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By Root 418 0

and it’s in marked contrast to the nerdy competitiveness on some of the upland trails. They are also the paths that most easily lend themselves to sensual suggestion. ‘Footpaths are our routes to a licensed intimacy with the landscape, to a carnal knowledge of nature,’ wrote poet Kim Taplin, and it is far easier to appreciate her point in a luscious water-meadow than a force nine gale on the side of a craggy fell. I remembered the steamy fertility of the path through the Undercliff, with the sea plashing gently far below, but walking through the landscape in which I’d grown up reminded me too of my clunky schoolboy attempts at seduction, most of which seemed to occur on out-of-sight waterside paths.

There was the Severn, of course, but rather more frequently, it was on the extensive Midland network of canal towpaths that I, and many of my mates, had our first snogs and gropes. Before they were transformed by ersatz waterside apartments, the canals were semi-derelict threads of illicit possibility – not just sex, but bottles of cider, ciggies, a much-prized joint if someone had managed to nick a tiny blim from their older brother. They formed an alluring no man’s land, beyond the grumpy rules of adulthood. Our Narnia, our Secret Garden, was reached through a broken archway in a Victorian wall, through muddy puddles and thickets of nettles.

The possibility of sex, even if it came only in finding some jettisoned copy of Forum on the towpath, raised also the possibility of danger. Paths anywhere could be tainted with this, but none more so than the towpaths or the alleys, snickets, ginnels and shuts that twisted their way through every urban wilderness. The reputation is still there today. Although you are far more likely to be flashed at or felt up on the Tube or in a motor-way service station, it is paths that are instantly demonised on the thankfully rare occasions that something awful happens on their route. Even when it hasn’t, siren voices still demand the closure of urban paths, just in case. A favourite place for kids to gather and let off steam is enough to bring on the hysterical opprobrium, for who knows what they might get up to if we don’t put a stop to it now?

This is the Nicholas van Hoogstraten mindset, the idea that paths are places only for flashers, perverts and reprobates. It’s the golfer-rambler split again too. Walking paths, themselves a penetration of an otherwise unattainable landscape, can indeed be a woozily erotic experience, and who’s to deny that bubbling over perhaps into quiet coitus in a shady nook? Chances are it won’t, but no harm in letting the possibility carouse through your veins. Perverts, say the men who do the decent, normal thing by shagging their secretaries in Premier Inns just off the M1, and getting the boys from the golf club to cover for them. What kind of weirdo gets his kicks that way when there are five lap-dancing clubs in the vicinity and two pages of escort ads in the evening paper? The kind who’s too tight to pay, that’s who. Thinks sex is free! Bastard.

In an age much less brutally sexualised, the paths were where you went courting, and waterside strolls were the most romantic of all. To writers like Henry James, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, E. M. Forster, Flora Thompson and Edward Thomas, paths were used as both settings and metaphors for erotic charge. In many of his works, most famously Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence made much of the connection between illicit trespass on land and forbidden pleasures of the body. And in the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, the public paths were often the venue for idle, hopeful dalliance. Almost all of the various courtships in Far from the Madding Crowd – its title even tailor-made to the theme – take place on paths, such as the ‘sunken groove between the embowing thicket’ where Gabriel Oak lures Bathsheba in order to warn her against Sergeant Troy.

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,