The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths

by Mike Parker

  With only about half a mile to go, I saw a slight figure coming along the track towards me, under a rucksack much the same size. It was obviously a fellow Ridgeway walker, but one who was only just setting out. Most unexpectedly, I felt such a surge of jealousy towards her, of all the wonderful things she was going to see, smell, hear, think and feel over the next week. We chatted like long-lost cousins, and I lapped up her excitement. A nurse near Sheffield, she’d decided a couple of years ago to do an annual solo walk on a long-distance path; this was her third after the Dales Way from Yorkshire to Cumbria and the West Highland Way in Scotland. Strangely, my only previous LDP walk had also been along the Dales Way, though I was 15 at the time and it was more of a long pub crawl, interspersed with some walking and the odd bus trip when we were too hung-over to move unaided. I told her – possibly with a little too much evangelistic zeal – that I was sure it was better to finish at Avebury, rather than Ivinghoe, despite what all the guidebooks said. Coming into Avebury really did feel like the right conclusion, the end of a pastoral symphony that had been almost imperceptibly swelling to a glorious climax. Either way, she was going to have a great time, and we hugged each other goodbye, two complete strangers united for just a few minutes, but in the same cause. I crossed the line, if there had been a line, one week and two hours after leaving Ivinghoe Beacon, and a new addiction had begun.

  To walk an ancient path, you probably need to go no further than a couple of miles from your front door. Although headline grabbers like the Ridgeway, the Icknield Way, the Sweet Track on the Somerset Levels or the Golden Road in the Preseli Mountains of Pembrokeshire make much of their undoubted antiquity, the footpath network everywhere takes you straight back deep into history, for they are some of the oldest features in our landscape. If you’re in the right frame of mind, you can feel it, those moments when suddenly you’re walking where thousands have gone before you, passing the same trees, fording the same streams and breathing the same champagne air. There are tell-tale signs on the map and ground alike: odd dog-leg routes edging around long-vanished boundaries, holloways and green lanes sunk like pensioners into comfy armchairs, smugglers and drovers routes heading high over the hills, church ways, pilgrimage routes, monks’ trods, herepaths, salt ways, drift ways and portways.

  Into the higgledy-piggledy ancient British network of tracks and paths came the methodical Romans, who sliced their roads through the old ways in much the same way that we do with motorways now. In some parts of the country, the pattern left by the Romans endures still: where I live in mid-Wales, for instance, almost all of our market towns are between 15 and 18 miles apart, a day’s march. Many of the Roman roads are now tarmaced and integrated into the modern network, some as great trunk roads such as Watling Street (the A2 from London to Dover and the A5 from London to Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury), Icknield Street (the A38 in the Midlands) and the Fosse Way (the A46 from Leicester to Lincoln and the A37 and A429 in the south-west). Perhaps the most thrilling is the A68 north of Corbridge in Northumberland, the Roman Dere Street. So empty is the landscape and so straight the road, that it is all too possible to lose any sense of perspective and speed, as the many warning signs make clear. Other Roman ways are much-loved B-roads and country lanes, but many were never aggrandised by tarmac and provide some of our most striking bridleways and byways. And they almost always are bridleways or byways, rather than mere footpaths: proof that a route’s historic use, however far back it may date, is still generally used to determine its contemporary status.

  Two of the most evocative paths I’ve ever walked have been over some of the best extant stretches of Roman road, both on bleak moorland. One sits high on Blackstone Edge above Rochdale, its tight cobbles and grooved channel like an illustration from a school textbook about the marvels of Roman engineering. Odd, therefore, that there is much academic debate as to whether the track is genuinely Roman or later. No such arguments at the other, north of Ystradfellte in the Fforest Fawr, the splendidly gloomy western part of the Brecon Beacons National Park. There, the cobbles are not quite so intact, but they still impress as the track runs up through a conifer forest in a perfect straight line, before cresting the hill by the ten-foot stone blade of Maen Madoc, its rough Latin inscription still faintly legible on the side. This is part of Sarn Helen, the great legionary causeway from Carmarthen to Conwy, often said to be the last time anyone successfully managed to build a road that unites north and south Wales. There’s some truth in the bitterness: the building of a decent north–south road in Wales has been a stated priority of government since the 1920s. It still is.

