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By Root 401 0

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.

Chapter 9

THE STILE POLICE

‘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,