ELLIE HARRISON
Walkers’ rights of way have been hard won; let’s preserve our historical paths and not erase them
We must all work to protect and extend access to the countryside.
It’s all horses down here. At school pick-up, mothers without socks pulled up to the knees, fresh out of riding boots are uncommon.
Even at school break times, I’m told it’s either ‘jumps’ for the children that do and dens for everyone else. I don’t have any problem with it: horses and I have an understanding that I will never land my hulking weight across their spine and they will never have to tolerate me attempting to ride.
But when it comes to outdoor pursuits, I worry that my go-to cold-weather activity of walking is rather less exciting than everyone else’s. It’s a view tainted by childhood walks that I see more clearly now through the lens of parenthood. For little people, walking from A to B is factually boring. Find a spot in the woods and play around in it for hours = fun; walk from over here to over there for hours = dull.
A lowly country pursuit it may be, but I’ve come to appreciate walking more over time. After forcing myself to go running for fitness each week, walking is a great skive. But far more than that, it’s a joy to move through nature at a pace that allows our senses to keep up. Cycling, riding and driving all move us along so fast that we can’t see the snail, hear the vole, get snagged on blackthorn or smell the spring garlic. Being out in nature in this way is a great gift.
And after filming a story with Disabled Ramblers and recognising the challenges of access faced by so many people, being out in the countryside on footpaths is also a luxury never to be taken for granted. In addition to the obvious physical challenges of the landscape, gates and styles can be prohibitive. I’ve learned how even gates with radar keys get deliberately glued over. I’ve heard too that coronavirus has been used as an excuse to illegally block or reroute rights of way.
ACKNOWLEDING OUR ANCESTORS
The gentle and sometimes unremarkable walks we go on are actually an opportunity to look out for each other’s right to do so. The landmark
Mass Trespass across the Peak District moors in 1932 resulted in bloodied faces and time in prison for some of the Kinder Scout ramblers, who made a sacrifice that we all now benefit from. We can pay this forward by knowing our local walking routes, by enabling two-way gates for disabled ramblers and by joining in the national conversation about footpaths.
In 2000, the Countryside and Rights of Way
Act opened up the countryside but also set an ambitious target: to record every public path in England and Wales by 2026. Any pre-1949 paths and rights of way not officially recorded by this date will be ‘extinguished’. With money spent and lost on the project and with backlogs of applications on council desks, rather than set a ticking clock on determined individuals to sleuth historical records and faint clues in the landscape for the thousands of miles of missing paths, it would make more sense to ditch the artificial deadline and return to an ever-evolving map, one that allows time for rediscovering old routes, for unused paths to diminish and brand new ones to open.
Just as destination isn’t the point of going for a walk, arriving at a definitive picture-locked map of our footpaths isn’t the point of charting our rights of way through the land.