  Britain’s most celebrated Roman remain, Hadrian’s Wall, is also the site of what is commonly said to be the country’s most expensive footpath. The 84-mile Hadrian’s Wall National Trail was first proposed in 1984, given approval by the government in 1994 and finally opened in 2003. By the standards of the early Long Distance Paths, 19 years might seem a reasonable average from idea to inception, although it should perhaps be remembered that the Wall itself – 80 Roman miles long, and with forts every mile – took only six years to construct. The National Trail’s budget of six million pounds was also rather bigger than Hadrian’s.

  Most of the money was spent on compensating landowners for the 30 miles of new path that were needed to drive the project from Wallsend, now swallowed by Newcastle, to Bownesson-Solway, on the Cumbrian coast; it took a dedicated team of 11 officers seven years to sort out the hundreds of claims and complications. The Lonely Planet guide Walking in Britain called it a ‘latter-day battle between the Wall’s guardians and the restless natives hereabouts’, the latest in a very long line. In one instance, in order to create a path where none existed near the village of Banks in Cumbria, a compulsory order had to be made – not because the landowner objected, but because, as the council’s own minutes put it, ‘she has an aversion in general to signing legal documents’. No such reticence at the other end of the trail, around the village of Heddon-on-the-Wall, near Newcastle. Despite being one of the least attractive parts of the route, it was here that the bulk of the compensation money was spent. Heddon’s other recent claim to fame was as the epicentre of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak – another bumper year for the compo.

  Some of my favourite old paths are those that were used to go to market. These I imagine to have been supremely sociable ways, alive with chatter and laughter, flirting and gossip. Trouble too at times, of course: the sheer physical graft of shifting goods through muddy ruts, exhaustion and disappointment at a poor day’s trading, even theft and harassment. After finishing the Ridgeway at Avebury, I wanted to go and walk another of Wiltshire’s finest, Maud Heath’s Causeway: not just any old path to market, but quite possibly the grandest in the country. Maud Heath was a fifteenth-century widow from Bremhill, between Calne and Chippenham. Every Wednesday, she walked four miles to market in Chippenham to sell her eggs and poultry, down into the valley of the River Avon and back up the other side into town. The river was notorious for frequent flooding, and in those conditions, the path was treacherous. She fell on numerous occasions, breaking her eggs and ruining her clothes.

  On her death in 1474, she left a bequest ‘in land and houses, about Eight Pounds a year, forever to be laid out, in the Highways and Causey leading from Wick Hill to Chippenham Clift’, according to the inscription on a memorial pillar erected in 1698 by the Kellaways bridge over the Avon. This was plenty enough to build a raised walkway across the marshy valley and for it to be maintained by a trust. Not only is the causeway still there, so is the trust, who still meet and pay out grants from the initial investments, more than 500 years later.

  Maud Heath’s Causeway is at its most impressive where it soars over the river, elevated on 64 arches above the modern lane by its side. At other places, you’d barely notice it if you didn’t know it was there, a cobbled pavement, home to the same wheelie bins and fag ends you’d find anywhere. What is most touching about the story, though, is that Maud Heath herself never benefite
d from this most gracious act of generosity, for she was long dead by the time it was constructed. That her name lives on, and is thanked daily, is as fine a legacy as anyone could hope for. The memorial pillar by the bridge ends with the most sweet and enigmatic of inscriptions: ‘Injure me not.’ Is this a prayer for passers-by, a plea to highway engineers, a warning to would-be vandals or a message from beyond the grave from Maud herself?

  These paths to market are a far cry from their contemporary equivalents. Rights of way in our city centres have been comprehensively wiped from the map, as whole swathes of shopping districts become privatised and policed by surly young men in polyester uniforms. Signs reminding us that this is not a public right of way are welded to every CCTV post, and there are always plenty of those. For the first time in our history, we have granted wholesale ownership of huge chunks of our mercantile centres to fast-buck developers and their shadowy mates, and it is they who decide who goes, and who does not.

