The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [62]
The idea of the immutability and immovability of a footpath is the holy grail for many, and it underpinned the Hoogstraten case and many others. Generations have gone that way, then so must we. There’s great romantic appeal in the notion, of course, for the most beautiful paths are usually those that are as ancient and integral a part of the landscape as the trees and streams. But it presupposes that we, indulging ourselves at our considerable leisure, are the rightful, natural successors to those who had no alternative but to trudge this way through the hail, mud and rain every sodding day of their entire lives, and I’m not sure that we really are. Surely too the biggest threat to rural Britain is the gallop towards turning it into one huge museum, clapped in the aspic of our national insecurities. If the paths and tracks, the veins and arteries of the countryside, are frozen for ever, how can we expect the body that they feed to maintain a pulse?
There’s the same judgemental selectivity about farmers. We like the ones that come and sell their cheeses and lamb shanks at the farmers’ market, with their rosy cheeks, salty language and eye-watering prices. We admire the enterprise of those who let out charming barn conversions as eco-friendly holiday lets or who turn their farm yards into petting zoos come lambing time (even if we mutter about yet more eye-watering prices on the way home). Most of the rest of them terrify us, though, with their monobrows and monosyllables, shit-spattered pick-ups and sheepdogs that go mad at the sound of a twig snapping two fields away. Yet it’s from them that you’ll learn more about the land, and all that is woven into it, than from any number of interpretation boards, downloadable leaflets or rambling club leaders.
Joseph Ritson’s quaking horror about the behaviour of ‘boisterous’ (read flash and uncultured) Americans provides another of the most dependable leitmotifs in our much-cherished hauteur. However much we can look down on our home-grown nouveau riche, we can always find a bit extra for our Stateside cousins. It gave the nineteenth-century story of the ‘Pet Lamb Case’ in the Highlands its necessary dynamite, and it surfaced again rather more recently, in the most controversial access battle since Hoogstraten: Madonna versus the Ramblers.
The Queen of Pop’s brief embrace of the English Dream seems like just that now: did it really happen? Or did we all collectively hallucinate that the world’s biggest music icon attempted, as one of her regular makeovers, to pass muster as a Wiltshire gentlewoman? The story unfolded in much the same way as ever: loud-mouthed Yank comes to our shores, throws on the tweed, has a crack at hunting and shooting, but doesn’t really understand how we do things here and thinks it can all be solved by throwing money at it. Once we’ve got over preening and flattering ourselves with their presence (‘Gosh, you want to come and live with little old us?’), the knives come out and we lacerate them.
With her then new (and now ex) husband, Guy Ritchie, Madonna bought the Ashcombe Estate, on the Wiltshire–Dorset border a few miles east of Shaftesbury, in 2001. She plunged enthusiastically into English country life, being snapped quaffing bitter in local pubs, wearing caps and going on the odd game shoot. The newspapers could hardly get enough of it, but before long, they were bored with happy and needed a new angle, preferably one that would enable them to start sticking the boot in. It first came in the shape of some new gates erected at Ashcombe in 2002. Not realising that they needed planning permission, it wasn’t initially obtained (although retrospective permission was soon granted), and the papers gratefully fell on the story, bloating it out of all recognition. A pair of stone columns with two wrought-iron gates became ‘twelve-foot security barriers