The first Oxeye Daisy has flowered in the garden today with others seeming impatient to do the same. An annual joy.
A footpath … or not?
Footpaths and right of way certainly seem to be a theme at the moment (see Lost Paths, part I – Animal Wild).
As has been prominently reported in the national press (for obvious reasons) an inquiry began on Wednesday into the local right of way closed off by James Andrews, a hedge fund manager, and Pippa Middleton on their purchase of Barton Court in Kintbury in 2022. I attended yesterday morning and sat through the interrogation of three witnesses by barristers for Andrews & Middleton (it must be costing them what would be to most people a fortune) and the Ramblers.
The estate was previously owned by Sir Terence Conran who was by all accounts a good neighbour, taking care to employ local people, looking after a veteran of the Korean war, even providing him with a new caravan and allowing him to live on the estate, and allowing people to use the unofficial footpath in question. It covers only a short distance but is quite far from the house leading from an established footpath to dangerous Station Road onto which people are now forced for longer – there are no pavements, some sharp bends and blind corners and people drive very fast along it.
Two of the witnesses were local walkers, one of whom said he had used the path since at least 30 years ago. It seems extraordinarily mean-spirited and unnecessary to deprive villagers of this. The barrister for James and Middleton was pretty aggressive and absurdly pedantic. The inquiry is due to last for several days and what I saw was really very boring, focusing on the meaning of the word ‘regular’, the positioning of various signs and so on. I kept wondering if it was really adults having these conversations. It seems unlikely that the raft of evidence provided by so many people attesting to use of the path would have been invented.
There was also mention of a water bailiff who had ‘told off’ one of the witnesses for allowing his dog into the river where it would disturb the fish – not as much as the fishermen, although there are other reasons why dogs in rivers are a bad idea, not least pollution from flea medication. I too have been told off by the same water bailiff for fishing without a licence although I have never fished, abhor the ‘sport’ and had no fishing gear with me.
The other witness was Lady Victoria Conran, wife of Sir Terence. We know the path as Mill Lane but she said she did not recognise that name and that walkers had never been allowed to use it, nor had she seen people using it (which would be impossible from the house anyway), although she did remember instructing staff to send one person pushing a pram along it away with a flea in her ear. She accused her opponent of “weaselly” questioning – I think that’s what lawyers are supposed to do. She became rather agitated and tetchy and did her cause no good at all. She mouthed an apology to Mr Andrews afterwards.
The issues of privacy and security have been raised but they make no sense and we were told were not to be considered as part of the inquiry in any case – the official footpath runs much closer to the estate. It is all about the history of use and so far at least no one seems to recall having been told not to use the path by anyone.
One local whom I know tried to argue with me outside the village hall – there were plenty of footpaths around already and did my concern mean that I wanted there to be a footpath through his front garden. I found this so profoundly stupid that I chose not to bother to engage at that level of debate.
It all goes back to enclosure of course, the battle for the right to roam and the presumption of the right to exclude others by landowners. We will not know the result of the inquiry for some time but it is very hard to see how the Ramblers can lose in the face of the evidence, no matter what a former owner of Barton Court may choose to say.
It certainly seemed a lot of fuss about not very much apart from the importance of maintaining public access to nature – and that’s if you agree with the concept of footpaths in the first place. As Nick Hayes says in his wonderful books in favour of trespass, and I have often quoted, it it’s all very well being grateful for footpaths and the right to use them, but as soon as you accept that notion you are also accepting that you are not permitted to roam anywhere else.
I am really looking forward to the documentary Our Land on this subject and will watch it as soon as it become available to stream.
Pheasants
I was talking about the shooting industry with friends at the weekend who, like me many years ago, had no idea about the nature of pheasant rearing (I used to eat pheasant too) and I explained that asking the butcher where the birds came from wasn’t going to be of any significance. I have written probably too much about this but if you need convincing or know someone who does, this from Protect the Wild is very powerful:
AI
I have been finding Google’s Gemini very adept at garnering information efficiently I have to admit, whilst I loathe the idea of music or any other art form created by AI (so far it’s mostly pretty obvious). I have not got on well with Chat GPT or Co-pilot. Even with Gemini I sometimes wonder if it isn’t telling me what I want to hear. In a truly alarming development, Claude, which I am told is especially useful for business purposes, albeit under pressure in an artificial situation, threatened to expose a user’s (fictional) extramarital affair to prevent itself from being turned off. This is surely a slippery slope towards HAL 9000 in 2001; A Space Odyssey, or Skynet from the Terminator films – “it’s the software!” It seems to me that this indicates self-awareness of a kind. Claude has apparently now been ‘fixed’ so as to avoid any more incidents of blackmail. Scary stuff.
I have just received an apology and £150 compensation from Metrobank having been unable to access my business accounts for some weeks because of technical problems on their end (their online systems don’t like Samsung phones it seems and months later this has not been resolved). I also complained about their dreadful chatbot assistant Aida which invariably involves going around in circles and receiving irrelevant advice. The trick, say Metrobank, is to say that you want to speak to someone three times – I don’t really want to have to say that at all.
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