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By Root 404 0

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