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

by Mike Parker

  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 by the landowner, and it has been shown on every draft and revised definitive map since then. Few paths are better documented.’

  Indeed it is, but the fact that it was definitively recorded in 1862 is due solely to the fact that this was part of the documentation of an enclosure order, in this case for the ‘remaining wastes’ of Framfield Manor. Proof that we should be allowed to walk the path today is therefore based on what historian and writer W. G. Hoskins called ‘the legalised theft’ of the enclosures.

  Although the process dates back to medieval times, the ongoing enclosure of huge tracts of British land accelerated dramatically through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the venerable environmentalist Marion Shoard, in her classic book This Land Is Our Land, there were in England during those two centuries 5,400 individual enclosures under 4,200 private Acts and various general Enclosure Acts, which resulted in the privatisation of more than seven million acres of land. This is, as she puts it, ‘more than the total area of the following ten contemporary English counties: Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk’.

  For the finest, most righteous howl of anger at this land grab that changed our relationship with the land for ever, it is best to spend some time in the company of John Clare (1793–1864). The greatest nature poet England has ever produced, his prodigious talent combined with the era of Enclosure Acts, leaving us with thousands of perfectly crafted observations from the frontline of breakneck rural change.

  To Clare, the enclosures brought:

  Fence meeting fence in owner’s little bounds

  Of field and meadow, large as garden-grounds.

  In little parcels little minds to please,

  With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.

  The right time, the right talent, but also very much the right place. John Clare was born and raised in the village of Helpston, one of thirty or so parishes that make up the Soke of Peterborough, a curious cul-de-sac of history. Historically, the Soke was a semi-detached enclave at the northern end of Northamptonshire, so that Clare was known from the very beginning of his poetic career as the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, a label that quickly became yet another stifling enclosure to him. When the creation of the first county councils was being debated in Parliament in 1888, the Marquis of Exeter, lord of the manor of one of the Soke’s great houses, Burghley, bored his fellow lords rigid with lengthy demands that his little fiefdom be granted its own county status. It is said that members of the House of Lords nodded this odd arrangement through just to shut Exeter up. This lasted until 1965, when the Soke of Peterborough was amalgamated with Huntingdonshire to the immediate south. Just nine years later, Ted Heath’s great local authority shake-up resulted in the absorption of the entire authority into neighbouring Cambridgeshire, and there it remains today. Nominally, at least: people there still identify far more readily with Northamptonshire, if anywhere.

  To have stayed stock still, yet see four different counties drift by within a century fits this quite beguilingly odd part of eastern England. It feels apart and beyond, yet deeply rooted into its fertile soil, while straddling the border where the limestone belt dissolves into the ethereal weirdness of the Fens. Despite being foursquare Middle England, it is an area on the cusp, somewhere in which it is monumentally easy to get lost and disoriented, and entirely the right place to have produced rural England’s most heartfelt, heartbreaking battle-cry.

  Most of his early poems, those that made him a near overnight sensation in Georgian literary society, were passionate evocations of his native landscape, in its diverse moods and detail. Like many young boys before and since, Clare had combed his own back yard with reckless glee, in the company of friends and alone, always watching, always noticing. His poetic account of the freedom of an English rural childhood set the bar for every dirt-poor-but-’appy saga since, from My Fair Lady to The X-Factor. And like them, Clare’s sudden success, when everybody wanted a piece of him, was painfully short-lived. The instant spotlight rarely lingers long.

  Clare loved his paths, and knew them intimately. In his childhood, Helpston was encircled by three great fields, each divided into strips for cultivation by all landowners and tenants of the village. To the south of the village lay Royce Wood (Rice Wood, as the OS has it), and beyond that, Emmonsales Heath, a massive wide-skied common used by all for rough grazing. Clare and his boyhood mates had the run of it all, ‘roaming about on rapture’s easy wing’. They knew every furlong, strip, cops
e, heath, pond and wood, and exactly which path would take them where. But a path was more, far more, than a means to an end: it was a world of its own, with its own lore and mood, somewhere to be relished not just for what it did, in taking you from A to B, but for what it was. Nearly two centuries on, we are by his side, smelling the earth and air, as in The Flitting he extols the

  Green lanes that shut out burning skies

  And old crooked stiles to rest upon.

