The Lost Paths, a History of How We Walk from Here to There, by Jack Cornish, Penguin Books, 2025 (first published 2024).
I am delighted to see now that the fox on the front cover appears on the spine of the book as well.
The buttercup and clarkia (I think) photos from the garden are purely to decorate this post.
The Life and Death section of the book continues with The Church, Death and Taxes. Cornish covers so much ground and has so much to share that it is difficult to pick and choose, but I offer details that were new to me or long forgotten. There is a good deal about monastic paths which join monastic farms – and that, it turns out, is what granges are.
I mentioned some odd coincidences of timing between this book and my recent trip to Dorset. At RSPB Arne I noticed and found myself thinking about memorial benches and the charm of the inscriptions on their plaques. That afternoon I read that Cornish too finds his eyes and thoughts often lingering on them. “The few short words which try to set out a person’s life and perhaps their connection to where ‘their bench’ now stands. Short statements which seek to describe the importance of these singular individuals for people whom may never have known them at all.”
We also learn of coffin paths, or corpse roads or bier roads and the superstition that has tended to surround them. Lych ways and lychgates (those arched entrances to English churchyards) take their name from the Old English for corpse: lich.
There is mention of sainfoins which we are told in a footnote is a crop used for animal forage, the word coming from the French for ‘healthy hay’. “The scientific name Onobrychis translates as ‘devoured by donkeys’”.
I had no idea that tithes, specifically the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, were the original catalyst for the mapping of most of England and Wales – tithes were converted to cash payments and to achieve this officials needed to know who owned what land. The Tithe Act of 1936 was a response to farmers’ understandable resistance to and protest against the tax but tithes, incredibly, were not fully abolished until the Finance Act of 1977.
It was good to be reminded of and learn more about the writer and publisher William Hone. This in a charming passage on the romantic idea of stiles and kissing gates playing their part in courtship and more. Hone wrote: “How many scenes of frolic and merry confusion have I seen at a clumsy stile! What exclamations and charming blushes, and fine eventual vaulting on the part of the ladies, and what an opportunity does it afford to beaux exhibiting a variety of gallant and delicate attentions. I consider a rude stile as any thing but an impediment to the course of a rural courtship.”
Hone (1780-1842) was a radical reformist, a champion of “the abolition of the poor rate and the improvement of insane asylum conditions, and a fighter against state repression and miscarriages of justice. He was also a staunch defender of free speech … and a strong defender of trial by jury by a defendant’s peers.”
Chapter 8, Pilgrim’s Paths, throws out the word “cephalophore”, “a saint who carries their own severed head”. St Urith was one such “curiously never shown decapitated but instead … two-headed, with one attached, one detached.” If that’s not a word of the day I don’t know what is. How pleased and probably rather smug I will be if it comes up in a crossword.
The next section, Water, opens with Salt Ways. Where other than in this book might I have learnt that at Winsford in Cheshire a great underground void was created by the extraction of salt. This is now DeepStore, a vast, temperature and moisture-controlled space used for the storage of archives – including documents, pottery and paintings.
Cornish is very amusing about an attempt to impose a semblance of order on salt paths. Ley lines are an appealing concept but there is a tendency to ignore all but the most convenient markers. Archaeologist Richard Atkinson devised a mock system of ‘telephone leys’ using telephone boxes to mark out a perfect grid and mathematician Matt Parker did the same thing with branches of Woolworths.
My friends and I in Dorset discussed the story of a man who had been the sole survivor of a number of disasters and here in The Climate Coast I read later that day the story of several people by the name of Hugh Williams. Allegedly one Hugh Williams alone survived a failed crossing of the Menai Strait in 1665. Two boats also sank there in 1783 and 1820. Again the only survivor was a man named Hugh Williams in each case. I suppose the answer is not to get on board if a Hugh Williams is on the manifest.
I was a little disillusioned to learn that the extended name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales was probably just a Victorian marketing ploy, much as tartan was a rather cynical nineteenth-century revival at best.
I adore the work of both Rex Whistler and his brother Laurence, master engraver of glass. I will never forget seeing the former’s trompe l’oeil drawing room mural at Mottisfont Abbey. It was commissioned by the owner, Maud Russell, whose granddaughter Emily became a close friend when I was a student.
In Lord Paget’s country house, Plas Newydd, Cornish tells us, is Rex Whistler’s mural which is the largest painting on canvas in Britain. The Mottisfont mural simulates a room, this is a landscape fantasy 58 feet long. I would love to see it. Whistler’s genius is to make it seem like an extension of the Menai Strait, complete with wet footprints, a self-portrait and allusions to his unrequited love for Lady Caroline Paget.
Whistler painted what Cornish describes as a “startling nude” of her. Certainly it was scandalous in its day and it is certainly intimate. I find it innocent and tender too.
Apparently it’s fine (I hope so) to download and share images from artuk.org for non-commercial use as I have these above which is quite a revelation for me and a very useful one.
The last footnote in this chapter is about the odd verb “founder”. Cornish notes that it is only applied to a few specific things: companies in dire straits, diplomatic talks, “troubled ships and unwell horses.”
I’ll just share one revelation from Chapter 12, Drainage. It’s a good one. A peat cutter called Ray Sweet was clearing a ditch on the Somerset Levels in 1970 and discovered what was then the oldest known track on the planet. Constructed of wood, it was established through tree-ring analysis that the felling of the trees dated from the spring of 3806 B.C.
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