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By Root 389 0

of style and playfulness. A well-worn path through chalk is doubly enchanting, for there is no better surface on which to recall the words of Edwardian poet Edward Thomas: ‘And the prettiest things on ground are the paths / With morning and evening hobnails dinted / With foot and wing-tip overprinted.’ Not so many hob-nails these days, but the galloping horseshoe-prints, mountain-bike tyre tracks and the stomp of a thousand walking boots etched into the ashen track gave it the look of a massive, elemental work of art.

Where the Ridgeway burrows under the M40, near Lewknor, there are countless graffiti messages scrawled on the walls of the tunnel. None are in paint or pen: all are in chalk just picked up off the path, and where words have got too nasty or offensive, people have simply rubbed them out. As a result, there’s a lightness of touch and a sense of humorous interplay in the graffiti that you don’t normally find in an underpass, and I spent a very happy ten minutes chuckling at it as the lorries thundered by overhead.

With two such distinct and different halves, it is the chalk that defines and unites the Ridgeway path, for this was the dry, high route along the top of the scarp that runs diagonally across England from Norfolk to the south-west coast. It’s no coincidence that this is roughly also the country’s dividing line between the wealthier bottom-right corner and the more spartan north and west. The Ridgeway runs along this cusp, something of a last hurrah for the money as it looks down, quite literally, on its muddy, lowland neighbours.

As the miles squeaked by, and the soles of my boots whitened up, I began to love the chalk and flint beneath my feet. Together, these equal-and-opposite twins represent a much-cherished version of fantasy England. Chalk is soft, yielding, clean, pure, white, strangely coquettish and makes us think of Vera Lynn, the white cliffs of Dover and Mr Chips scribbling on a school blackboard. Flint is dark, unfathomable, unyielding, rock hard and brings to mind ancient arrowheads, rudimentary blades, the plucky underdog and some of the loveliest, yet simplest, architecture of the Church of England. Softness and toughness, purity and resolve, education and warfare, Sir and God: our favourite combinations, and those that we rather like to think define us as a nation.

Of all the chalk-and-flint districts, there’s nowhere quite as rhapsodic as the Chilterns, particularly to Londoners of a certain standing. This modest range of woods and hills shields the capital from the dirt and dullness of the provinces; its flinty little villages, topped with their red tile roofs, are the England of a painted pantomime backdrop. This is a land of chivalrous knights, swooning maidens, magical forests and lusty green-sward – even the reintroduced red kites, swirling overhead in vast numbers these days, fuel the Tudorbethan fantasy. It’s Betjeman’s ‘Beechy Bucks’, the Grand Duchy of Metroland, bulwark and avatar for all manner of medievalists, nostalgists and fantasists: Stanley Spencer, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Eric Gill, the Shelleys, John Piper, G. K. Chesterton and Sir Francis Dashwood. It’s where you’ll find The Wind in the Willows and The Vicar of Dibley, Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Three Men in a Boat, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Bekonscot model village. And acknowledging the sinister shadow at the heart of the suburban idyll, it’s also where you’ll find The Avengers, The Saint, Midsomer Murders and Miss Marple. Darkest of all, most weekends since 1921, you might also find the British prime minister of the day, kicking back at Chequers.

The Ridgeway path makes great play with Chequers, flirting with it from all angles. Coming from Wendover, it’s a steady slog up to the Boer War memorial on the top of Coombe Hill, at 853ft almost the highpoint of the entire Chiltern range (Haddington Hill, on the other side of Wendover, is 23ft higher). Another good reason for walking the Ridgeway east–west is that this affords, as you reach the monument,