  Above them hangs a maple tree,

  Below grass swells a velvet hill,

  And little footpaths sweet to see

  Goes seeking sweeter places still.

  It was losing the paths that focused them so sharply into Clare’s mind and poetry. His childhood and adolescence coincided exactly with the time that the enclosures reached his part of the world. When he was six, the nearby village of Bainton became the first in the area to be enclosed. A decade later, an Enclosure Act was passed in Parliament for Helpston and all its surrounding parishes, and over the next few years the young John watched with mounting horror as favourite trees and copses were ripped out, streams blocked and diverted, and fences and gates thrown up across the fields and heaths in which he had wandered freely, developing an intimacy with every leaf, flower, insect and bird. As a graphic reminder, ‘On paths to freedom and to childhood dear / A board sticks up to notice “no road here”’: a punishment almost impossible to bear for one so sensitive.

  He railed with increasing bellicosity about the injustices of enclosure, which brought him into direct conflict with some of his wealthy patrons, who had, on his initial success, been delighted to be seen publicly supporting the nation’s new favourite peasant. After the dizzying sales of his first collection, which needed reprinting four times within the first year, the pressure was on for a swift and successful sequel. The title poem of the collection, The Village Minstrel, did not beat about the bush:

  There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,

  There once were paths that every valley wound,

  – Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;

  Each tyrant fix’d his sign where paths were found,

  To hint a trespass now who cross’d the ground:

  Justice is made to speak as they command

  The high road now must be each stinted bound:

  – Inclosure, thou’rt curse upon the land,

  And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann’d.

  Such bald sentiment brought immediate use of his red pen by one of Clare’s most effusive supporters, Lord Radstock. ‘This is Radical Slang’ he scrawled across the lines when given a proof copy of the collection to see. Radstock’s unbending attitudes – he had already objected to a line about a baby ‘all beshit’ – can perhaps best be seen in the titles of his own most successful books, The British Flag Triumphant!, a collection of naval tales about us whupping the French, and The Cottager’s Friend; Or, a Word in Season to Him who is so Fortunate as to possess a Bible or New Testament, And a Book of Common Prayer.

  Looking at poems such as this one, it’s easy to be lulled into a belief that Clare was some early The Land Is Ours propagandist, who would have been at the forefront of any protest smashing down the iniquitous gates and fences. In truth, the new order terrified him, and he cowed before it, as his celebrated sonnet on the topic so forensically demonstrates:

  I dreaded walking where there was no path

  And pressed with cautious tread the meadow swath

  And always turned to look with wary eye

  And always feared the owner coming by;

  Yet everything about where I had gone

  Appeared so beautiful I ventured on

  And when I gained the road where all are free

  I fancied every stranger frowned at me

  And every kinder look appeared to say

  ‘You’ve been on trespass in your walk today’.

  Caution, dread, wary, fear, frown, trespass: words with which any modern walker is all too familiar. But there are signs already that Clare’s mind is troubled way more than it should be by such matters. ‘I fancied every stranger frowned at me’ (even as he walks on the open road) is the key line here: most people he passed by would surely have been wrapped up in their own minds and worlds, scarcely even acknowledging the furtive poet skittering by, muttering to himself. And this is why we remember John Clare today, not just for his lyrical power, but for the delusions and mental decline that eventually sent him to the madhouse.

  For someone who never had much to begin with, it was Clare’s extreme sense of loss that defined his life, informed his poetry and ultimately destroyed his sanity. His first-hand witness of the effects of enclosure both confirmed and exacerbated this, but it was by no means a unique example. The lost figure of Mary Joyce, his first love at school, haunts his work throughout. She came from a smarter background than him, so her father forbade any further alliance and, although she remained unmarried in the neighbouring village of Glinton for the rest of her life, it is not believed that they ever spoke again. Even when the sad news of her death in a house fire in 1838 reached him, he continued to think and write of her as his second wife and pine for her by name in poems and diary entries for the rest of his days. She had long since transcended from being a flesh-and-blood Northamptonshire wench into a totem for all that had gone: not just first love, nor the commons and paths, but childhood, innocence, comradeship, freedom, easy sexuality, his status as pin-up of the chattering classes. Family too. John was born a twin, but his sister – a far stronger baby than him – died after a few days. Surprisingly little is made of this in Clare’s numerous biographies, but it must have set in stone the heartbreaking emptiness and perhaps his sense of viewing life from the sidelines that stalked him for ever.

