The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [135]
My haughtiness is, of course, tempered by the very real terror that I will become that letter writer. And liking a walk – loving one, in fact – is no guarantee that I’ll avoid the fate. Quite the opposite, it seems, for my year of walking the tracks of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland had shown all too graphically how easy it is to combine the great outdoors with ever-shrinking horizons. It’s quite some feat, in truth, for there is nothing more liberating than progressing through the landscape at your own pace, entirely under your own steam, whilst revelling in both the perfection of nature and the ingenuity of man.
Despite the clouds of doom being whipped up over budget cuts, I’m hugely optimistic about the future of our paths network. Something has fundamentally shifted in the last 20 years: our level of knowledge as to what we have, and an understanding of what it means to us all, have become embedded in a quite new way right across our collective identity. The recent kerfuffle over the sale of English forests has shown quite dramatically just how deep our assumption of access has rooted. It’s thanks to a number of factors that coincided almost perfectly. Two decades ago, there was the sudden increase in named long-distance paths, which sparked much interest and a considerable surge in their usage. Around the millennium, there were the debates about the right to roam and the eventual, and long overdue, measures in the resultant CROW Act of 2000, and its even bolder Scottish twin. Hard on the heels of that came foot-and-mouth, whose blanket bans on walking and access served as the most chilling reminder possible of what we stood to lose without our rights of way network. And since then, barely a Sunday night has been free of some lavish landscape porn on the TV, our countryside showcased in its most coquettish glory to a swelling Elgar soundtrack. Garnish all this with growing localism and environmentalism, together with the power of the internet to bring like minds together, and it has resulted in a far deeper connection that is not going to be jettisoned overnight. Neither is it dependent solely on the amount of public money thrown at it. But we’re British, so we’ll continue to moan and bicker about it, to see loss where there is none and to live in a state of perpetual impending doom, always lurking just around the next corner. It’s what we do best.
Along with footpaths, that is. A year of walking, in every landscape and almost every part of these islands, has been an extraordinary experience, one of the purest pleasures I’ve ever had with my clothes on (though I have of course shed them on one or two remote walks; you’ve got to keep the likes of Nicholas van Hoogstraten secure in their prejudices). My inner map of our islands has been much coloured in, and the glorious reality of their places and people way exceeds anything even the Ordnance Survey have managed. I’d found too that walking is a surefire way to enhance the landscape, for even places that I was used to looking tired or dull through a moving windscreen took on amazing new hues of subtle interest and beauty as I walked by them. Leslie Stephen, founder of the Sunday Tramps, put it thus: ‘Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love of walking not only makes any English county tolerable, but seems to make the charm inexhaustible.’ He’s right. I’ve walked in Hertfordshire, one of my least favourite counties, and it was lovely. So strong is the spell, it might even work for Bedfordshire.
I’m glad too that I waited to do this until well into my forties, for in my younger years, I was in far too much of a hurry to hear the pitch and rhythm of the land, or to wallow in my own insignificance