Paths to glory – and peril

In 2014, a storm in Port Eynon, the Gower Peninsula, ripped back layers of sand to the peat underneath. Discovered in the boggy ground were footprints of adults and children who had trodden the same paths as we do – but an amazing 7,000 years ago. The anthropologist Tim Ingold says that the unfurling of life can be found ‘not in places but along paths’.

Jack Cornish is the head of paths at walking charity The Ramblers. While walking might seem the easiest of leisure pursuits, the struggle simply to walk across public land is centuries old.

It was only in 1949 that the National Parks And Access To The Countryside Act was passed, with rights of way that had existed for centuries being required to be legally recorded for the first time.

This protection would have pleased one of the earliest agitators for rights of way – William Wordsworth. He was vehement about the public’s right to ramble across it – and didn’t mind inflicting a bit of criminal damage to make his point. Walking across a field to Lowther Castle, Wordsworth found a wall blocking his party’s access and set about knocking it down, much to the wrath of the local landowner.

Cornish’s book delves back in history. If you’ve ever wondered about the phrase going on the warpath, the Anglo-Saxon ‘herepaths’ (or ‘army ways’) formed a network between their settlements in southern England.

In the early 20th Century,

‘Dr’ Deighton and George

Allen both walked from John O’Groats to Land’s End. Deighton made a sponsorship deal with Bovril, claiming his feat was due to consumption of the beef extract. Allen, a vegetarian, was so annoyed he beat Deighton’s record, while fixing up his own deal with Phosferine, a tonic wine.

Meanwhile, the deadliest path in England and Wales is the Broomway near the closed island of Foulness in Essex, although it is the tides, rather than anything more sinister, that mean it has claimed at least 100 lives.

Cornish is keen to point out that there is still much to do to widen access to walking. We may have moved on from the misogyny of the hiking craze of the 1930s, where MP William Mabane spluttered about encountering ‘forward young ladies in… hideous shorts’. But today only one per cent of visitors to a national park are from an ethnic minority.

This book can sometimes feel heavy going, but then on the next page you discover an enticing new vista.

It is also written with a sense of urgency: 49,000 miles of footpaths are still missing from British maps. If they are not recorded by 2031 under the Government’s deadline to record historical rights of way, they could be lost forever.