The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [54]
These paths to market are a far cry from their contemporary equivalents. Rights of way in our city centres have been comprehensively wiped from the map, as whole swathes of shopping districts become privatised and policed by surly young men in polyester uniforms. Signs reminding us that this is not a public right of way are welded to every CCTV post, and there are always plenty of those. For the first time in our history, we have granted wholesale ownership of huge chunks of our mercantile centres to fast-buck developers and their shadowy mates, and it is they who decide who goes, and who does not.
If transporting a basket of eggs a few miles in the Middle Ages was a formidable challenge, it’s hard to imagine the logistics for the drovers, as they steered whole herds of sheep and cattle hundreds of miles across the country. From at least the Norman age well into the twentieth century, hundreds of beasts at a time, in columns anything up to half a mile long, were moved at a steady two miles an hour from the wilder country of the north and west to the merchants and markets of the south and east. Some of the old drovers’ roads were tarmaced, but the majority were left to green over and sink gradually into the landscape, as paths official and not. A straggly line of hawthorns, sheep fleece fluttering in its lower limbs, alongside just a hint of a dip in the field, gives the gentlest of nods to its former life.
Walking or driving in rural Wales (or in parts of Scotland, northern England and the West Country), you are regularly reminded of the drovers and their impact on the landscape. Isolated pubs high in the hills often point to their overnight stops, as do small clusters of three Scots pines. When the drovers reached England, they would swap pine for yew trees to identify the inns and farms where they could shelter. Even in some of the most quintessentially English parts of the country, there are tangible reminders of the noisy cavalcades of Welshmen and their beasts that used to bustle through. A line of country lanes east of Leamington Spa is still known today, and marked on OS maps, as the Welsh Road, as is the Welsh Way near Cirencester in the Cotswolds. In true-blue Stockbridge, a Hampshire town of handsome Georgian houses and fine trout fishing, there’s an old drovers’ inn whose frontage is painted with the Welsh slogan Gwair Tymherus, Porfa Flasus, Cwrw Da a Gwal Cyserus (‘seasoned hay, sweet pasture, good beer and comfortable beds’). It’s as good a motto as any for a long walk, with or without the livestock.
Chapter 5
ON THE WARPATH (SOUTH)
Framfield path number 9 and Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s half-built Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield, East Sussex
OS Landranger, number 187. My dog-eared old copy, pre-dating the imposition of front-cover photos, is named Dorking, Reigate & Crawley, which sounds like a firm of solicitors you might find on one of the handsome high streets on this sheet. Brass name plaque, established 1894, although there’s only one Mr Crawley there now, and he’s dreaming of the day when he can take early retirement and move permanently to his Executive Plus apartment in an Andalucian golf resort. The map cost £1.40, although chances are I nicked it during my teenage carto-heist years. ‘Selected roads revised 1975’ is its most up-to-date legend, so it’s no wonder that the M25 is shown mostly as a theoretical light-blue dashed line, nudging its way across woods and fields, and looking about as disruptive as a gentle stream.
Map spread, I’m on the hunt for the homes and stomping grounds of some typically enthusiastic ramblers. This Surrey hinterland