Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

  The day had started pleasantly enough, with two more people to add to my now growing list of those who’d ‘walked with me’ along the diagonal. They had been early volunteers, but by this stage they may possibly have been regretting their offer. We’d met just south of Stoke and proceeded along the Trent and Mersey canal for three miles, generally catching up and talking about this and that. We’d already passed a reed-lined pond with a family of swans and come across a newt haven, so, initially at least, my new companions, both nature-lovers, were happy.

  We’d also passed by the Wedgwood complex in Barlaston outside Stoke. With a refurbished museum and factory tour, this is now as much a visitor attraction as a true manufacturing plant. Most of the company’s wares is now produced in China. An iconic British brand, Wedgwood’s story is more international. After initially merging with the Irish firm Waterford, the joint company was bought up by a New York-based equity firm when it went into administration in 2009. Six years later, the new owners sold it on to a Finnish consumer goods company.

  Back at our gate, we eventually made it back to terra firma and continued our walk, looking out over ploughed fields of the distinctive red soil that presumably reflects the quantity of clay within it. Our path took us gently uphill, and briefly along a road, where a strange sign indicated we were outside a farm with a name that came across more as Stalinist Five-Year Plan than the more traditional ‘Green Acres’ or ‘Manor Farm’. The ever-informative Simon remembered that this reflected Staffordshire County Council’s policy of owning farms to let to start-up farmers, an admirable idea they spoiled a little by giving them names such as ‘Holding Number X on Estate Y (Z).’

  We were approaching Barlaston Common outside Meir Heath, where my eagle eyes spotted a shortcut across the common that would lead us to a pub. The day had turned out to be hot again, and a pint was suddenly a very good idea. As we approached the gate to the common, however, we spotted a problem. The path on the other side was distinctly churned up, and as we were now wary of anything brown and liquid, and our boots had by then dried out sufficiently to form a thick crust, we hesitated.

  At that point a half-naked man – well, stripped to his waist anyway – appeared, a cacophony of barking dogs in his wake. He was yelling at us, and first thoughts returned to the belligerent farmer earlier, which just goes to show you shouldn’t rely on first impressions. He was, in fact, sympathetic to our plight, bemoaning the recent practice of allowing cows to graze the common. Cattle had been reintroduced a decade before on the basis that grazing would stop the common, mainly marshy grassland, being invaded by scrub. No one had spotted the equation that heavy cows plus wet ground equals mud.

  Our new friend duly invited us to walk through his field and onto a more convivial section of the common, from which we could make our way to the pub. He did issue a warning however: ‘It’s gone right downhill recently.’ When we got there, the pub, The Swynnerton Arms, was just what we needed, friendly and with good facilities and an outside seating area. More of a gastropub than a locals’ pub, we agreed that our recent friend’s definition of going downhill was different from ours.

  Suitably refreshed, and with a podcast recorded, we made our way through Meir Heath, past its windmill and on through fields to Fulford. Along the way, Simon reflected how when he’d taken some New Zealand friends walking they were amazed that we were able to just walk across a farmer’s field. I was reminded of how lucky we were to have our network of footpaths, something that made the entire Diagonal Walking enterprise possible. Coming in a number of different guises, from footpaths through permissive paths, byways and public rights of way to bridleways, 140,000 miles of such paths criss-cross England and Wales, according to an estimate by The Ramblers.10 And that excludes the 10 per cent of such paths not shown on OS and other definitive maps. Many of the paths are thousands of years old and may represent old drovers routes, or simply how people used to get from A to B in an age before cars, or indeed an age when owning a horse or a donkey was a luxury. These rights of way are one of the country’s largely unsung assets, especially valuable when there is an imperative for people to exercise more.

  It was a shame, therefore, that, if my experience of two days of rural walking in Staffordshire was anything to go by, they were under-appreciated, under-loved and under-maintained. In this county anyway. Actually, it was more than a shame: it was downright dumb. If a footpath is ill-defined, then the walker has no option but to trample wherever they can to find their route, which is in neither their interest nor that of the local landowner. At times it felt as if a policy of benign neglect was, in fact, deliberate. No paths, no walkers, means no need for paths. If this was how things were going to be for the rest of the walk, I was in trouble.

  The next day I gained two fresh diagonal walkers: one of my sons, Ed, and his partner Lydia, as well as Annette, who’d already earned her spurs. With two cars now at our disposal, we were able to take one to our intended end point and drive to the start point, where I’d left off with Simon and Judy the day before. Once again, the day started well as we absorbed the local countryside at its best, with freshly budding shrubs and trees, and the deep lime-green of grass now growing steadily after a wet winter and being enjoyed by gambolling lambs. After walking during the hottest April day for seventy years, we were now about to set out during what proved to be the hottest May Day since the holiday was created forty years before.

  After shuffling the cars, we found our starting point, but the gate protecting it was padlocked and impassable. This went beyond the usual local practice of providing a sign at the start of the footpath and then leaving you to figure out your own way. The locals appeared to have adopted a strategy of trying to stop walkers even starting, a theory supported by the fact that once we found our way onto the path, taking a diversion through some dead hedging that ripped my T-shirt, the stiles and waypoints were, at best, antiques.

