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A seemingly unassuming, if steely, woman called Kate Ashbrook was to be his nemesis. She has been perhaps the most dogged of all access campaigners in the last 30 years, as full-time General Secretary of the Open Spaces Society since 1984, trustee and twice national Chairman of the Ramblers’ Association, and with her fingers in the wholemeal pies of almost every other organisation involved in access to the countryside. It was Kate who, on 10 February 2003, wielded the bolt clippers that first freed the Framfield 9, some 13 years after it had been so thoroughly blocked off. It had been a long, expensive, explosive saga.

I invited Kate to come and walk Britain’s most notorious footpath with me. It was her first visit since those heady days of 2003, and the pride was still etched on her face as she showed me the various flashpoints. She had taken the action personally against Hoogstraten, and then against East Sussex County Council when they cravenly caved into him and agreed to divert the path, ploughing tens of thousands of pounds of her own money into the fight. It was worth every penny. ‘The Hoogstraten case was brilliant,’ she said, ‘because he was just evil. You need people like that, because then you can explain the issues to folk really clearly.’

If it sounds unwise to be speaking so ill of the undead, then she probably need not worry, for Hoogstraten seems to have disappeared from the Sussex landscape. His unfinished monster mansion, its copper domes glinting over the hedgerows, sits gathering dust and damp, and the black-suited security guards that used to surround both him and the estate have vanished. I’m excited – hugely so – to see it for myself, for villainous bling on a scale this monumental is a rare commodity in our modest little land. The mansion reminds me of somewhere I’ve seen recently, and then I remember. It’s the Trafford Centre, but as built by Nicolae Ceauşescu. Fantasic. I mean, awful. Terrible. But, gosh, absolutely fascinating.

Once the footpath battle started raging, Hoogstraten ploughed into ramblers with the same panto gusto as every other opponent he’d ever faced. ‘What kind of people go rambling? Perverts,’ he declaimed to Lynn Barber in the Observer. It was a theme he returned to regularly, telling a journalist from the Independent, ‘You ask any policeman, he’ll tell you. They’re what we call the dirty mac brigade. Flashers. Very few decent upright citizens, people who pay their rates, taxes and have a house they own, are anything to do with the Ramblers’ Association.’

It sure did the trick. That outraged letter from my mythical Dave would have been one of the 5,000 that poured in to the Lewes headquarters of East Sussex County Council, although only 166 of these came from residents of the county itself. It could be seen, I say to Kate, as the ramblers’ jungle-drum beating, the indignant rent-a-rant of people who probably write a couple of letters of complaint every week about something or other. She’s not having that. Locals were terrified to speak out, she says, and indeed one official at the county council, which was supposed to enforce the right of way, said that his officers were ‘scared to death’ of Hoogstraten. You would be, I’m sure. But no local residents, not one from Palehouse Common, the hamlet by the path’s blocked entrance, or Framfield or Uckfield, came out in support of the ramblers. In fact, as Kate admits, they ‘rather hated us. They didn’t like the intrusion, or the parking problems, or the press.’

Much as he would be loath to admit it, Hoogstraten was a pawn in a game whose rules were set by Kate and the Ramblers’ Association. They were every bit as ruthless as him, but considerably smarter (not that it’s much of a competition; read a few interviews with Hoogstraten, and intellectual capacity is not what springs to mind). The path was first reported as blocked to East Sussex County Council in 1989 by a local RA member. Despite his repeated protestations, nothing was done. It was only in December 1998 that the national RA realised that it was Hoogstraten