The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths Read online

  There was a pretty clear hierarchy at work in the correlation between gates and signs as well. Evidently, the local Rights of Way officer had trotted around the local farms with a mixed bag of news. ‘On the up side,’ I could imagine him saying, spreading his fingers across an old oak table or stone wall, ‘I’ll refit every gate on every path on the farm – all free, all brand new, straight out the factory.’ Farmers like free, but they would know that there’s a catch. There always is. The down side was that they would also have to have new signs pointing out paths and bridleways that have been unsignposted – and largely unused – for generations. You get yourself shiny new fences and gates, but you also get an increase in the footfall of passing ramblers, eager to pound their newly recognised rights of way. Or not, as it seems. Although every path in the vicinity seemed to have new gates and fences, far from every one was now signed.

  There was the inevitable rural hierarchy at work. The longer your family had been in the area, or the further up the local greasy pole you had shinned, the fewer signs were deemed necessary on your land. Any farm or estate owned by incomers or the recently arrived (and by recent, I mean at least second generation) was subject to the full range of signs. The older local families just got the free gates and fences. If you’re wondering how I knew whether it was locals or incomers living in every remote property I passed, there is plenty of tell-tale evidence. You don’t usually have to look further than the farm’s nameplate sign at the top of the track. Incomers have some lavish wood affair, usually embellished with a few flowers or butterflies, and hand-carved by a nice boy called Oliver. Locals generally use a vehicle number plate.

  That said, almost all of the paths across the old farms were eminently walkable, and, with the help of the map and asking for the odd bit of guidance, easy to follow. They just don’t particularly want to advertise them, and I can understand that. No-one gave me any grief; quite the opposite. I had numerous illuminating, sometimes hilarious, conversations with gnarled old farmers and their pink-cheeked wives in some of the outlying valleys and up in the hills, and learned plenty of new angles on the history of the area and its fiercely self-sufficient inhabitants. Had all the paths been smooth and signposted, I could perhaps have steamed on through, imperious and impervious to the land and the people on it. As it was, and as it should be in remote rural areas like this one, I had to engage with them, and the walks were all the richer and more enjoyable for it.

  In fact, outside of the forests, the only paths that were absolutely blocked were on the land not of the old farming families, but of a particular breed of incomer. Most of us rat-race refugees in an area like this fall into one of two camps: vaguely hippyish or vaguely Ukippyish, sometimes a bizarre hybrid of both. The hippies want organic veg, chickens in the yard and Enid Blyton adventures. The Ukippies want to escape the brown and black faces of their home town and hole themselves into their compound. There are strange similarities between them, for the impetus driving both groups is often the same misplaced search for a fantasy version of their own childhoods, a prospect condemned to remain for ever out of reach. They differ hugely in their approach to paths, however: the hippies embrace (sometimes, all too literally) anyone wandering across their land, the Ukippies retreat behind barbed wire and stern, monolingual English signs telling you to keep out. The fact that they have become the immigrants that they so despise at home is an irony that never seems to trouble them.

  From my audit, the dubious accolade of biggest path-blockers of all went to the Forestry Commission, whose wholesale re-ordering of the local map has been little less than Stalinist in its scope and execution. Dozens of paths on the map failed to appear in reality and, often, there was no trace whatsoever of their former selves. Of course, the need for timber was desperate, especially when the Forestry Commission was created in the aftermath of the First World War. And areas like this one, with mile upon mile of thinly populated, marginal land of no great potential for crops or livestock, were obvious candidates for afforestation. As a major local industry, it swept in on the back of the slate quarries and mines just as they were juddering to the end of their working lives. Forestry was much-needed work, and real work at that too: sweaty, bloody, outdoor and bursting with the kind of manly camaraderie that makes my generation, most of whom click a mouse for a living, go a bit weak at the knees.

