The Lost Paths, a History of How We Walk from Here to There, by Jack Cornish, Penguin Books, 2025 (first published 2024).
I am loving this book. It didn’t take long to win me over, no longer in fact than the realisation that the author is director of England (and formerly head of paths) at the Ramblers and on reading part of the dedication: “… to all those who fight for public access and to preserve our paths – past present and future … “, a cause I passionately support. The portrait photograph on the inner lower cover show him to have the kindliest of faces. I can’t see the name of the artist of the lovely cover illustration but am very happy that there is a fox walking through the signposted grassy landscape.
There are couple of useful maps at the beginning showing the paths the author travels and key places along them.
The breadth and depth of Cornish’s knowledge and research is extraordinary and I have learnt much and been reminded of much that I had forgotten.
I had to check that The Ramblers is the same organisation as The Ramblers’ Association – it turns out that it was renamed in 2009. A recently launched campaign is called “Access Denied” calling for the “shameful web” of barriers to access to be dealt with and for the government to declare nature a legal entitlement for all. There an estimated 32,000 blocked paths in England and Wales and there is a massive backlog. They also want the 49,000 miles of lost paths discovered by volunteers to be officially recorded and successfully pressed for the 2031 deadline to be removed. I couldn’t agree more that the Right to Roam should be forever enshrined in law as it is in Scotland. No woodland, riverside or other waterside should be off limits.
We learn from the introduction that rights of way were only required to be officially recorded aş recently as 1949. Cornish himself set up “Don’t Lose Your Way” with the intention of reclaiming lost paths and putting them back on the map.
There are six chapters in the first section, Land, and the first is Ancient Highways. There are two forgotten or unknown words on the first page: “menhirs”, tall, upright, prehistoric stones and “cists”, ancient coffins or burial chambers.
“Wild animals were the first path makers” – of course they would naturally find “the easiest contours, the best places to cross and negotiate difficult terrain and rivers.” Humans followed.
The second chapter, Animals, is a wonderful history of drovers who it seems were the early instigators of the banking system. To avoid travelling with large sums of cash, they used promissory notes. A Welsh drover in 1799 started the Banc yr Eidion Ddu, the Bank of the Black Ox, featuring that animal on his banknotes. It s possible that the Black Horse associated with Lloyds Bank may have similar origins.
The third chapter, The Parish Road and Turnpikes, is equally illuminating. Cornish repeatedly ends me off on tangents. Do Ordnance Survey maps really include pylons? Yes, they do. I adore OS maps.
A holloway is a sunken road or path and that is why that part of London bears the name.
Cornish has a wonderful way with words as well as wearing his learning lightly. He describes, for example, steps bearing the evidence of countless feet in “a pillowy sag”. Whether the steps are of wood or stone it is easy to picture exactly what he means.
It is a long time since I have noticed a milestone – I am sure I was more observant when I was younger. Wonderfully, there is a Milestone Society (reminding me of the websites for pylon enthusiasts which I wrote about here: Phoenix Trail, a double rainbow, a Sparrowhawk in the garden and a bird murder raffle – Animal Wild).
This is their website: Home – The Milestone Society
“Here you can find out about milestones and other waymarkers, their history and their heritage significance. They are distinctively local, constructed in idiosyncratic styles from vernacular materials; they also mark a path into the past, to the Romans, the statute labourers, the builders and travellers of the turnpike roads, to industrial travel and transport.” Volunteers have logged 31,230 of them with 2,150 images. Waymarkers are shown on OS maps but not always reliably. There is also Google Earth, Google Earth Maps – The Milestone Society. I will be looking for them now.
Turnpikes are of course restrictions and the chapter includes a history of the riots they inspired.
We get a concise but comprehensive history of our railways in chapter 4, Railway Mania. I love the concept that a wonderful view alone should be justification enough for the preservation of a right of way, in spite of the best efforts of Network Rail. The Ramblers objected to the closure of 45 crossings and 34 were saved, including a path used by hundreds of people every day who would otherwise have been forced onto busy and dangerous roads and in two cases deprived of a “spectacular view of Ely Cathedral” and “a fine panorama of the River Stour.” I am reminded of an especially happy childhood holiday, our first at a Landmark Trust property, Alton Station in Staffordshire, the railway having long since disappeared.
In the fifth chapter, From the Ground, we are treated to a history of mining, especially in Cornwall. I visited a tin mine there once and could hardly stand the sense of claustrophobia for more than five minutes. A mention of St Austell prompted another memory – a WOMAD festival on the beach featuring the great Burning Spear amongst many others. We camped and bathed in the sea every morning. I remember a local stallholder saying that she had been dreading the arrival of the crowds but had found that were all “rather lovely”.
A mention of the art installation 20:50 by Richard Wilson sent me scurrying hre: 20:50 | Sculptures | Richard Wilson
There is a good deal about the Penannt family, Richard Pennant being the owner of a Welsh slate quarry, his wealth coming from “four sugar plantations and thousands of enslaved workers in Jamaica”. As an MP for Liverpool in the 1770s and 1780s and chairman of the West India Committee he argued strongly against abolition. When slavery was abolished, the inheritor of hs estate received the equivalent of £1.3m in compensation, The Welsh polymath Thomas Pennant seems not to have been related.
Cornish notices that slate is by no means a monotone grey: “The slate shimmers with petrol hues – purple, dusty pink, sage and steel blue.” Again it is easy to picture precisely.
One of our largest earth sculptures is in South Wales in a country park in the valley of Sirhowry formed from the mass of a former coal tip where a 650-foot bank has been shaped into “Sultan the Pit Pony”. Sultan the Pit Pony in Caerphilly | Atlas Obscura
And at two mines in Cornwall, Cornish path-moss, Ditrichum cornubicum, has been discovered. “This moss has only been found in one other place in the world and the total world population covers 0.16 square metres (just bigger than a piece of A3 paper”.
In the next chapter, Enclosure, I loved the idea of the sleepy Norfolk village of Seething failing to live up to its name. I have written at some length about the enclosures myself. Cornish is rather more temperate but writes of what seeems to him to be “outright theft” and “class robbery”, the results of which we still live under today.
It seems typical that the Earl of Coventry was able in the eighteenth century to insist on a private driveway within his enclosure, forcing everybody else to take the long way round. The commissioners swore oaths of impartiality and yet were either land agents or lawyers for the biggest local landowners. It will be interesting indeed to witness later this month the case against Pippa Middleton who has closed off a much loved and used path in our village, forcing people onto the dangerous road, which is being contested by none other than The Ramblers.
George Orwell wrote of “land-grabbers … taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.” The footnote on this page of the book references the superb The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes and Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England?, both of which I have written about.
Stiles are also in a sense barriers, not portals … and, yes, there is “a passionate Twitter community” which celebrates them, and a “cult book, a definitve guide”, Michael Roberts’ Gates and Stiles: The History and Design of British Gates and Stiles, and Cornish notes various categories: “the ‘ladder’,’ the ‘staircase’, the ‘grid’, the ‘slab’, the ‘vee’, the ‘zig-zag’ and the ‘turnstile’.” But he has no truck with them: “They all need sweeping away to enable millions more people to use our paths and access nature.”
He quotes from John Clare’s ‘The Village Minstrel’:
Here once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt,
There once were lanes that every valley wound –
Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;
Each tyrant ixed his sign where paths were found,
To hint a trespass now who cross’d the ground.
Chapter 7, In Work and Poverty, the first in the second part of the book, Life and Death, deals with the appalling injustices of the Poor Law Amendment and Vagrancy Acts of the nineteenth century which essentially criminalised poverty. It is a shocking read.
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