The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [124]
Making everything accessible to everyone is the shibboleth in public services, and you can hear the linguistic squirming in just about every pronouncement on the topic. Most of the ROWIP documents beat themselves up about the lack of disabled people, the lack of young people, or the lack of people from ethnic minorities using their paths, and make vague promises to consult various forums and develop various strategies in recompense.
There’s a fine line between being genuinely helpful and plain condescending. Whilst not denying that there is a real barrier between the countryside and many black and brown Britons, it should be remembered that to some cultures, the idea of walking in the country is anathema. Hanif Kureishi said that his middle-class Pakistani family viewed it as utterly demeaning to go ‘traipsing about like peasants’. Most of the disabled people I know would not be content merely because the council have built them a nice level boardwalk going 200 yards into a wood, even if it is adorned with Braille interpretation boards and those speakers that you wind up with a crank handle to release recordings of birdsong or sanitised nuggets of local history. They are all too aware that such trails are a poor, and slightly patronising, simulacrum of the real thing.
I have a blind friend who would push me under the wheels of a passing mobility scooter if I ever took her on such a ‘walk’. She hates feeling that she is on the receiving end of some sort of Victorian paternalism, and I’m sure that such measures would sit firmly in that category. She is, however, the most wonderful person to go on a real walk with, and not because it makes me feel good to see her little face light up with grateful joy in unaccustomed sunlight, but because she comes out with the most staggering observations as we walk. In many ways, they are more visually rich than anything I ever manage: her ability to marshal all the other senses and conjure up a whole picture of where we are is quite breathtaking, and unfailingly accurate. She feels the path’s undulations and its different surfaces, stops to stroke tree trunks and rocks, sniffs and tastes the air for nearby plants, animals or approaching weather, and listens intently to where the echoes fall, the waters rush and the birds crawk. Even on walks that I’ve done dozens of times previously, I’ll see them in a whole new light when I walk with her, a light that seems richer, more vibrant and comprised of many more textures than normal. Walks with her are some of the most totally immersive I’ve had.
Come back Lara Croft, the people in charge of looking after our rights of way network need you. Every part of every process to do with our footpaths is mired in costly, opaque procedure, institutional buck-passing, multi-agency duplication, vacillating shifts in the political priorities of the day, pointless surveys and head-counting, and rabbit-in-the-headlights terror of lawyers and insurance companies. Against all that, it’s a miracle that Rights of Way officers manage to achieve anything at all. Yet they do. But they are going to have to butch up a bit.
The axe is already falling; RoW budgets are being cut by more than half in some cases. The priorities of Powys, so artfully concealed within their Rights of Way Improvement Plan, will probably become the hidden strategy of most local authorities, namely to concentrate on the named and the showpiece paths within their area, at the expense of the rest of the network. There are vague hopes that David Cameron’s much-vaunted ‘Big Society’ will mop