The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [133]
I first heard of the place as a result of a tangential google. What I was looking for, I can’t remember, but somehow I ended up in slack-jawed amazement reading numerous threads and debates on the Mawsley Village Forum. If ever there was proof that the internet is a fabulous way to talk to people far away, but a terrible way to talk to your near neighbours, this was it. Intemperate and inebriate rants, passive-aggressive posturing, unfounded accusations, grudges, whingeing and A-grade curtain-twitching filled screen after screen. The topics that proved most combustible were the predictable roster of dogs (and their shit in particular) and everything to do with cars, especially parking. I hadn’t realised that there were quite so many ways in which to get absolutely bloody furious about where and how you leave your car, but the Mawsley Forum soon put me right on that. Even reading it, I could feel my blood pressure soaring, so God knows what it must be like for the poor sods grinding the stuff into their keyboards at their flatpack desk in their flatpack house.
To be honest, I was hoping to make a cameo appearance in the Village Forum myself. There had been a couple of threads headed with things like ‘WHITE VAN JJ52 HDG – WHO HE?’, posted by upright Mawsleyans who had seen someone they neither knew nor liked the look of in their precious paradise, and wanted to alert everyone else to the fact. Some visitors made it into the threads just because they’d hung around a little bit too long, had said hello to some children or had parked where they shouldn’t have (a capital offence if Mawsleyans had their way). And I’m extremely disappointed to report that, despite parking right outside the One Stop shop and leaving my van there for an entire Saturday afternoon, despite daring to walk around Mawsley in broad daylight while being guilty of not wearing an England shirt on day one of the World Cup, despite being an unaccompanied bloke in his forties and despite even writing down the odd note in my notebook, no-one felt the urge to cyber-snitch on me. I was gutted. Should have parked in the ‘RESIDENTS ONLY’ spaces, I now realise.
Mawsley Village, and its growing number of compatriots, are the Tesco Value version of Prince Charles’s model town at Poundbury in Dorset, somewhere that he loves to believe is as organic as his biscuits. It isn’t. Poundbury is a chemical compound, a sub-urban Prozac, designed to smooth away the edges of reality into a no-peaks, no-troughs azimuth. Poundbury and Mawsley are not bad places, and some of the houses look genuinely lovely, but in order to function, they have had any potential surprise or spontaneity surgically excised from their DNA.
Paths come a long, long way behind roads in Mawsley. There is an old bridleway slicing the very corner of the development, and it was good to see a mum and two kids enjoying it on their bikes, their crash helmets glinting in the sunshine. Less welcome, but more Mawsley, was the couple who nearly mowed me down with a quad bike on the bridleway that brought me back to the village from nearby, long-dead Faxton. And at the northern end there are some meadows into which a path – actually, it’s a fully fledged pavement – meanders for a couple of hundred yards. Judging by the comments on the Village Forum, nearly all of Mawsley’s thousand-strong population have moved here from towns and cities for their slice of country life, and pavements across fields is as near as they dare get.
The nearest thing to a village green is, naturally, the central car park, around which