The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [121]
You can always tell a lot about any gathering by its fringe of stalls and interest groups. The Ramblers’ Association were there of course, firmly in the thick of the action, but none of the other walking or access organisations. It’s not one big, happy, rambly family. In my after-dinner speech to the conference (the price of my admission), I mentioned visiting the Stockport headquarters of the venerable Peak & Northern Footpaths Society. There was an audible hiss from some quarters, like when the baddie comes down the stairs at a pantomime curtain call. I got a small round of applause for observing that the infamous ‘Hoogstraten path’ in Sussex was not all that interesting; one delegate later told me that he considered the high-profile campaign to be ‘mad’.
Other stallholders included salespeople for the ever-growing forest of municipal paraphernalia growing alongside our footpaths. One company specialises in path-specific gates: choose from the Worcester 2-Way (with ‘the tried and tested Prosafe Self-Closing mechanism’ enclosed in ‘an anti-vandal casing’) or the Chiltern Bridle Gate 2-Way (‘an extra handle is provided so the gate can be converted to a Milton Keynes gate if required’). They also sell stiles, kissing gates, latches, cattle grids, fences, static and retractable bollards, picnic tables and benches made of recycled plastic, and a whole range of barriers, including a strange-looking metal Motorbike Inhibitor (it blocks motorbikes ‘whilst allowing access to pedestrians and users of most sizes of mobility vehicles . . . it is recommended that local groups and disabled ramblers are consulted about the siting and the gap that is most suited to them’). I still can’t quite picture how a mobility scooter can go through a gap that a motorbike couldn’t, and the brochure illustration shows enough space at the sides of the Inhibitor to get a Mini Metro through, but perhaps it’s more impressive in reality. At £231 a pop, or £299 if you want it ‘Polyester Powder Coated in Moss Green or Black’, plus VAT and a 6 per cent increase across the board thanks to the rise in the global steel price, you’d certainly hope so.
Galvanised steel gates have been a boom industry of late, and there are numerous companies churning out variations on the same theme. On paper, they’re bland enough, but in situ, especially wedged into beautiful places and alongside the artisanal gates that they’ve usurped, they become depressingly ugly: a triumph of function over form, the physical manifestation of cut-price thinking. Even their functional victory seems woefully short-lived. Many of the new gates around my village that started this footpath pilgrimage aren’t working properly any more, little more than a year after being installed. The commonest problem is that catches have slipped, broken or seized up, so that the gates don’t snap shut and tend to bounce back open with the slightest gust of wind, leaving farmers with the furious headache of scattered livestock and even greater tension between them and walkers.
Much as it displays the same kind of one-size-fits-all approach, I was strangely thrilled by the next stall, a company flogging signs. It was just so pretty. A display wall of examples – direction and destination indicators, waymarks, pointer roundels, trail-identity badges – was a blast of bold colours, like the walls of a primary school. Looking closer, the sentiment was all quite primary school too: don’t do this, be careful of that, purty pictograms of moo-cows, baa-lambs, bunnies, birds, acorns and flowers. The computer age has made us all far more symbol-savvy, and I was particularly