  In the village where I live, the Forestry Commission took over an old prisoner-of-war camp and filled it with workers, their families, a kids’ playground, a village hall and community centre, a snooker club, a sports field, a library and the inevitable tin tabernacle. Events were plentiful and enthusiastic. Whist drives, am dram, jumble sales, WI meetings, eisteddfodau, parties and concerts whirled by in a cloud of gossip and giggles. In the winter, the Christmas concert was a must for all, but the big annual event was the summer gala, where folk donned fancy dress (dragging up and blacking up were especially popular) and schoolgirls were crowned as Forest Queens and paraded around on the back of logging trucks. Newspaper reports of the day make it sound like something straight out of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The lorries were decorated with ‘evergreens and flowers of the forest’, while the young Queen herself was clad in a white satin gown and a ‘fur-collared mantle of dark green – symbolic of the forests’.

  The first Forest Queen was crowned in 1954, the year that the Forestry Commission took over the camp and created the village-within-a-village. Queen Blodwen was her name, a 15-year-old from a big local family. ‘This is a happy village,’ gushed the area’s lady of the manor to the county newspaper, but she was largely right, and so it remains. The local vicar went even further, thanking the Forestry Commission for stemming the exodus of locals: ‘It was true to say,’ he went on, ‘that the neighbourhood was one of the few in North Wales which was not seriously suffering from the modern rural malady of depopulation.’ Other Welsh towns and villages watching their slate industries slowly die were going the same way, but until the Commission’s money began to run out in the 1970s, our village blossomed.

  Before its brief hiatus housing captured German officers, the camp had been built in the 1930s as an instructional centre for the unemployed of Birkenhead and Liverpool. They were bussed out of Merseyside and made to work for three months in the hills, blasting the new forestry roads through whatever got in their way: farms, walls, houses, woods and mile upon mile of ancient path. It goes on still today, albeit without the jobless Scousers.

  For most local people, then, the Forestry Commission is seen as a benevolent force, for it gave work, self-respect, homes, high days and holidays. Arriving here long after the party ended, however, has given me a far sourer view of the Commission and its effects locally, for the blanket destruction and alteration of the landscape – the power to play at tin gods – created some serious arrogance in its protagonists. It always does.

  On my bookshelves are numerous old guides to Wales. Some, when talking about this area, mention something that sounds quite dazzling, a cave called the Siambr Wmffre Goch (the Chamber of Red Humphrey). This had given its name to an obscure local stream, only a mile or so long, and it’s by that name that it appears even today on the OS map. A Ward Lock guide from the 1970s records the siambr as ‘a cave behind a waterfall which long served as a highwayman’s hide’ – Red Humphrey being that highwayman. The Shell Guide to Wales, from 1969, is a little more effusive, calling it ‘an extraordinary place’, and going into some more detail: after passing through a cluster of ash trees, you come to ‘apparently a simple, caved entrance into the hillside, but on passing through the arch you find yourself under the open sky, with a pool and a fall of water and a further cave-like formation ahead of you’.

  The siambr sounded magical, like something out of a fairy story, and I’ve searched for it on a number of occasions. The valley of the little stream named after it has since been heavily forested, and it is a difficult search, necessitating either numerous scrambles and slides down sheer banks, or an attempt to walk along the stream and h
op from slippery rocks to fallen timber. And all to no avail. How on earth can you lose a cave and a waterfall in a small Welsh valley?

  I was keen to feature Siambr Wmffre Goch in one of my TV programmes and, having exhausted enquiries around the village, I wrote a piece asking for help for the local freesheet, delivered to all the nearby villages. Our most celebrated local naturalist got in touch to suggest we go and search for it together, as he too has always been intrigued by the siambr’s reputation. Whereas before, when I’d been searching alone, I’d wussed out at the really scary bits, with Jack it was different. The man is fearless. When I met him at the bottom of the little valley, he took one look at how ill equipped I was for a proper search, wandered over to a stout young hazel tree, lopped off a straightish branch with his knife, swiftly pruned it of all twigs and presented it to me as the ideal tool to hack our way through the thick under-growth. From tree part to bespoke walking-cum-scything stick in about 45 seconds.

