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By Root 316 0

‘It used to be very, very negative, but after the CROW Act, landowners saw that actually public access to land didn’t cause the kind of damage they thought it would, so they have moved a bit, and they also recognise the benefits to the economy that accrues. They can’t rely on farming any more; they have to diversify, so they do see that it may be quite a good thing. They have moved a bit, I think.’ She tails off, and I detect something almost regretful in her tone. ‘The battle’s much harder to fight now,’ she continues, carefully measuring out her words, ‘because it’s nothing like as black and white these days. Landowners used to be really quite evil. I was always going on the Today programme and having a real knockabout with the president of the CLA [the Country Land & Business Association, formerly the Country Landowners’ Association], but it just doesn’t work like that any more. They’ve moved more in our direction.’ ‘And maybe you’ve moved a little in theirs too,’ I suggest. ‘I don’t know about that. I hope not.’

Luckily for Kate, before we leave Framfield 9, I ask if we can go and have a little wander along the footpath’s continuation to the north of the lane. It’s a mess. Broken stiles with vicious-looking electric cabling pinned to them, and the path forced into an almost impenetrable nettle-and-bramble-filled ditch. Kate whips out her camera and snaps away, her eyes gleaming. Two days later, she sends me copies of emails between her and the Rights of Way officer at East Sussex County Council in which she is demanding action, and he is promising it. You would, you really would.

As we walk back to her car, she positively scurries past a nearby farm. ‘They’re not friendly at all,’ she sidemouths to me. When we get to a safer distance away, she turns back and points out the paddock jumps and overdone hanging baskets. ‘See, horsey types. Nouveau riche. It’s them that are the trouble, it’s always them. They just think that if they spend enough money, they can buy their privacy. Well, they can’t.’

It’s not a unique – nor indeed a new – observation. I heard it countless times from the footpath and access activists that I met, the strident belief that it’s the nouveau riche that are ruining the countryside. It’s why Nick van Hoogstraten became such a pin-up for them, for he was the physical manifestation of all the avarice and arrogance that so many ramblers are certain lurk beneath every sharp suit and brassy hairdo. They point at the garish gates, mock the mock-Tudor treble garage and raise their eyes in horror at the security cameras, blacked-out SUVs and leylandii.

I sympathise, of course I do. I’m as much of a snob as the next Archers listener, but it’s something I do try and rein in a little, for I’m frankly quite scared of what lies a bit further down that particular path. Whereas the great access battles around the northern cities were driven by a highly ideological class war, almost everywhere else – here in southern England in particular – they seem to have been powered by regular surges of good old British snobbery; one, furthermore, that tends to come from both sides of the political spectrum. Left-leaning access campaigners and bluff old right-wing landowners are as one on the subject, as they put aside their differences and gang up instead on those in between.

Was it ever thus. I remembered the nouveau riche rage of Ralph ‘Vegetable’ Wright in Flixton, a fit of pique that had proved to be the inadvertent midwife of the rights of way campaign movement. And I was reminded of the 1938 Commons debate on the Access to Mountains Bill, when the ‘person in the motor car’, the Rolls-Royce in particular, had become the bogey figure of the day and all-purpose cipher for flash, brash and thoroughly reprehensible. Joshua Ritson, the ex-miner turned Labour MP for Durham, started it off with: ‘There are landlords and landlords, but we are getting now a new class of landlord. I have always paid and shall always pay tribute to the old aristocratic families, who never bothered at all about these matters, but now we are getting