and laughing their way to work took on a whole new character in the evening, or at the weekend, when lovers ‘would link up, arm in arm, and saunter along field-paths between the ripening corn or stand at stiles, whispering and kissing and making love until the dusk deepened’.

I think of that morning with Mary often, as I walk the dog along some of our old postman’s paths. Some days, the real postie passes me on the way, the blur of a wave through the wind-screen as he hurtles around the lanes in his Vauxhall Combo. The paths, with their still too-new fingerposts, spider out along the valley, from door to door (or ex-door in the case of the many roofless shells in the forestry). It’s this that upsets one farmer in particular. He remembers the postman walking along them, bringing not just the mail but news, views and red-hot scandal. Now he keeps finding startled ramblers edging nervously past his kitchen window, and they can hardly get away fast enough.

Our network of paths is as much an industrial relic as any bit of rusty old winching gear on a canal bank. Paths are spare and lean, not wasting a moment as they find the best way through for the ghostly legion of posties, farmers, miners, traders, priests, tramps, quarrymen, gypsies, milk maidens and factory workers who scuffed them deep into the earth. That we can still trace them and, for the most part walk them, is something of which we should be inordinately proud.

How our needs have changed though. These workaday paths of sweat and grease are now our leisure lifelines. We escape to them, seek solace from them, shut out the gibber and bleeps of the modern world on them. Most of all, we walk them to rid ourselves of the all-pervasive car, something that has changed the landscape, and our relationship with it, far more comprehensively than the enclosures ever managed. Just a few hours walking off-road makes re-encountering traffic such a shock, for it brings home the brutality of the culture on which we’ve become so hooked. As my year of walking progressed, I became ever more fascinated by how different were the places that you could still only reach by path, and I started to steer my routes to seek some of them out.

Railway stations with no road access have a very singular appeal. There’s a holiday jaunt feeling at Berney Arms in the Norfolk Broads, and a Buchanesque sense of foreboding at Corrour station, on Rannoch Moor in the Highlands of Scotland. Just down the road from me is Dyfi Junction, where the mid-Wales line splits north and south. It is just two platforms in the middle of a peat bog, accessed only along a track that soon degenerates into a path, waders and sea-birds suddenly squawking into the air as you pass by. It is also where, for at least 1,500 years, the main ancient kingdoms – and the counties, still – of Wales have met, where the mountains of the north meet the rolling greenery of the south, the scattered hill farms of the east look out over the sea of the west. The beating heart of Wales is a bog-ridden railway station that almost no-one ever uses.

For an even more surreal experience, thanks to its place in the coat-tails of the suburbs, catch a train to Middlewood station, on the line between Manchester and Buxton. Never has a station been so well named, for it is indeed in the middle of a wood – and that’s it. No car park, no nearby road, just footpaths and a cycle route radiate out from the platforms, quietly slipping through the trees to who knows where. Just south of the up platform, the Norbury Brook tumbles down a waterfall. Once the train has departed, the sound of the hissing water is all there is to hear. It is the most unearthly, and quite beautiful, experience, and transforms getting a busy suburban train out of Piccadilly and Stockport into a trip on the Hogwarts Express.

Pubs to which people have no choice but to walk are also very special. Folk arrive in a car at a pub, they often stay in their own impenetrable huddle; a reliable rule of thumb is that the amount of fun to be had in a pub is in inverse proportion to the size of its car park. Two of my best pub sessions ever took place in the Isis Tavern, on the Thames Path at Oxford, and the Turf Hotel on the Exe estuary in Devon, both inaccessible by car. It produces a rare, convivial atmosphere, one where everyone is on the same level and is already fairly relaxed when they arrive. I’m yet to manage a pub crawl around the remoter off-road outposts of Scotland, but it’s extremely high on the to-do list. The same with churches, and there are many of these, their sanctuary appeal augmented by the fact that you can only walk to them. The fields of Norfolk are particularly stuffed with fine examples, as are the empty hills of the Marches, albeit of a far humbler variety. England’s smallest church, at Culbone in Somerset, is an exquisite stop on the South West Coast Path, as is the imposing hilltop St Martha’s on the Pilgrim’s Way near Guildford.

For the full auto-detox, you can always rely on Venice, of course. The city has charms piled sky-high one on another, but a delight that has sharply increased in recent decades has been its place as a cloister away from the car. As soon as you leave the car parks of the Tronchetto, or the bus depot at Piazzala Roma, you step into a parallel world where the car has evaporated as if it never existed. And not just the physical vehicles themselves, but their plentiful paraphernalia too: the signs, road markings, traffic lights, junctions, noises, smells, the background levels of angst and anger, all joyously absent. You don’t even much register it at first, for the city layers on the intoxications with such relish that the absence of cars doesn’t compete with the milky turquoise canals, crumbling courtyards and dazzling light of the Serenissima. You notice it when you leave, though. The dream shatters, the bubble bursts as you are spat rudely back into the real world and its slavish addiction to the internal combustion engine.