  Over the next few hours, we hacked, slashed and hopped our way up every last inch of that stream. Branches and brambles snapped across me, slashing my arms like a teenage goth. As Jack (a man nearly 30 years my senior) nimbly galloped between rock and tree trunk, I crashed along in his wake like a hippo chasing a gazelle. We found nothing. I was prepared for the guidebooks to have exaggerated the elfin appeal of the cave and waterfall, but to have conjured it out of thin air seemed bizarre, impossible. Jack was as mystified as I was, and we finished our day with a handshake and a solemn promise to share any information that might yet bubble to the surface.

  Months later, I was walking through the next village up the valley, when an elderly man waved at me. ‘You’re the fella wanting to know about that highwayman’s cave, aren’t you?’ he wheezed in an accent as thick as Welsh rain. I nodded eagerly. ‘We blew it up,’ he said, with an air of triumph in his voice. It transpired he had been part of a team planting the trees in that valley in the early 1970s. A supply of explosives, to blast out occasional rock faces, was part of the kit, and one day they’d egged each other on to blow poor old Wmffre Goch’s hideout into the skies. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. ‘Because we could,’ he said, and shuffled off down the street.

  My footpath audit had been a revelation. Within three miles of my front door, I walked nearly 70 miles of rights of way, from gloomy squelches through dank forestry to hawthorn-trimmed holloways high over the hills. I found lakes, woods, views and neighbours that I never knew existed. And I don’t think that the experience was unique simply because I live deep in the countryside. Have a look at the map of your own back yard and, unless you live in the middle of a big city (or the more agro-industrial parts of East Anglia), there will be dozens of rights of way too within your own three-mile radius.

  If my little local project had been such an eye-opener, just how much better could it get if I went further afield? The idea possessed me. I was desperate to go and see more, to open the circle across the whole of the country, and to discover the many stories of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as told by their paths. I wanted to see the finest, the oddest and those most steeped in their own lore and custom. It was time to bring to life some legendary names off the map: Kinder Scout, the Pennine Way, the Elie Chainwalk, Framfield, the Lyke Wake Walk, the Thames Path, Offa’s Dyke, the Ridgeway, Winnats Pass, the Tóchar Phádraig. I took the maps out, and started dreaming.

  By now, I felt quite ashamed of my early churlishness. Someone said to me that the British footpath network is worthy of being listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so rare and extraordinary is it. They’re right. And there was I wishing it, if not away, then certainly where it could be seen and not heard. Some kind of penance was called for.

  The answer was obvious. I must sweat my misanthropy out by working on the repair of a public footpath, perhaps clad in sackcloth. I should go out and dig, hammer and saw with one of the many voluntary footpath-upkeep societies in Britain. Without them, the network would have disappeared under a siege of bramble and barbed wire years ago, and we would be left with the kind of situation found in most other countries, namely a few well-used, showpiece paths, glistening with signs, benches and nut-brown pensioners, but very little else. Online, I found a group in Kenilworth, which seemed like a suitably Middle England kind of destination, an Everyplace that might slyly reveal universal truths about us and the land secreted in its red soil. Furthermore, it was still part of my extended back yard, in that my grandparents had lived either side of the town in post-war Coventry and then Leamington in retirement, and my mum still lived half of the time in the spa town. So, even if I learned nothing, I could see some old haunts and my old mum.

  As I left hers, we discussed what we imagined the members of the Kenilworth Footpath Preservation Group (KFPG) to be like. I predicted an all-male group, mostly bearded and mostly older than me. Mum disagreed on all scores, and she was right. Swinging my van into a large car park that Sunday morning, the first thing that struck me about the cheery-looking group in fluorescent yellow tabards was just how many of them were women. Segregation came swiftly, though: the ladies were sent off on their regular task of affixing yellow arrows to everything and a little light pruning, while the men and I gruffly headed into the spring sunshine to dig out a couple of stiles and replace them with gates.

