The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [2]
Once, my dad told me that we were all going on a walk, and that I could choose where. Of course, I rushed to the map to pick somewhere that looked interesting, and fastened immediately on the Clee Hills, midway between our home in Kidderminster and the Welsh border. ‘Are you sure?’ Dad said. ‘It’s a bit grim.’ His job often took him out that way, and he’d come back with stories of dribbling inbreds and ancient feuds. Which is almost certainly exactly why I wanted to go there.
Stubbornly, I refused to change my mind, and, good to his word, Dad packed us all into the car, grumbled only slightly, and set off for Clee. I can’t remember much of the walk, save for some filthy quarry tracks and a burnt-out 54-seater coach halfway up a hillside, the grass scorched and still smelling of petrol. As we stood, rather nervously, looking at it, someone pointed out the black sky heading our way. About thirty seconds later, a biblical deluge of hail, with balls of ice big enough to bruise, exploded over us. I wasn’t asked to choose a walk again.
Mind you, Dad had some pretty leftfield ideas of his own as to what constituted a good walk. When the West Midland Safari Park opened, we were living on a new estate only a few hundred yards away. There was great excitement in the area at the opening of something so thrilling on our doorstep; in school, competition was fierce as to who’d yet been. Those that had would swan in, flamboyantly showing off their souvenir pencil case emblazoned with a lion. The rest of us would crowd round the lucky beggar, and pump them for titbits about the animals, the amusements, the food and whether their car aerial had been snapped off by a baboon. I couldn’t wait to go, and kept begging my parents to take us there. The answer was always no, qualified with things like ‘just look at the queues’ or ‘we’ll wait until the crowds have died down’, rather than the more unpalatable truth that it was because money would have to be spent.
We must have all nagged pretty thoroughly, because Dad one day announced that we were finally going to the Safari Park. I very nearly combusted with excitement. At last, I was going to be able to hold my head up high at school, and join in the exclusive conversations about whether we preferred giraffes or tigers. Off we walked down the road towards the entrance, before suddenly turning off too soon and heading instead up to the perimeter fence. We then spent hours, largely in the rain, being frogmarched around the park’s outer limit, peering through the fence at occasional intervals and trying to work out if that distant blur was a cheetah or a leopard. Or perhaps an Austin Allegro.
Only gradually did the realisation dawn that some paths were allowed, and some weren’t. As a child, I roamed as free as I dared, by bike and on foot, out into the woods and fields around the town, along canal and river tow-paths, country lanes and muddy bridleways, with no thought as to whether it was officially sanctioned or not. Occasionally, I’d get shouted at by someone, but that happened most days anyway, so I thought nothing of it. Thanks to my growing collection of Ordnance Survey (OS) Landranger maps, I was soon aware of what the little lines of red dots and dashes meant, that these were official rights of way, as intrinsic a part of the Queen’s Highway as any trunk road or motorway. Learning that was fascinating, and tracing their route across the map and on the ground was a joy, but it necessitated a loss of innocence that would never return.
These rights of way have only been marked on OS maps for the last fifty years (and only in their entirety for the last twenty-five or so), but today, they are unquestionably the main reason that anyone still buys paper versions of the Landrangers (1:50 000) and