The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [36]
Every inch of access to land and the use of footpaths has depended – and continues to depend – on tiny nuances of law, common practice and precedent, all sifted and nitpicked over in countless court cases. In 1905, a judge had succeeded in declaring that the tracks used since time immemorial by visitors to Stonehenge were not public footpaths, and it was against this kind of backdrop that the much-emasculated 1932 Act finally limped on to the statute book. It also included the idea of councils holding maps of rights of way within their remit (although this had been included in the measure as a way for landowners to document that disputed routes were not public, by doing so they had to show which were), and it was hoped that these would gradually coalesce into definitive maps of the rights of way network. The 1949 Act enshrined this as a legal requirement, and every council had now to map its paths. Some urban authorities, such as Cardiff, Ipswich, Norwich, Plymouth and various London boroughs, have still not managed it 60 years later.
The new Long Distance Paths were, for the most part, carved out of existing rights of way as mapped throughout the 1950s. That in itself was difficult enough, for there was considerable opposition in many places, but when trying to forge a new link path, the problems were massive. For the Pennine Way, the highly charged totem of the new policy as it crested the backbone of England through some of the most hotly contested areas of all, 70 miles of new path were needed, and there were numerous local enquiries stuffed full of the area’s many vested interests. The usual crew of grouse shooters muttered their opposition, but the lion’s share came from water boards, who insisted that walkers would pollute the gathering grounds of municipal supplies. Bearing in mind that the path would take the high ground along the watershed of northern England, this was an argument that ran and ran, even though it was dismissed by expert opinion time and again. And what of other users of the land? As an editorial in the Manchester Guardian put it, ‘does the minister now intend . . . to close all those paths, roads and railways over [the water authority’s] gathering grounds, and if not, why not?’
On Saturday, 24 April 1965, after 14 years of enquiries and a full 30 years since he had first floated the idea in the Daily Herald, Tom Stephenson was the guest of honour at the ceremony in Malham to open the Pennine Way. By now the secretary of the Ramblers’ Association, Stephenson was justly thrilled with his achievement, realised exactly as he visualised it three long decades earlier, as ‘a long green trail from the Peak to the Cheviots . . . just a faint line on the Ordnance Maps which the feet of grateful pilgrims would, with the passing years, engrave on the face of the land’. Strangely enough, Stephenson himself never did the walk in one go; neither did Alfred Wainwright, who produced one of his celebrated guidebooks of the route in 1968. His promise to stand everyone who finished the walk half of bitter in the Border Hotel at Kirk Yetholm is said to have cost him £15,000 in the 23 years from then until his death. Wainwright’s book ends with the weary promise that ‘you won’t come across me anywhere along the Pennine Way. I’ve had enough of it.’ This might be related to the fact that he famously sank to his waist in a peat bog on the Dark Peak, and had to be rescued by a National Park warden. The many boggy mishaps aside, the path even spawned its own bespoke injury,