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By Root 414 0

Walkers Association (LDWA). Some routes were dreamed up to fit a historical theme, some a geographic feature, others were named after local luminaries, either famous and long dead or not-so-famous and just dead. They connect churches, battlefields, rivers, mountains, villages, hill forts, castles, rusty lumps of industrial archaeology, standing stones, real-ale pubs, abbeys and railway stations; in other words, anything that gets a walking Brit excited. From the Abberley Amble to the Ystwyth Trail, via the Kinver Clamber, the Myrtle Meander, the Daffodil Dawdle, the Purbeck Plodder, Offa’s Hyke, the Trollers Trot and the Seahorse/Skipton/Sidmouth Saunter, the options – and the puns – seem endless. Which of the two Limestone Links, four Jubilee Ways or five Millennium Ways do you fancy? The Dales Way, Dales Walk, Dales Celebration Way, Dales Highway or Dales Traverse? And across the OS map they all spread, a colourful riot of blobs, dashes and diamonds. Though still not Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, obviously, the most popular of them all.

The most enthusiastic instigators of new LDPs, though, were the local authorities. When Ted Heath’s shiny new counties and districts came into force in 1974, many of the newly minted councils thought that a fine way to cement their name and identity was to create their own paths, often doing nothing more than circling their own boundary. The same has happened with many of the unitary authorities that replaced them from 1996 onwards. While it could be said that such a practice was a fine civic throwback to the notion of beating the bounds, it somehow brings more readily to mind the idea of a dog indiscriminately pissing up the fences that define its territory. All the more so when you consider that the new councils most enthusiastically pursuing the idea were generally the slightly chippier ones in areas with plenty to be chippy about. How many people ever gave up a week of their lives to walk the Solihull Way, the Barnsley Boundary Walk, the Bridgend Circular, the Langbaurgh Loop, A Coventry Way, the Stevenage Outer Orbital Path (STOOP), the Altrincham Circular, the Rotherham Ring Route, Around Corby, the Doncastrian Way, the Hillingdon Trail, the Taith Torfaen, the Milton Keynes Boundary Walk, the Crewe and Nantwich Circular or the Bolton Boundary Walk (now even more appealing since being taken over by the Rotary Club and renamed the Bolton Rotary Way)?

In local authorities, the paths strategy today remains orbitally minded, though it is literally a case of ever-decreasing circles. These round borough routes, over a hundred miles long in some instances, are now gathering dust on the back shelves, their leaflets long out of print, their monogrammed waymarks vanishing into the undergrowth. For they have been eclipsed by a favourite new toy, the short circular walk. These are routes, anything from a 20-minute leg-stretch to a half-day’s hike, that fan out either from car parks or public transport nodes. The paths are even, clean and lit. They are thick with signage, warnings, interpretation boards, kids’ treasure hunts, dog poo bins and touchscreens (occasionally, these even work). Many of the more ambitious include things that you can download prior to the walk and play on your iPod or GPS as you shuffle around the circuit. They are to walking what Turkey Twizzlers are to cooking.

These bastard creations would be fine were they not greedily snorting up such a large proportion of the steadily diminishing pot of cash, for all that reassuring gadgetry, spoon-feeding and arse-wiping does not come cheap. But we have to do it, you see, is their response, because our survey said so. And it did. All of those Rights of Way Improvement Plans contain variations on this same theme. People told us that they don’t use the footpaths because they’re muddy, or scary, or boring. There aren’t enough toilets, cafés, signposts, floodlights or car parks. They don’t know where the footpath is going. Sort all that out, and of course we’d use them. One day. Maybe.

ROWIP documents have that same tone of voice