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as I crossed it at a steady two miles an hour. Walking is a gloriously middle-aged pastime, and there’s no shame in that. It sits alongside gardening, silence, gin, olives and classical music as things most of us take time to ripen into. It cannot be forced. Amongst the acres of PR twaddle in the Ramblers’ Association document used to precipitate its glitzy rebrand, there was one tiny glimmer of truth that went entirely disregarded. Asked the question, ‘What one thing could the RA do to attract people like you?’, one focus group member sagely responded, ‘Too young to join. Something to do later in life.’ To the officers of the RA, such thinking is treasonable. To anyone else, it’s practical good sense, and a pretty sharp summary of the true shape of our three score years and ten. ‘The flowers smell sweeter the closer you are to the grave,’ warbled the Beautiful South; it was a line that sang in my soul as I sauntered through the cycle of a British year, drawing limitless inspiration from all that floated by.

None of this is to advocate complacency, though. The threats to our freedom have always been there, and always will be, though they mutate with time from one gruesome ogre to the next. My near-neighbour, the writer George Monbiot, put it to me that, at almost any given moment in our history, Parliament is full of that particular age’s most venal brand of crook. He’s right, and they’ve all had a go at regulating our relationship with the land according to their own worldview and self-interest. Hoggish landowners begat rapacious industrialists begat bloodless technocrats, all of them seeing both the land and the people as units to be shifted as and where they saw fit. In more recent times, the tedious mandarins of the 1970s were elbowed aside by the city boys and estate agents of the Thatcher age. Once they’d got what they came for, they shifted to accommodate the marketing and PR gurus of the Blair–Cameron era to package their greed in ever-glossier assurances and illusions of choice. It’s all PR, and it’s nearly all bollocks.

They too will pass, and fade from the scene. But our paths will not.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Messing with the mind, at Whitchurch psychiatric hospital, Cardiff Photo by Peter Finch

The Noam Chomsky quotations are from www.chomsky.info, May 1995 interview for RBR magazine entitled ‘Anarchism, Marxism and Hope for the Future’.

So many people gave so freely of their time, ideas and special places during the course of writing The Wild Rover. In particular, thanks to Audrey Christie and family; Neil Ramsay and all at Scotways; Geri Coop at IPROW and the delegates at their conference; Brian Nicol, Howard Easton, Ian Henderson and their co-diggers at the splendid Kenilworth Footpath Preservation Group; Sian Barnes and colleagues at Powys Council; Anne Taylor at Lancashire County Council; Kate Ashbrook; Roger Jones; Patsy and Helen Cahalan; Gerry Millar; Father Frank Fahey and the pilgrims of Ballintober Abbey; Melissa Coles; Maura and Martin Walshe at Radharc Na Cruaiche; Anne-Marie Carty; Helen Sandler; Jane Hoy; Niall Griffiths; Tom Bullough; Robert Evans; Tony Coleman; Jeremy Grange; Bill Drummond; Rhys Mwyn; Jack Grasse; Meg Thomas; Peter Finch; Jon Gower; John Trevelyan; Sue Rumfitt; Steve Westwood; Sheila Talbot; George Monbiot; Jon Woolcott; Helen Baker; Clarke Rogerson and the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society; Chris Perkins; Paul Salveson; Helen Parker and Julia Griffin; Sue Parker and Andy Knight; Diana Fenton; Susan and Tony at the YHA Ennerdale; Gill at Plas Dwpa and Jane at Carreg-y-Gwynt; Hero Sumner and the team at the John Clare museum in Helpston; Woody Fox; David Archer; Norma McCarten; Julieann Heskin; Caz Ward; William Evans; Peter Finch; Susan Blakiston; Nick Fenwick; Linda Brown; Paul Woodland; Lou Hart; Andrew Gee, Kirsten Hearn; the two Helens at the Ryedale Folk Museum in Yorkshire; Roger Kidd and the regulars at geograph.org.uk. Apologies to those missing from the list, especially the many illuminating people I encountered on numerous paths (and in a fair few pubs).