  We persevered, but it was hard going. Obstacles placed in our way included electric fences, electric fences over stiles (something that required a special sense of hostility towards walkers), crops sown right up to the edges of fields, making it difficult to walk, pointers that had been discarded or removed, fingerposts left to fall and rotten stiles. Occasions when we found a stile that wasn’t either rotten or unstable became the exception, and even when they were whole they frequently contained rusty nails sticking out of them. Every nasty trick in the book, in other words.

  Then there were the sheep. Never get between a protective ewe and her young, that’s my advice. I’d always thought sheep were timid creatures, easily frightened. Not when they have young to protect, they’re not. Negotiating a way over a dodgy stile only to be confronted by a cantankerous sheep is no joke, especially when the next stop is another death-trap stile a hundred yards away. A horned and extremely woolly sheep can be quite threatening when it looks like it’s prepared to take you on. Incidentally, simply yelling ‘Mint Sauce’ in their angry faces only serves to antagonise them.

  We survived, and shortly after a picnic lunch pretty much bang on the diagonal line, overlooking a solitary, and eerily quiet, wind turbine, we met a woman sitting on a camping chair in the middle of nowhere, studying a map. She looked like she was enjoying the sunshine, but wore a concerned look on her face, so we checked to see if she was okay. It turned out she was a Duke of Edinburgh Scheme invigilator, there to track the progress of a group of innocent sixteen-year-olds. Both Ed and Lydia had taken part in such expeditions and a knowledgeable exchange took place before I picked her up on something she’d said.

  ‘You said tracked …’

  ‘That’s right, we have trackers on them.’

  Visions of criminal tags came to mind, but on further questioning, the invigilator seemed to think this was perfectly normal. Her greater concern was that they’d barely moved for nearly an hour and a half and they’d phoned through to say one of their number was suffering from a ‘gammy-toe’. Wait a mi
nute. Phoned through? With this news, my young companions enjoyed an early opportunity to revel in one of the pleasures of adulthood by muttering something along the lines of ‘Back in my day …’, before we wished her well and got on our way.

  Within minutes we came across the dishevelled party, finally on their way, it appeared. Whilst there was little sign of any gammy-toe-afflicted member, there was one lagging at the back, constantly complaining, who may or may not have been the injured party. Ed assured me this was normal practice for a ‘DofE exped’, as he called it. There was always one, it transpired. They’d just negotiated a stile with heavy rucksacks, so we empathised, telling them their tracker up on yonder hill was furious with them, just for devilment. They didn’t look too bothered, although at least one of them may have been less nonchalant when they later realised they’d left behind a bottle of Tizer. They’d also dropped a solitary crisp, speculation on the nature and flavour of which provided us with conversation for a full three minutes.

  We continued along our route, the various challenges being thrown our way now representing a new normal. This trend was pleasantly bucked when we came across a large prairie-like field freshly sown with wheat towards the end of the day. Uniquely, it had been treated with weed-killer, leaving the footpath clearly visible. Cutting a diagonal through the field it also provided a wonderful photo opportunity, and I handed my camera to the proficient Lydia. This was more like it. A farmer who ‘got it’. A nice wide strip through, and not along the edge of, a field. If only he’d fixed the stile at the end of it, which was a double one through a particularly painful hedge, he could have been up for a Staffordshire Farmer of the Year award.

  Just before reaching our final destination, things reverted to normal – a fingerpost pointing straight into a field of waist-high rape, as yellow as sunshine, but not as welcome. We’d all had enough. Locating the car on the phone, we walked down a track and along a seemingly endless B-road, arriving hot and not a little bothered at our transport. A good, but hard, day’s walking, made bearable by the fact that it had been completed with family. Later that night, we recorded a podcast after a barbeque and a couple of beers, during which Lydia suggested that one reason why the paths might be in such disrepair could be because most serious walkers probably headed for the Peak District, a National Park, only twenty minutes drive away, allowing Staffordshire to hide in its shadow. Later, I was to post a blog on the state of the county’s footpaths, which received a lot of reaction, including a piece on the website of one the main walking magazines. It was reassuring, but also a little disconcerting, to find our experiences weren’t unique. It was going to be interesting to see if this was an issue everywhere.

  This opportunity for reflection also revealed that, other than the DofE expedition, we’d seen no other walkers all day, a gloriously hot and sunny Sunday on a bank holiday weekend. Whether this was a coincidence, or an indicator of a wider trend we didn’t know. Whether the state of the paths played a part or landowners’ attitudes reflected the wider local population’s indifference was a riddle.

  One thing I’d discovered after three days of walking with others was just how different it made the experience. When I was on my own I tended to give reign to my internal dialogues, requiring frequent stops to take notes. I was also more diligent in stopping to take photos for my social media accounts, and in shooting video for the YouTube channel. The advantage of walking with real (rather than virtual) others was, of course, that it is more companionable. It also proved useful to have people to share the frustration with when the local landowners set up a game of ‘Find The Footpath’ for us.