To a tourist, the lack of cars in Venice is one of its most thrilling ingredients, though we’re not, of course, prepared to live without the conveniences cars bring. For the dwindling number of Venetians (the population has now fallen below 60,000, a third of the number who lived there in 1950), it looks far from easy. Get up early, before the daily
acqua alta
of tourists surges through the squares, and you see the gristle and bone of the city flexing itself with a spare efficiency rarely thought of as a particularly Italian trait. Chugging up to the quayside will be flotillas of boats, each stacked with sacks of aubergines and lemons, whole sides of pig and calf, boxes of wine, beer and luminous Aperol, vats of olive oil and vinegar, fridges, cookers and gas bottles, before a small army of men whisk their bounty away on trolleys and carts into the still-drowsy streets. Like a well-choreographed ballet, just seconds after the last one has left, the first tourist parties of the day arrive on gondolas and vaporetti, laughing and pointing their cameras at everything that moves, and everything that doesn’t. Another Venetian day is born.

The daily physical struggle to oil the wheels of this capricious machine has some distinct benefits. People-watching over a coffee or a glass of prosecco is one of the finest sports offered by any Italian city, but in Venice you are rewarded by the sight of some of the finest, fittest specimens around. Young Italian stallions, surgically removed from their beloved scooters and cars, display all of the same swaggering bravado that they employ behind the wheel, but here it is forced out in the open, into a far grander arena, and they rise magnificently to the occasion, manhandling carts, barrows and vast boxes with an effortless panache. Young women too: lissom dark-eyed lovelies flick back their hair as they glide carts of laundry five times their size across
piazze
and
campi
– there is no need for gym membership in Venice. Even the older folk keep up, as they must. Over a quarter of the city’s population is elderly, a higher proportion than across Italy as a whole, and it’s easy to spot the lifelong inhabitants. I admired two grey-haired denizens bouncing a boxed 42-inch plasma TV up and over a bridge, even though it overhung their tiny trolley by a foot and a half on each side. The typical Venetian old lady is elegantly coiffed, immaculately turned out and with legs as thin as a sparrow, save for her knotted calves of pure muscle from 70 years of step aerobics.

These tiny little oases in the petrol fumes are a gorgeous anachronism now, turning their very carlessness to an advantage, but for some places it’s been their lingering death knell. What happened when the tarmac never came? When the rutted byways, bridleways and age-old footpaths spoking out from every village somehow missed metalling and transformation into brave new roads? This was a more common phenomenon than you’d imagine, and it happened on some pretty substantial routes: the old Oxford–Cambridge main road, for example, was only sporadically tarmaced, and since the 1930s has been gradually reduced to the status of country lanes and footpaths. Villages en route quietly shrivelled and died.

This happened too in the Northamptonshire village of Faxton, a handful of miles to the south-west of Kettering. It was never a major settlement, but Faxton was a parish, with a manor house, two or three good wells, fish ponds, a village green, a few farms, cottages and a row of eighteenth-century almshouses. It really only had one moment in the sun, when King Charles I’s soldiers were quartered there the night before the Battle of Naseby.

At the south-western corner of the green, the plain little church of St Denys, with its odd double belfry instead of a tower, had a Norman doorway and font. In this county of often extravagant churches, its lack of ornamentation – Arthur Mee described it as ‘plain unto nakedness’ in his 1945 County Series book on Northants – was offset only by a florid memorial inside to Sir Augustine Nichols, the Lord of the Manor and Justice of the Peace, who died suddenly on 3 August 1618, the night before he was due to officiate at an Assize Court in Kendal, Westmorland. Rumours that he was poisoned by the lover of one of the men he was due to try – and, given his fierce reputation, probably hang – the following day have persisted since.

Faxton was never an especially blessed place. Exposed on a windy hillside over 400 feet up, the winters were especially punishing. The plague wiped out most of the village inhabitants when the Lord of the Manor fled here from his London abode to escape the disease – unfortunately, bringing with him a servant girl who was already infected. The manor house burned down, after a Faxton farmer’s ill-treatment of a gypsy had brought a curse upon the whole village. In 1841, the Census recorded 108 residents. By 1901, this had dropped to 37. The tide was going out, and it wasn’t coming back.

The little church hosted its final service just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and was demolished completely in 1959. Whispers circulated throughout local villages that, in its deconsecrated two decades, St Denys’s had been used by practitioners of black magic, and this is said to have hastened the decision to raze it to the ground. The perishing winter of 1947 was the final straw for most of the village’s beleaguered inhabitants, for it wasn’t just the roads passing Faxton by, but mains electricity, gas and water too. Nor was there ever a shop, pub or school. In the early 1960s, Mrs May Bamford, Faxton’s last inhabitant, finally succumbed, and left.