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standing up to entrenched opposition, be it from long-standing landowners or other vested interests. She singled out a particular delegate for praise. ‘He’s an ex-copper, and he does the job exactly as you’d expect an ex-copper to do,’ she said. ‘He serves a 28-day enforcement order on anyone who’s wilfully blocking a path, looking them straight in the eye as he does it, and explains it in crystal-clear detail. They know that he means it, and he’ll be back to check exactly twenty-eight days later. He has a very high success rate, while many of the others . . .’ She tailed off, but I knew precisely what she meant. Someone who’d come into the job from a marketing background told me that there was a critical need to market rights of way to their potential customers. ‘Doesn’t that already happen?’ I asked. He grunted. ‘Just look at them. Nice people, but not sales folk.’

In an attempt to launch the conference with upbeat aspiration instead of depressed scythe-sharpening, the first session split us into six groups, each one given a random piece of household ephemera, boxed and wrapped beautifully in some sheets of a local authority’s definitive map. Our instructions were simple. We were to ponder the gift and see in just how many ways we could link it with rights of way and the budget pressures of the moment. Nothing was too oblique or tangential; we must think, even dream, the impossible.

Inside our box was a foot-long plastic cable tie – the sort you use to, well, affix one thing to another. There was a sheet of instructions too, but these were ignored as the group charged headlong into freeform thinking about the many and varied ways our footpath network could be compared to a cable tie. They are both flexible, suggested someone. And simple, ubiquitous and reliable, added someone else. And beautiful, I heard myself offer, not something I’d ever thought about a cable tie before. They can be used for business or pleasure, said someone else. You can join two or more together. We were an orgy of positive thinking, but not for long. ‘They’re both taken for granted,’ someone grumped. ‘Remove them and things fall apart.’ ‘If you cut and cut a cable tie,’ someone else chipped in, ‘it becomes less and less useful.’

When it came to the report-back session, our group acquitted themselves very well. I’d presumed that we’d come off quite poorly in the gift stakes, having had to waffle around a cable tie for 45 minutes, but it seemed not. The group with the AAA battery didn’t have much to say (‘we offer an AAA service,’ ‘we must have energy’), while receiving a plaster with a logo on it made another lot bang on about the idea of commercial sponsorship of particular paths. The Anusol Ridgeway, bring it on. More inspiring were the ideas from the group who had the best present, a small Lara Croft doll, which seemed to act like a shamanic totem to them, inspiring them to ever-greater heights of rebelliousness. ‘We need to break rules!’ they hollered. ‘So much of what we do is inflexible, too rigid and becomes counter-productive! We’re too bogged down by legal processes!’ I half-expected the session to end in lawless uproar, a flash mob of Rights of Way officers storming out and barricading Cambridge City Council HQ with their fleeces, but we swiftly went on instead to hear back from the groups who’d received a paper clip and a computer lead. It was a heady start.

Twenty-four hours later, I was still in Lara Croft mode, but the mood had passed. I hovered on the edge of conversations, each as impenetrable as any thicket of brambles across a footpath, about Protocol 178s, Schedule 14s, PPOs and THSs. Eyes were ablaze with passion, laced with a very real fear that not only were many of their jobs on the line, but that the painstaking work that had occurred over the past two decades in building up both the paths network and the public’s affection for it was in danger of being destroyed. And credit where it is due: it seems unquestionably true that the big battles of yesteryear are largely over now, done and dusted by the growing certainty of