  If transporting a basket of eggs a few miles in the Middle Ages was a formidable challenge, it’s hard to imagine the logistics for the drovers, as they steered whole herds of sheep and cattle hundreds of miles across the country. From at least the Norman age well into the twentieth century, hundreds of beasts at a time, in columns anything up to half a mile long, were moved at a steady two miles an hour from the wilder country of the north and west to the merchants and markets of the south and east. Some of the old drovers’ roads were tarmaced, but the majority were left to green over and sink gradually into the landscape, as paths official and not. A straggly line of hawthorns, sheep fleece fluttering in its lower limbs, alongside just a hint of a dip in the field, gives the gentlest of nods to its former life.

  Walking or driving in rural Wales (or in parts of Scotland, northern England and the West Country), you are regularly reminded of the drovers and their impact on the landscape. Isolated pubs high in the hills often point to their overnight stops, as do small clusters of three Scots pines. When the drovers reached England, they would swap pine for yew trees to identify the inns and farms where they could shelter. Even in some of the most quintessentially English parts of the country, there are tangible reminders of the noisy cavalcades of Welshmen and their beasts that used to bustle through. A line of country lanes east of Leamington Spa is still known today, and marked on OS maps, as the Welsh Road, as is the Welsh Way near Cirencester in the Cotswolds. In true-blue Stockbridge, a Hampshire town of handsome Georgian houses and fine trout fishing, there’s an old drovers’ inn whose frontage is painted with the Welsh slogan Gwair Tymherus, Porfa Flasus, Cwrw Da a Gwal Cyserus (‘seasoned hay, sweet pasture, good beer and comfortable beds’). It’s as good a motto as any for a long walk, with or without the livestock.

  Chapter 5

  ON THE WARPATH (SOUTH)

  Framfield path number 9 and Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s half-built Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield, East Sussex

  OS Landranger, number 187. My dog-eared old copy, pre-dating the imposition of front-cover photos, is named Dorking, Reigate & Crawley, which sounds like a firm of solicitors you might find on one of the handsome high streets on this sheet. Brass name plaque, established 1894, although there’s only one Mr Crawley there now, and he’s dreaming of the day when he can take early retirement and move permanently to his Executive Plus apartment in an Andalucian golf resort. The map cost £1.40, although chances are I nicked it during my teenage carto-heist years. ‘Selected roads revised 1975’ is its most up-to-date legend, so it’s no wonder that the M25 is shown mostly as a theoretical light-blue dashed line, nudging its way across woods and fields, and looking about as disruptive as a gentle stream.

  Map spread, I’m on the hunt for the homes and stomping grounds of some typically enthusiastic ramblers. This Surrey hinterland is a good place to look. Despite the motorways, the rat runs and the commuting hordes, there are plenty of green corners, wooded hills and bits tightly policed by the National Trust and their ilk. Footpaths too: not just the regular rights of way threading between villages and through copses and paddocks, but a wealth of named long-distance paths as well. On my older map, there’s the Pilgrim’s Way in Olde English typeface, an early medieval track from Winchester to Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, and the North Downs Way National Trail, opened in 1978 and making its cartographic debut. Frequently, the two form the same route.

  Thirty odd years on, and the modern Landranger 187, as well as showing the brutal reality of the M25, is crawling with named LDPs. On the cover map, now relegated to the back, the North Downs Way is shown, but the ever-obedient OS also remind us that it is part of the E2 European Long Distance Path – not that any Surrey stalwart would ever refer to it as such, or at least not without a few choice expletives attached. Handy, though, for those occasions when the urge grips you to walk from Leatherhead to Luxembourg, and who hasn’t had one of those? Inside the map, the keen rambler is spoilt for choice: there’s the Eden Valley Walk, the Forest Way, the Greensand Way, the Downs Link, the Sussex Border Path, the Way South Path (or was it the Path South Way?), the High Weald Landscape Trail, the Sussex Ouse Valley Way and the West Sussex Literary Trail. There’s a corner of the London Loop, for those Hoxton hipsters who will exhaustively blog about their trundle through Cheam, Carshalton Beeches and the outer reaches of Purley. Most irresistible of all is the Vanguard Way, with the tough choice of which glittering trailhead to aim for, Croydon or Newhaven.

