The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [64]
This is Cranborne Chase, a lofty chalk ridge that looks down towards Salisbury Plain. For an all-too-brief few years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the view would have included the three hundred-foot-high tower of William Beckford’s Gothic extravaganza, Fonthill Abbey, until it collapsed for the third, and final, time in 1825. The Ashcombe estate is down in a smooth valley that looks as if it has been gouged out of the chalk by a giant ice-cream scoop. I took the path down into it from Win Green, the highest point on Cranborne Chase. Nothing was left to chance: the estate signposting of its paths was efficient, unfailingly polite and tastefully retro in its uniform shade of British racing green. It was a warm summer’s day, with bees humming, cuckoos singing, and perfect little cotton-wool clouds tripping lazily across a cornflower sky. ‘We just fell in love with it,’ said Madonna about their first visit to Ashcombe. ‘In the summertime it’s the most beautiful place in the world. It just stayed with us, haunted us for a really long time.’ Me too: this was possibly the single most idyllic walk that I had all year, and writing about it months later brings it all back and makes me smile wistfully. For the first, and quite probably the last, time in my life, I suddenly felt sorry for Madonna, for what she’d had and then lost – and not even the image of Sting plucking his lute could make me hate her.
Many of the access or footpath battles you hear about these days involve celebrities, for the tales fit so well with our need to trash the upstarts and, in particular, the always reliable narrative of building ’em up to dash ’em back down again. Jeremy Clarkson, Keith Richards, Ashley and Cheryl Cole, Claudia Schiffer, John le Carré, Eric Clapton, Gary Barlow, David Puttnam, Peter Gabriel and Andrew Lloyd Webber have all had their skirmishes. With the proposals for universal coastal access still being hotly argued over, it is likely that there will be many more. Sometimes the threat of stalkers and paparazzi is deployed, usually to a chorus of scoffing from the very papers that pay top dollar for shaky telephoto lens shots through the same people’s herbaceous borders. Sometimes it’s their human rights, which only brings on a burlesque crescendo of ‘poor diddums’. And, touching another nerve of the moment, sometimes it’s health and safety, things such as the possibility of lawsuits from injury on their land. That goes down worst of all: two obsessions of the tabloid tubthumpers in one fell swoop, and they almost knock themselves out with their own sarcasm and sanctimony. Turn over a few more pages, though, and there’ll be the ads: ‘Tripped Over a Paving Stone? MAKE THAT CLAIM!’. The only other grouping that regularly makes it into the papers over footpath battles on their land are bankers, and they get even less sympathy.
The politics of the footpath and access movements has always been a strange mix of old Right and firebrand Left. I’ve not made it into the former category quite yet, but I have spent most of my adult life in the latter – at least by my own definition; many of my friends and family would probably disagree, once they’d stopped laughing. In truth, I’ve been a shameless political slap-per, having voted, at one time or another, for six different parties: Liberal, Labour, Communist, Green, Lib Dem and Plaid Cymru. No Tory or UKIP, though; not yet, anyway. On any conventional scale, my views have definitely slidden rightwards, and it’s in this area of land ownership and custodianship that I can see it most glaringly.
Growing up in 1970s Worcestershire, by far my favourite outing was to Witley Court, a few miles south-west of