COVER STORY ENGLAND THE KENT COASTLINE WALK – MARGATE TO BROADSTAIRS

*** On a stroll with Stuart Maconie, president of the Ramblers, Tom Ough finds it is a race against time to save some of Britain’s ancient pathways CONSTABLE COUNTRY, ESSEX

2019-01-27 -

Let’s start with a bald fact: if the British public doesn’t register 10,000 miles of ancient paths by Jan 1 2026, most of those paths will be lost forever. Here’s why. They didn’t make it on to the flawed official maps, known as the definitive maps, that were drawn in 1949; they were allocated 26 years’ grace at the turn of the millennium, with the government seeking to find and record those paths within that time frame; the official project collapsed in 2008, four years after its creation; and now, with a little under six years remaining and a new Defra plan yet to be executed, there is a lot of pathway for members of the public to register, and not much time in which to do it. When the deadline passes, those ancient paths will no longer be rights of way, which means that, in most cases, landowners will not be obliged to keep them visible, navigable and safe.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” says Stuart Maconie. He and I are walking one of those paths, now a muddy slip ’n’ slide that is festooned with brambles and obstructed by tree trunks. “If we don’t do this now, they’ll never come back.”

My boot squelches into ankledeep mud. Also, my earlobe is bleeding after I had to force my way through a knot of said brambles. Maybe some paths are meant to be lost, I think to myself. But then again, if this path were marked on the map, maybe more people would use it, and maybe the landowner, or even volunteer Ramblers, might be moved to keep it in better condition. Squelch.

Maconie feels strongly about all this. Alongside his work as a BBC Radio 6 Music presenter and a travel writer, he is president of the Ramblers. This means he is the figurehead of British walking, if there can be such a thing, and represents the charity’s 120,000 members. In the absence of a government initiative to register the lost paths, the Ramblers are encouraging those members to find the routes and flag them to their regional authorities and, in the meantime, are advocating an extension of the deadline.

It’s Article 50 for cartographers. “As a country, we are very into the idea that

‘This network of old ways is part of our heritage, just as palaces and castles are’

ordinary people have freedoms, hardwon freedoms, and this is a case in point,” Maconie explains as we walk. The majority of British land, he says, is privately owned, and “that’s fine. But we do have rights to cross it in order to get to places that we want to be”.

Getting from A to B, rather than going for a roundabout stroll, was probably the genesis of the path that Maconie and I are following in the West Midlands. It consists of a wet, tree-lined trench between two fields. The trees look deliberately planted, and from time to time we encounter bits of stone and brick laid into the soil, presumably put there decades ago by people who used the path regularly and wanted to improve it. Back then, I’m guessing, the path was a useful thoroughfare between two farms. Sometime in the 20th century, an actual road was built, and the path failed to make it on to the definitive maps, just like so many others. Being unmarked, it seems to have fallen into near-absolute disuse. If a tree falls across an unmarked right of way, does it matter?

So, do we really need these paths? The deadline wasn’t set out of malice: landowners, quite reasonably, want certainty. After my walk with Maconie, which was muddy, convivial and, to be frank, all the more enjoyable for involving some level of difficulty, I spoke to the Country Land and Business Association, which represents many of the individuals and businesses whose land is crossed by these paths. Christopher Price, who is the association’s director of policy and advice, said many of the lost paths “were created in very different times and for purposes that are not always relevant in the 21st century”.

“There is considerable scaremongering about the proposed 2026 cutoff,” he continued, “but routes that are already in use by the public will be unaffected, whether they have been recorded or not, and significant measures are in place to make sure genuinely useful paths are not accidentally lost.”

For others, however, this is often about something other than genuine usefulness. Mary-ann Ochota, the documentary presenter, anthropologist and author of Hidden Histories: A Spotter’s Guide to the British Landscape, told me “this network of old ways is part of our heritage, just as palaces and castles are. They’re a way of understanding historical landscape that is as important as any building. And when they are lost they are lost forever.”

She said the deadline should be extended and that local councils, which are struggling to keep up with the submissions filed by walkers, should be given more funding. “This isn’t an abstract thing that busybodies are doing, but a practical challenge that has benefit for all of us.”

Romanticism seems to be a powerful motivator. I thought of something else Maconie had said. “We love the secret, the undiscovered, and the forgotten. We like that in our poets and painters. We don’t like brashness in the way that Americans might want to celebrate some huge highway or other countries might celebrate some huge achievement but, in this quiet British way, we like to celebrate the overlooked. And that’s something very important to our national psyche.”

Come Jan 1 2026, we’ll know whether he’s right.