The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [47]
The B&Bs I stayed in were run by ferociously efficient ladies of a certain age, who managed to welcome me in, get me out of my boots, rustle up a pot of tea, bake a light sponge, order the kids to piano practice, saddle a couple of horses and hoover the Labradors, all without pausing for breath. They reminded me of a great routine I saw once in Glasgow by American comedian Scott Capurro. He’d been touring England for weeks, and had garnered a wealth of material about how mad the English were, a sure-fire winner of a topic in Glasgow. He wondered aloud why Britain needed an army, as all we had to do, he said, was position on the white cliffs of Dover a few battalions of upper-middle-class English ladies, their arms folded and one eyebrow raised menacingly. No-one would dare invade.
I’d rather them any time, though, than their husbands, who were either golfers in loafers or tweedy types in regimental ties. In one guest house, I was grilled by an ex-army chap, who, his wife whispered to me, had already had three heart bypass operations. It quickly became obvious why: he was permanently on the verge of scarlet-faced apoplexy. His wife invited me in to watch the early evening news with them, which was accompanied by a constant barrage of heckling from him. During one story, they took vox pops in the street, one coming from a young male student with shoulder-length hair. ‘Get a bloody haircut!’ he kept shouting at the screen; we never got to hear what the student had to say. His wife, doing her best to keep the mood sweet, asked me if I had a wife or children. ‘No, I live with my partner,’ I replied, provoking a snort of derision from the corner as he plunged back into the pages of the Telegraph. At breakfast he told me, at some length, about the organised holidays that he leads to the Second World War battlefields of northern France, ‘though never to the American beaches in Normandy – what bloody good were the Yanks? Too little, too late.’ Despite my still-painful foot, I fair danced out of there and back on to the trail.
The Chilterns must be up there as having perhaps the best signposted footpaths in the country. It wasn’t just the Ridgeway that was waymarked with such colour co-ordinated vigour, but so was every single footpath, bridleway and byway that either led off it or connected to it. And I never came across a single broken stile or gate. The Chiltern Society, run with the same brisk efficiency as the area’s B&Bs (and probably by the same formidable ladies), is largely responsible for this laudable state of affairs. Not only do they have a Rights of Way group to browbeat any recalcitrant local government worker into submission (‘Come on now, chop chop!’), they also publish and sell their own footpath maps, some 28 of them, which will set you back £70 for the whole pack. They’re at the same scale as an OS Explorer, though each covers only a small area as it is designed to be more portable than a sometimes bulky OS. They’re very beautiful as well, emphasising not just the paths, statutory and permissive, but pubs, car parks and Anglican churches too, a set of features that makes as good a definition of the Chilterns as any. This is, you surmise, a supremely map-literate part of the world. I was tickled to see on the Chiltern Society website a button haughtily labelled ‘Report Something’, which sounded like one of the buttons in longstanding Chilternite Roald Dahl’s great glass elevator. Report Something – anything: stray sheep, hoodies, drug dens, inconsiderate parking, a porch with no planning permission, late-night