  I’ll call my mythical rambler from Landranger 187 Dave. He lives in one of the villages south of Weybridge, and walks every morning to the station (Effingham Junction perhaps, if only for the comedy value of the name), where he catches a train to work, at the University of Surrey in Guildford. Dave came to Guildford as one of its earliest intake of students, back in that apocalyptic year of 1968. Originally from the Potteries, he’s never felt much at home in Surrey, but his degree became an MA, then a PhD, then a lecturer’s post and, for the last 12 years, he’s been head of department, so although he likes to keep his vowels as flat and northern as possible, he’s lived in chi-chi Surrey for well over two-thirds of his life. Dave’s north Staffs tones get even stronger when he’s had a pint or two (real ale only; lager is the devil’s work), as does his absentee devotion to Port Vale FC.

  To be honest, Dave hates his job, but he’s far too near retirement to think about quitting. As someone who came to a university that was forged brand new in the white heat of technology and the blazing flames of potential revolution, he just wants to slap the pallid little remote-controlled excuses for students that file through his seminars these days. Not that he ever would, of course. Dave is a lifelong pacifist and socialist, though he voted Lib Dem last time round, as the Labour vote in Surrey had shrunk to Monster Raving Loony proportions, and he quite liked their stance on Iraq and tuition fees. He’s kept very quiet about the latter since. His most radical daily activity is buying the Guardian from the tiny pile at the station newsagents, dwarfed beneath tottering mountains of Daily Mails and Telegraphs. Even that just makes him feel worse, though. He hates the Guardian’s incessant wittering about Twitter and Facebook and Borough bloody Market, and would, if truth be told, rather have the Telegraph, because the crossword’s better.

  Dave and his wife Maureen have never made great friends locally. When the kids were growing up, they were pals with other nearby couples from the school run, but most of these have since upgraded to Richmond or retired to the coast. They have the immediate neighbours round every Christmas for a stilted hour or two of sloe gin and avoiding contentious topics. That aside, cats are fed, cars waved at, parcels looked after and residents’ association meetings occasionally patronised. Dave hates those meetings, the golf club Hitlers and their Neighbourhood Snoop schemes, but 40 years in Surrey has taught him that it’s best to show your face once in a while, or who knows what whispers might fill the vacuum.

  Walking came to Dave’s rescue 15 years ago, when the kids were leaving home and barely a week went by without some new named pa
th being unveiled in the local paper. Age and a grumbling knee had put paid to his squash playing, so he took to heading out into the hills most weekends, usually alone but sometimes with Maureen or his colleague Roger, and had soon walked most of the waymarked routes in Surrey, Sussex and Kent. He tried joining the local Ramblers’ Association group, but it was just the residents’ association in gaiters. Twice now, he’s had week-long walking holidays in the Peak District, which brought back fond – and some difficult – memories of his childhood; he was surprised to find himself quite so glad to be going back to the Hornby train-set prettiness of the North Downs. Walking became not just a hobby, but an ideological passion, a one-man crusade to reclaim his land, his history. He’s read up on the Diggers and the Levellers, on enclosures and Kinder, and the knowledge gives a spring to his every step.

  Politics used to be so straightforward for Dave, but all the black-and-white certainties of the seventies social revolution and the them-and-us Thatcher years had long since dissolved into a murky grey soup. He’d been briefly excited, and not a little amazed, by the strength of local feeling against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and had helped organise a coach from the area to the huge march in London, but then spent all day praying that he wouldn’t bump into anyone he knew, lest they saw him marching under placards saying ‘Dorking Churches Say It’s Not On, Mr Blair!’ and, worse, thanks to its witheringly posh sentiment and even posher rhyme, ‘We Don’t Want a War in Iraq, We Just Want a Walk in the Park.’