The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [66]
Writing guidebooks in my twenties and early thirties, I trotted around plenty of stately piles, a sneer etched on my lips as I went. In the late 1990s, the Guardian ran a regular feature where they would invite two people of diametrically opposing views to correspond on a common issue, and they would then print the letters that had winged their way back and forward (by fax, if I remember rightly). Some report had come out saying that the number of people visiting stately homes had dropped quite considerably, and they wanted to explore the issue through the medium of a contrived dust-up between an aristo and a self-appointed Robespierre. I was asked to do it, and pitched against James Hervey-Bathurst, owner of Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire. No wonder you’re losing visitors, I told him gleefully. You’re stuffy, pompous and ‘make the average visitor feel like an unwelcome oik’. Where, I demanded, was the history of the ‘folk who built [the stately homes], skivvied and cooked and cleaned and curtseyed’? The Saturday this appeared in the paper, I fantasised that I was being cheered over toast and marmalade up and down the land. Dave and Maureen in Surrey, I’m sure, were doing so. If only they’d actually existed.
As you’d expect, Mr Hervey-Bathurst (you can imagine how pleased I was that he was called that) proved to be the very model of affable politeness in his responses. He finished with a point that was an almost perfect counterfoil to my Witley-shaped fixation: ‘When my wife and I were hesitating about moving into Eastnor, we were encouraged to do so by the local community. People do not want a derelict ruin at the centre of the estate; by developing and maintaining the property we, and similar houses, generate needed income for the rural community. Most historic houses now rightly play a useful role in their communities. This input must be maintained and improved.’
I could see even then a glimmer of truth in what he said, but I was still busy fighting the class war from the comfort of the pub, and it took until a year or two later, when I moved from urban Brum to rustic mid-Wales, for his words to begin to sink in properly. A decade of rural life since then has almost obliterated my old beliefs. The rural economy is such a fragile and inter-dependent entity, and a well-run country estate or major farm is its beating heart. Most importantly, those running such places are playing a very long game, their motivation above all others not to drop the baton that has been passed to them down the generations. The vast majority take their centuries-old responsibilities, to footpaths and bridleways as much as their tenants and neighbours, very seriously indeed. You’ll never get such abiding consistency from politically motivated landlords, and having seen what a fist of a job the men from the ministry did in set-ups such as the Forestry Commission and the MoD, I’m regularly grateful that no government, of any persuasion, has ever managed to nick any more of the land. As John Ruskin put it: ‘No man is so free as a beggar, and no man more solemnly a servant than an honest landowner.’
None of this is clear cut, and it never will be. The history of our land, ties, access and identity is riddled with contradiction and ideologically square pegs that, however hard we try, we cannot bash into the round holes we’ve so lovingly fashioned. Even a case as apparently crisp and clear-cut as the Hoogstraten battle has irony laced through it. One of the most quoted facts about the Framfield 9 footpath was that it dated back, in Kate Ashbrook’s words, to ‘1862, and is thus at least 140 years old. It was shown on the county council’s composite map prepared under the Rights of Way Act 1932 as a public footpath admitted