Taking a Walk

On a map, they are a great latticework of yellow. From the air, they are wiggling caterpillars of green. On the ground, they are grey… Country lanes are perhaps our richest public space, and nowhere is this quiet wealth more resplendent than in Devon, a huge county stitched together by the tracks and ways that tunnel between its fields.

There is a lifetime in these lanes. My dad is an avid lane-walker. On his hallway wall is a map of the southern slopes of Dartmoor around his home in the small town of Ashburton. He draws every walk on it in fluorescent orange pen. The map is a maze of orange but in 20 years he hasn’t yet marked every byway with his footsteps – or pen.

We set out on a well-trodden lane walk, up Bowden Hill, out of town. It’s steep enough to defeat cyclists and narrow enough to befuddle delivery drivers, although somehow the binmen squeeze along here every week. The master of this lane is the local who whizzed down it on skis during the great snows, his video making the national news.

Farther up, the asphalt gives way to loose stone, the houses stop and we turn onto an even tinier, unsurfaced track that dips down and up before diving into a dark tunnel of overgrown hazel. This path is owned by the badgers whose setts spill dark soil from ancient-rooted banks.

The path passes obediently around a small reservoir on the top of the hill and becomes a steep track down through grassy paddocks that are increasingly the currency of the region’s burgeoning population of hobby farmers. It’s a derogatory phrase – so we need another: vocational farmers or later-life livestockers, perhaps.

At the bottom, we rejoin tarmac between high hedge-banks and the lane imperceptibly ascends towards the moor. I hit this road at a bad time, just before 9am. In half-a-mile, I squeeze against the bank for 17 cars, sweating along their morning shortcut.

Still, many smaller highways remain tranquil, usually because they are intimidatingly narrow, their passing places too far apart for the reverse-phobic. (The worst rage I’ve ever encountered was when I was driving on a peaceful lane and met a pick-up truck driver who felt that to find his reverse gear would be an irreparable wound to his masculinity.) For the remaining three miles of this lane walk, I meet just one vehicle.

The old road around Druid Farm is my favourite of this walk, switchbacking as it follows a contour around the southwesterly slopes of what rises to become Dartmoor. Even during the driest of summers, water oozes from the hillside to dampen the track’s brow. Hedge-banks are filled to bursting by a procession of flowers: primroses, red campion, foxgloves and meadowsweet. Later come burgeoning shoots of ash and field maple. A silverwashed fritillary sails high between the old oaks; at eye level, the bramble flowers bounce with bumblebees and gatekeepers.

I turn left up another quiet lane which passes an old water mill and continues in a lung-bursting assault on the moor. Before it does, I go right across an old stone bridge over the River Ashburn and into the woods. The only sound is the stream’s trickle; the only smell the surreal tang of heavy blooms of buddleia, the shrub vaulting here from some distant garden.

I follow the trail down the valley, on the lanes back to Ashburton. All kinds of creatures make paths, on purpose or otherwise, opening up space for others. I’m treading in the tracks of miners lugging tin from the moor, farmers bringing sheep and cattle, and now cyclists, triathletes, geocachers and everyone else who finds new purpose in the old ways.

Ordnance Survey Explorer OL28 Dartmoor shows a lifetime of Devon lane walks. I walked in a circle north of Ashburton, leaving on West Street and returning on North Street, with Bowden Hill, Druid and Rew in-between