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By Root 407 0

up the remainder, and that we’ll see groups of volunteers, such as the splendid crew at Kenilworth, popping up all over the country to maintain the paths on their patch. It’s a lovely idea. But they were finding it ever more difficult to do the very straightforward work for which they had been established, simply because the forest of regulation had been growing denser and denser by the month. You cannot have it both ways.

As the cuts deepen, there’s been no shortage of siren warnings against them. The PR machine of the Ramblers’ Association has been cranking out apocalyptic press releases, baldly stating that ‘unless something is done we will see a return of the “Forbidden Britain” of the 1960s when access to the countryside was more of a challenge than a pleasure . . . when today’s cuts take effect at a local level, walking in the countryside will be taken back fifty years, to a time when you were lucky to be able to reach the end of a path without difficulty.’ Absolutely no path is safe, apparently. Adrian Morris, the Ramblers’ Association’s Head of Walking Environment, even warned that ‘we’re truly facing terrible times when simple pleasures, such as a walk with the dog, are under threat.’ Over in the Open Spaces Society, Kate Ashbrook said that ‘the paths will undoubtedly deteriorate and we shall all be the losers.’ Amidst all this unspecific sabre-rattling, the best point has been made time and again by IPROW, that cutting Rights of Way professionals is likely to prove a false economy, for without them, local authorities will end up having to spend far more on legal fees and Counsel. Though that, of course, doesn’t make for such exciting headlines in the local paper as ‘Cuts Threaten Your Dog Walk’.

Of course there is reason to worry, but isn’t there always? It certainly seems so for a particular kind of footpath fundamentalist, ever able to turn the issue of the day into a full-scale red alert that they want us all to be terrified by, furious about, or both. I’m a huge fan of the late Fay Godwin, writer, photographer and past President of the Ramblers’ Association. Her monochrome imagery of the British landscape is some of the finest ever captured, none more so than in her 1990 book Our Forbidden Land. Amongst the elegiac images of trashed landscapes and blocked access, the occasional glibness of her analysis sadly detracts from the bigger picture. At the time, the poll tax was the huge bugbear of the day, and this she returns to on numerous occasions, declaring flatly that it will ‘close down many of the village shops which have so far managed to survive’, that it will kill crofting and the entire Hebrides as a viable place to live. AIDS was a new panic button to press too, and she asserts, on the basis of one man’s bizarre evidence to a Commons committee, that polluted seawater can carry and transmit HIV. And she flaps that philistine Thatcherism is about to see off ‘green and thriving’ urban jewels, going into loving detail of three over which the axe was hovering: the Kentish Town City Farm and Camley Street Natural Park in London, and the Kirkstall Valley Nature Reserve in Leeds. Twenty years later, all three are still going, stronger and more loved than ever. So when Tom Franklin, Chief Executive of the Ramblers’ Association, warns us today that ‘in a year or two’s time, when the true affects [sic] of these cuts are realised, Britain’s landscape will have already started to change. Paths will begin to become overgrown, blocked, closed off and walking will slowly become restricted to a few specially designated tourist destinations,’ we should perhaps take it with a cautionary pinch of salt (and a dictionary).

If he’s right, though, and only the showpiece routes are going to survive the cuts, then there is a glimmer of good news, for at the rate we’re going, there’ll barely be a right of way left in the land that isn’t part of at least one named Long Distance Path. Their rise has been stratospheric, from the handful of National Trails set up in the 1950s and 1960s to the 1,200 plus now logged by the Long Distance