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By Root 370 0

– you could easily walk the entire trail without any kind of map, and you can imagine how hard that is for me to say. Any junction, be it of paths, or of paths and roads, was signed, the black-armed wooden Ridgeway signs efficiently directing you from one encounter to the next, augmented by finger posts and even the odd daubed tree adorned with the trail’s acorn symbol and a reassuring arrow to keep you going in the right direction. Every kind of path was also colour-coded on the signs and laminated maps that appeared every few miles, for even the Ridgeway itself is a succession of different kinds of path welded together into one. The colour scheme quickly gets absorbed into the brain:

white for permissive paths, not actual rights of way. This didn’t apply to any of the Ridgeway trail itself, just some of the side routes branching off.

yellow for a footpath, the bedrock of the trail. Two feet good, four feet (or two wheels) bad.

blue for a bridleway, a track usable by horses and push-bikes too. Bikes far outnumber horses these days, and I can well imagine that there are frantic meetings in council offices up and down the land as to what new name they can come up with for a bridleway to indicate this.

maroon for a restricted byway, a new category introduced by the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act and enthusiastically taken up on the Ridgeway. This enabled local authorities to keep a route’s age-old byway status, while banning the quad-bikers and off-roaders who were enraging the ramblers and horsey types.

a fiery orange for a B.O.A.T. (Byway open to all traffic), sub-divided yet again into B.O.A.T.s seasonally closed to motor traffic and those open all year.

So swiftly absorbed are these different categories, so often do you see visual reminders of what category you are currently walking and what category are the many side routes, and so much time do you have to ponder these as you go, that they soon burrow deep down into your thinking and break out in one of the many symptoms of Trail Fascism, an affliction it is almost impossible to resist. Yet resist it you really should, because it is an ugly side-effect of a good walk, and likely indeed to ruin it if you let it.

On the Ridgeway, this particular symptom broke out in me most virulently on the four-mile section known as Grim’s Ditch that takes you off the Chilterns and down to the River Thames near Wallingford. On a narrowish strip marked firmly in yellow as a footpath only, I suddenly saw two cyclists snaking their way through the woods towards me. Righteous ramblers’ fury bubbled up inside me and threatened to blow like the Icelandic volcano that had cleared the skies of aircraft so thoroughly for the duration of my walk. Should I stand, Amazon-like, in the middle of the path and force them off their bikes? Or let them pass, but with a stern ‘You really shouldn’t be cycling here, you know’ as they sped by? Or, trickling down the scale of bravery, would a filthy look and a low mutter perhaps suffice? Fortunately, the sun came out at precisely that moment and I suddenly realised that we were just three people harmlessly enjoying ourselves on a spring day in a lovely old English wood, and perhaps it was entirely possible that we could all continue that way, with no need for pomposity or tantrums. I stepped aside, admired the bluebells, and wished them a cheerful good morning as they cycled carefully by. They thanked me and went on their way. It was all very easy.

Not so for some ramblers. So intoxicated are they by the rightness of their pastime, and so sure are they that the world would be a wonderful place if only everyone acted exactly as they do, that ticking off cyclists and horse-riders, or loudly demanding their rights of way becomes a major component in the makeup of their fondest-remembered walks. And having scrutinised the OS map at five-minute intervals throughout, they know with cold certainty precisely where the footpath becomes a bridle-way becomes a byway, that they are Right and you are Wrong. Nothing gets the thin blood