The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [82]
Thank God, too, that the broken stiles, the rights of way that don’t translate from the map to the ground and the occasional theatrically surly farmer all combine to put off a certain type of English walker. Sorry, but it has to be said. Were it not for the distinctive Welsh way, in all its bony bloody-mindedness, the beautiful mid-western peninsula of the island of Britain would long ago have been overwhelmed from the east, even more than it already has been. And even nice people, people like us who read the liberal press and recycle every last bit of it, who love the wind on our face and a pint of real ale in our hands, even we can cause untold damage to the fragile fabric of marginalised communities by insisting on our way over theirs. We might not even realise that we are insisting, but we will be.
I’ve just had a fortnight with the boot on the other foot, and it’s been very instructive. There’s a tiny cottage that I rent occasionally at the very end of the Llŷn peninsula, that bony arm of north-west Wales pointing at Ireland. In common with the many other little whitewashed stone dwellings dotted around the heathery slopes, the cottage is a tŷ-unnos, a ‘one-night house’. This refers to an old Welsh tradition that if you started to build a house on common land at sundown and managed to have it roofed and with smoke coming out of its chimney by the following dawn, that house, and the land as far as an axe-throw in four directions, was yours. The little tŷ-unnos that I rent sits above the sea on the side of a mountain criss-crossed by paths both official and not. There’s no garden as such, just a couple of out-houses (one of which contains the toilet bucket; there’s no bathroom, nor indeed running water – you have to collect that from the spring up the hill) so that the house sits squarely as part of the hillside, with no evident boundary.
Since my last visit two years ago, the Llŷn coast path has been cut through on top of the cliffs either side of the cottage, and I saw more people walking up there this time than ever before, I’d guess by a factor of about ten. If I was sitting outside with my nosy sheepdog, who has a tendency to stand and stare at anything that moves, however far away, then the pattern of behaviour that unfolded when people came past was almost invariably the same every time. I saw them crest the hill that first gave them a view of the cottage and us. They would stop, look a little befuddled, pull into a tight huddle and confer with each other. The walk leader would then very ostentatiously pull out the map, and do a bit of pointing, reassured that they were in the right place, on the official right of way. Visibly bolstered by the knowledge, they would then sail past, heads high and bristly chins resolute, not quite near enough to say hello, but never, ever, with so much as a wave or a small detour for a chat.
It reminded me of a passage in a wonderful old book I picked up years ago in the back of some dusty second-hand shop. The Countryside and How to Enjoy It was published at the end of the 1940s: it is a splendidly paternalistic instruction manual intended to smooth the way of the great unwashed into their brand new National Parks and designated trails. Amongst chapters entitled ‘Going on a Journey’ and ‘What of the Weather?’, there is one called ‘The Footpath Way’, written by S. P. B. (Petre) Mais, perhaps the author most responsible for educating Britons in the 1930s and 1940s about their landscape and history. ‘Never turn aside from an approaching farmer,’ he boomed. ‘You would consider it a grave discourtesy if you found a caller at your own house turning away when you came out to meet him. The farmer is your host wherever you go in the country and it is necessary to exercise