The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [53]
Britain’s most celebrated Roman remain, Hadrian’s Wall, is also the site of what is commonly said to be the country’s most expensive footpath. The 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall National Trail was first proposed in 1984, given approval by the government in 1994 and finally opened in 2003. By the standards of the early Long Distance Paths, 19 years might seem a reasonable average from idea to inception, although it should perhaps be remembered that the Wall itself – 80 Roman miles long, and with forts every mile – took only six years to construct. The National Trail’s budget of six million pounds was also rather bigger than Hadrian’s.
Most of the money was spent on compensating landowners for the 30 miles of new path that were needed to drive the project from Wallsend, now swallowed by Newcastle, to Bownesson-Solway, on the Cumbrian coast; it took a dedicated team of 11 officers seven years to sort out the hundreds of claims and complications. The Lonely Planet guide Walking in Britain called it a ‘latter-day battle between the Wall’s guardians and the restless natives hereabouts’, the latest in a very long line. In one instance, in order to create a path where none existed near the village of Banks in Cumbria, a compulsory order had to be made – not because the landowner objected, but because, as the council’s own minutes put it, ‘she has an aversion in general to signing legal documents’. No such reticence at the other end of the trail, around the village of Heddon-on-the-Wall, near Newcastle. Despite being one of the least attractive parts of the route, it was here that the bulk of the compensation money was spent. Heddon’s other recent claim to fame was as the epicentre of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak – another bumper year for the compo.
Some of my favourite old paths are those that were used to go to market. These I imagine to have been supremely sociable ways, alive with chatter and laughter, flirting and gossip. Trouble too at times, of course: the sheer physical graft of shifting goods through muddy ruts, exhaustion and disappointment at a poor day’s trading, even theft and harassment. After finishing the Ridgeway at Avebury, I wanted to go and walk another of Wiltshire’s finest, Maud Heath’s Causeway: not just any old path to market, but quite possibly the grandest in the country. Maud Heath was a fifteenth-century widow from Bremhill, between Calne and Chippenham. Every Wednesday, she walked four miles to market in Chippenham to sell her eggs and poultry, down into the valley of the River Avon and back up the other side into town. The river was notorious for frequent flooding, and in those conditions, the path was treacherous. She fell on numerous occasions, breaking her eggs and ruining her clothes.
On her death in 1474, she left a bequest ‘in land and houses, about Eight Pounds a year, forever to be laid out, in the Highways and Causey leading from Wick Hill to Chippenham Clift’, according to the inscription on a memorial pillar erected in 1698 by the Kellaways bridge over the Avon. This was plenty enough to build a raised walkway across the marshy valley and for it to be maintained by a trust. Not only is the causeway still there, so is the trust, who still meet and pay out grants from the initial investments, more than 500 years later.
Maud Heath’s Causeway is at its most impressive where it soars over the river, elevated on 64 arches above the modern lane by its side. At other places, you’d barely notice it if you didn’t know it was there, a cobbled pavement, home to the same wheelie bins and fag ends you’d find anywhere. What is most touching about the story, though, is that Maud Heath herself never