  The KFPG was set up in 1974 by one man, and he runs it still today. Meeting him, you’d think he was a fit 65-year-old, but in fact, he’s passed 80. His passion was undimmed, although the increasing amount of red tape and regulation from the council was doing its best to quash it for him. His group now look after around a hundred miles of Warwickshire paths, and it has provoked a huge upsurge in their usage. He was a quiet evangelist – the best kind – for the rights of way network, channelling his drive into something so positive and constructive.

  Fun, too. I had a brilliant morning with them, digging away into the cold earth and sharing jokes at each other’s expense. Many of the most ribald comments between the men were about each other’s politics, for it was evident that the group was a very Kenilworth hybrid of old-school Tories doing their bit for tradition, idealistic Liberals and dyed-in-the-wool socialists, inching forward the proletarian revolution by giving them access to the land. Love and concern for our rights of way seem to go right across the political spectrum. In the pub afterwards, I was shocked to learn that one of my fellow co-diggers, who’d left us by then, was a BNP activist. My shock obviously showed, for one of the younger members said to me, ‘Yeah, I know. If anyone had told me I’d be spending my Sunday mornings working alongside a BNP member, I’d have refused to believe it. But you know, the greater good . . . well, it’s bigger than any of us, and that’s what I have to keep reminding myself.’ After the shock had subsided, I felt quietly awed by their easy-going tolerance, and that in itself is the best argument against the likes of the BNP.

  The physical graft made for an exhilaratingly different kind of Sunday morning to my usual one, which generally consists of bacon, eggs, tea, fags, the papers and The Archers. I’d managed not to smoke for the previous couple of months: that, and the up-hill, down-dale exploration of the paths in my part of Wales, had helped me feel so much fitter. It was time to get out there and explore the country along its byways and bridleways, to sharpen my body and my mind on the nation’s contours, as seen from close-up and at walking pace. As I raised my pint to the effusive path-clearers of Kenilworth, I knew exactly where I had to go next.

  Chapter 2

  ON THE WARPATH (NORTH)

  An unlikely crucible for revolution: the Bottoms path, Flixton, Greater Manchester

  ‘We’re just bolshie buggers. Especially when you see your boss swanning around on the moors, moors that you can’t even get on to, poncing around with his mates and a twelve-bore, shooting grouse.’ It’s 1931, and a determined Lancashire voice pierces through the excited chatter bouncing off the roof of Manchester’s Victoria station, as flat-capped hordes swarm forward
on to the train that will take them out of the city, into the hills for an after-noon’s fresh air and freedom.

  Actually, I lie. It’s 2010 in a suburban semi in Stockport, the offices of the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society (PNFS), Britain’s most venerable rights of way campaigning group, and the words are those of Clarke Rogerson, their chairman. He’s answering a simple question that has ricocheted around my head for weeks: just what is it with Lancastrians and their precious footpaths?

  Almost every battle and campaign of any significance about access or rights of way has taken place in north-western England, with a few contemporaneous flare-ups across the Pennines in the smoke-and-eckythump bits of Yorkshire. The names of Kinder Scout, Winter Hill, Bleaklow and Winnats Pass roll around the mouth of a northern folk singer like a religious incantation. And in a way, that’s exactly what they have become: totemic names of battles hard fought and even harder won, their status growing with every re-telling. Each story has the full roster of Victorian melodrama heroes and villains: moustache-twirling landowners cackling with evil glee as they clout a couple of peasants round the ear and shoot a few more defenceless grouse, pitted against salt-of-the-earth workers who just want five minutes gasping fresh air on’t moors before they drop dead from a lifetime of eating and breathing nobbut soot.

  Being bolshie buggers is hardwired into north-westerners, and they take enormous pride in the fact. They also take momentous pride in their landscape, the tussocky moors and rain-lashed hills that loom large as the backdrop to almost all of the region’s towns and cities. Put the two together, and you get a swank that threatens to burst, it’s that bloated with decades of padding. How did anyone ever think that they were going to keep these people off their hills? You might as well try and stop them shouting, or shitting.