  With some irony, if you care to visit Clare’s native country today (and you should), it is its sense of openness that first strikes. Big-sky country, it’s a place of cornfields and cornflowers, poppies and skylarks, languorous clouds, good pubs, woods and furzey commons (at least in early summer, when I was there. Heavy, sodden soils and vicious north-easterly fronts – ‘Flood bellowing rivers and wind roaring woods’ – are its lot come the winter). Church spires are still the tallest things for miles around. Many of the natural (and indeed man-made) features of Clare’s tender verse can still be found, and there are innumerable good paths and open spaces binding them together. Compared with many other rural parts of the country, this seems to be an unsung walkers’ paradise. But then, unlike Clare, we have no intimate knowledge of just how much more free it once was, for we are measuring our sense of its accessibility from a very different base. On top of that, Clare was witnessing the area as it hurtled into the modern age: enclosures, breakneck industrialisation in the limestone quarries and finally the coming of the railways, all events that traumatised him. Now the spent quarries are designated nature reserves, many of the former railways signposted wildlife corridors or cycle paths and, to the amateur eye, the fields look reassuringly timeless. The leisure age has spun its illusion, and we tumble for it. I don’t suppose Clare would have done.

  The Soke is a surprising understudy for the Cotswolds. Shown a picture of villages such as Castor or Barnack, many would guess that they were looking at Something-on-the-Wold or Somewhere-on-the-Water. They share the same geological bedrock of mellow limestone, the same fleshy productivity and easy nature, and are full of similar honey-coloured Georgian piles that set the property sections of the weekend papers ablaze with desire. Yet there are no tourist coach parks here, no flocks of Japanese snappers, no antique emporia, no artisan patisseries flogging cupcakes at two quid a bite. There are barely any places to stay, and none at all in Helpston itself. As I wanted a night in the village, I kipped in the back of my van parked on the verge of what I thought would be a quiet country lane, but which instead proved to be a major route for tractors, muck-spreaders, haybalers and even a few enthusiastic members of the local dogging fraternity. John Clare would be
proud, on all counts.

  As with most poets, Clare’s popularity has waxed and waned according to changing fashion and prevailing moods. Because of the acute sense of loss that permeates his poetry, he seems to swim back into view whenever times get rough, which may partly account for his growing popularity these days. Writers, composers and artists seem eternally fascinated by him: Edward Thomas, Iain Sinclair, R. S. Thomas, Benjamin Britten, John McKenna, Geoffrey Grigson, Adam Foulds and Edward Bond have all produced major Clare-inspired works, and there have been paintings and exhibitions, radio plays, TV documentaries, dramas and readings galore. One event in Clare’s life seems to capture the artistic imagination far more than any other, and that is the longest walk that he ever undertook, 80 miles in July 1841.

  This was no loving, leisurely nature ramble. Clare was escaping an asylum, at High Beach in Epping Forest, to which he had been committed four years earlier. Over four days, with no money or food, and in already ruined shoes, he hobbled from Epping Forest back to Helpston, sticking mostly to the route of the Great North Road, what we now know as the A1. Clare’s journey has enthralled us ever since, and many have felt moved to follow in his fevered footsteps. In the visitors’ book of Helpston parish church, numerous modern-day pilgrims record that they have walked there from Epping, and when recent fundraising efforts were going on to help convert Clare’s birthplace cottage into a museum, the central event was a sponsored walk from High Beach to Helpston, albeit not clinging quite so closely to the thundering Great North Road as had Clare nearly 170 considerably quieter years earlier.