The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [81]
With hindsight, we can see now that the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001, and the hysterical blanket closure of footpaths that it sparked, ended up doing the cause of public access to the land no end of good. To lose every path in an instant was a wake-up call like no other, and to everyone. It wasn’t just the beardies and the hearties moaning, it was the folk who liked a nice run out into the country on a Sunday afternoon, the people wanting to walk their dogs or take the kids somewhere that they could charge around and let off steam. Rural tourism collapsed, the effects rippling through the whole community and alarming even the most loutish of local politicians. It was an apocalyptic vision of what could so easily be, and people didn’t like it at all.
It wasn’t even an effective way of dealing with the problem. There have been outbreaks of foot-and-mouth since, which have been successfully dealt with in a far more localised way. The 2001 outbreak, and the mass, aggressive closure of all rights of way and most common land, felt like the last stand of an old order, especially as it coincided with the enactment of the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act 2000, the so-called ‘right to roam’. Things would never be the same again.
Researching this book, when I’ve told English rambling campaigners where I live in Wales, there’s been a common response, along the lines of, ‘Oh, I don’t go walking in Wales. Too many closed paths.’ End of. Walking across the width of Wales, I came across only two that were completely inaccessible, each necessitating a bit of a detour, some scrambling over gates and, in one case, an encounter with a farmer that turned into a very enjoyable chat about local history and characters. Only once in 25 years of walking in Wales have I been threatened and forcibly turfed off the land, but I’ve lost count of the many illuminating and entertaining conversations ignited by having to ask for a little guidance.
It might sound strange to those of an absolutist way of thinking, but the Welsh way has at its core something even more precious, democratic even, than the holy grail of well-waymarked routes for all to march down. There is a danger that, when we walk the prescribed routes, we become stuck in their groove, sometimes at the expense of the wider context of the landscape and its evolution. The boundaries in Wales – physically in this instance, and ethereally in so many others – are more blurred and often more interesting. You have to ask, to engage with the people for whom every lump and seam of the land has a story to tell: they are as intrinsic to the path as the stones underfoot or the flowers in the hedgerow.
This less official, and considerably less officious, Welsh way has a long tradition. As a schoolboy on the run, Thomas de Quincey, later the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, wandered as a vagabond through Wales for a couple of months in the summer of 1802. He noted that there was ‘no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian style of travelling’. From the same era, the less charitable English response to walkers was captured by Pastor Karl Philipp Moritz, a German who set about walking from London to the Peak District. His diary records his amazement at the jeering and abuse he received everywhere, particularly from those on stagecoaches, and the way inn landlords took one look at his pedestrian attire and shunted him immediately into the worst rooms. ‘Why do the English disparage walkers so much?’ he asked a fellow traveller. ‘Because we are too rich, too lazy and too proud,’ came the reply.
More than 200 years later, it’s a distinction that endures, and, from the Welsh point of view, thank God that it does. In the same way that walking is woven into the natural fabric of life, rather than ring-fenced apart from it, so it is with the Welsh landscape. You