  The following day I was back on my own, and I immediately missed this interaction. I started by getting thoroughly stung by stinging nettles along an overgrown path. Shortly after, I was challenged to avoid some particularly aggressive Canadian Geese guarding of all things, a moat. The moat enclosed a small copse of trees and it was impossible to see if there was anything inside it. An MP perhaps, calculating his expenses? Having ducked under one electric fence and climbed carefully over another, I made it to the pretty settlement of The Blythe, which sits on the River Blithe (yes, with an ‘i’ not a ‘y’, and no, I don’t know why), around 11:30, in time for a quick refresher at the local pub. It was shut. A local informed me they were still cleaning it. I wondered what sort of party had taken place the night before that stopped it opening before 12 on a sunny bank holiday Monday, but just managed to stop this thought spilling out of my mouth.

  Given their tardiness in opening, I felt justified in using one of their picnic benches to dump my rucksack while wringing out the back of my T-shirt and taking on some fresh water. A scattering of caravans decorated the back of the car park, into which a car now turned, pulling up just in front of me. A couple who looked like they were in their sixties got out and started unloading plants and potting compost. The woman of the pair spotted me and asked:

  ‘Are you having a nice walk then?’

  This was my cue. ‘Well actually …’

  I told them about my route and how far I’d come and when I mentioned Stoke, her face lit up. ‘I’m from Stoke,’ she said, ‘lived there all my life. Fancy a cup of tea or coffee?’. The kindness of strangers had struck, and we settled down. This was Linda, the woman who’d grown up in poverty in Stoke in the 1950s. While her partner Dave potted up plants, we exchanged life stories.

  In his book The Kingdom By The Sea, Paul Theroux suggests that saying you’re a writer to anyone tends to be the kiss of death on a conversation. I disagree. In my experience it tends to open up a chat. This was particularly so in Linda’s case, not least because she too was a writer, although on spiritual matters rather than walking. With her agreement, we recorded an interview for my podcasts and, thanking her and wishing her well, I went on my way.

  The following stretch was relatively straightforward, and included a picture-book half-timbered farmhouse of the sort that would suit a jigsaw or the cover of a tin of biscuits, the sort of thing you might see in an airport, in a shop called Souvenirs of Ye Olde Englande.

  Another travel writer came to mind, H.V. Morton. He began his book In Search of England, originally published in 1927, by summoning up the memory of an idyllic England he’d had when he’d thought he was dying in Palestine during the First World War. It was an image of thatched cottages, wood smoke coming out of chimneys and church bells being rung. It was not dissimilar to the picture of England used by the then Prime Minister John Major in a speech to the Conservative Council for Europe in 1993. In this he’d pronounced that ‘fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. The last of these was a reference to the favoured form of gambling at that time, the football pools, so on that one at least he was wrong. This is an image many writers have tried to express – for example, George Orwell when he talks of ‘old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist’,11 a reference thought to have inspired John Major’s speech.

  Next up was Abbots Bromley, which epitomised the sort of place summoned up by such ruminations. On the surface at least, the village looked well kept and affluent. During my brief time there (I stopped for a pint and to top up my water at the pub, where I also made some), I saw at least three expensive open-top sports cars glide gently by, but I suppose if you have an expensive sports car, a sunny bank holiday is the sort of day to go out in it. Abbots Bromley was rated the best place to live in the Midlands by the Sunday Times in both 2013 and 2016 (the Sunday Times seems to do an awful lot of these polls). Although some may cruelly regard this as a backhanded compliment, its wide main street, succession of half-timbered buildings, fine school and decent pubs certainly looked alluring.

  The locals were on the warpath, though. Notices everywhere implored people to spruce up their surroundings, as the judges for the Best Kept Village competition were due in town. Abbots Bromley is a regular
winner of the East Staffordshire section of this competition, but it has yet to win the county-wide award, something that rankles, just a bit. The village is also the location for an annual Horn Dance. With claims to be the oldest folk dance in Britain, this tradition dates to way back when and takes place on the first Monday in September. It involves six dancers carrying a set of reindeer horns: three white and three black, with some of these having been radio-carbon dated to over a thousand years ago. Other dancers include someone playing Maid Marion, a fool and a hobby-horse. This felt in total keeping with the Abbots Bromley brand, if I can call it that. One of those nutty traditions that people will fight to the death to defend but serve no contemporary purpose. A bit like the royal family, it’s harmless fun, makes people feel happy and brings in the tourists.

  I checked in to see how Annette was getting on. It turned out she was still some way off being able to collect me (having decided that one day’s diagonal walking was enough, my companions of the previous day had chosen to immerse themselves in the delights of the Wedgwood Experience), so I decided to push on to my next destination, Yoxall. Only later did we realise that the texts I’d received had arrived in the wrong order, and she was, in fact, ready to get me. It was an error I was to rue.

  The footpath away from Abbots Bromley included the by now traditional impediments, with the added bonus of some curious alpacas to spice things up a bit. I made an error when presented with a 50:50 choice at one footpath, but was soon able to course correct, and passing through the grounds of a large farm, I was cheered to see something I’d thought I would never see in Staffordshire: brand new stiles and gates placed at the correct point on the footpath.