The Lost Paths, a History of How We Walk from Here to There, by Jack Cornish, Penguin Books, 2025 (first published 2024).
Firstly and not entirely tangentially, I posted this in June 2024:
Rural vandalism near me – Animal Wild
I gave this account of one individual’s taking of liberties:
“Just across the railway line, right by the entrance to the village, someone decided they needed somewhere to park their car and trailer. Choosing a roadside patch of woodland, by a stream, he hacked away at trees, hedgerow and shrubs, during nesting season, with ruthlessness. The selfish disregard for others and nature would be bad enough if he owned the land, but he doesn’t. It belongs to Network Rail. It is also either within or right on the boundary of a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The appalling individual claims to have thought that the land was not owned by anyone which he believed gave him the right do whatever he liked. He also claims to have submitted a planning application to West Berkshire Council, but they never received it and told him he would have to submit another. He claims to have done that too but decided he couldn’t be bothered to wait for a response, obliterated the area and laid down the hard surface he wanted. Why clear so much land for such a small vehicle? The parish council is in contact with WBC, Network Rail, Natural England and the police. I hope they throw the book at him. Even if he is forced to remove his vehicles and the hard surface, the damage is done. Destruction is easy and quick, restoration takes time.”
I am delighted to report now, from our excellent parish council annual newsletter, that this has been robustly dealt with. The account of the vandalism is not much different from my own and does not mince words. Network Rail (NWR) told the culprit to leave and make good the site (he vacated but actually left it in a terrible state). NWR have installed a gate in keeping with the existing fencing and agreed to designate the land a Community Garden. It isn’t that but it does allow the parish council to be caretakers of it. NWR sadly would not permit owl and bat boxes to be installed in case they wanted to use the land in future (I cannot imagine for what exactly) but it will now, it is hoped, revert back to its natural state as a home for wildlife. “At least it won’t be the home of vehicles and machinery, putting an unsightly blot on the entrance to our beautiful village.”
Jack Cornish adds three chapters under the heading Conflict – The War at Home, The Warpath and Protest and Protection. Again there is much to learn. Did I ever know that Ireland was officially neutral during World War II? Finally I know what the Maginot Line in France was: “an extraordinary belt of fortifications along its border with Germany, which was designed to deter, stop and slow invasion.” In the end Germany pretty much bypassed it, entering France through Belgium and Holland. I learn that a new German word was coined after the bombing of Coventry, coventrieren, meaning to raze a city.
There’s a nice section on path names and waymarks. Paths are named self-explanatorily after their routes, some after literary or musical figures such as the Brontë Way, the Tennyson Trail, Shakespeare’s Way, the John Bunyan Trail and the Gustav Holst Way. Others are named for less well-known individuals, some after ramblers and others who fought for rights of way, some for war and conflict, and there are trails linking castles, forts and battle sites.
The word “way” is from the Anglo-Saxon weg, leading to “holloways” and “ridgeways”, whilst a herepath is an army way. Burh, an Anglo-Saxon fortified settlement, gives us borough, burgh, bury, burg and other variations.
Another of the coincidences between this book and my weekend in Dorset is that we were talking about danger areas owned by the Ministry of Defence (the third largest institutional landowner in England) where accessibility can be overridden by military by-laws. There are “sixteen large areas and over a hundred smaller ones scattered across the country.” I wrote about the one in Dorset where there are tanks ‘hiding in bushes’ and which extends out to sea. The village of Tyneham in Dorset was cleared out completely during World War II and it remains a ghost town.
I forgot to include a part of The Climate Coast chapter – it is impossible to measure a coastline – it depends on the size of your ruler, an idea taken up by Benoit Mandelbrot whose Coastline Paradox became the notion of fractals. Nevertheless, water naturally erodes coastlines and countries are inevitably shrinking.
Protest and Protection is an exciting chapter and the most relevant to the footpath inquiry going on in my village between footpath users and Pippa Middleton and her husband.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were walking with friends in 1836 in Westnorland when they came up against a wall belonging to Lowther ‘Castle’ blocking their way. To my delight, Wordsworth smashed it down, declaring “This is the way and an ancient right of way too.” He responded to angry landowners at dinner that night, “I broke down your wall Sir John. It was obstructing an ancient right of way and I will do it again.”
Also in the Lake District, in 1887, the well-used path Spooney Green Lane which ran over and around Latrigg fell and another path to Latrigg were barricaded by landowners. Demonstrations and direct action followed (a number of footpath protection groups were formed around this time, one included Tennyson and Ruskin amongst its members) and eventually there was a court case. The result was a partial victory for the people – many locals testified (as at the inquiry in my neighbourhood) that they had used the path for years, including Robert Southey. The lane remains a public bridleway but the terrace path can only be walked with permission.
The mass trespass at Kinder Scout in 1932 is rightly celebrated and resonant but Cornish tells of another – at Winter Hill in the Pennines in 1896 – and reminds us of the recent challenge to wild camping on Dartmoor, during whch the spirit of Kinder Scout was invoked.
A mention of the Youth Hostels Association brought back happy memories, of cycling trips with my brother to our great-uncle in Felpham on the south coast, when I think we stayed at Holmbury St Mary in the Sussex hills (we also once did the 70 mile journey in a day, which I couldn’t manage now), and a two-week cycling tour of East Anglia during which a friend and I must have stayed at all of them in that part of the world. I had to check what the rules are now but we slept in dormitories having cooked our own, usually very basic meals, and there were obligatory chores to be done in the morning before leaving. Arriving by car was out of the question. Now food can be provided and there are no longer chores. And you can book a private en-suite room. Perhaps I should go back to them. Of course there was much less traffic then and even A roads were perfectly safe for cyclists.
The installation of a locked gate at Winter Hill, suggests Cornish, fulfilled John Ruskin’s words: “of all the mean and wicked things a landlord can do, shutting up his footpath is the nastiest.” The person responsible was estate owner Colonel Richard Henry Ainsworth, a vehemently “”anti-socialist and anti-union employer”, a keen hunter and shooter who wished to keep the public out so that he could “blast birds out of the sky” (also a factor at Kinder Scout). The family made a fortune from slavery in the West Indies. In spite of multiple protests access was only restored after 100 years – declaration of the public right of way happened as recently as 1996. As ever, local people had “little means against powerful and wealthy landowners.”
Another such offender was notorious landlord Nicholas Van Hoogstraten. A delightful meme new to me is the Streisand effect, defined by knowyourmeme.com as “the unintended consequence of further publicizing information by trying to have it censored. Instead of successfully removing the information from the public, it becomes even more widely available than before as a backlash against the censorship attempt.” Barbara Streisand tried to have a picture of her house removed from a website which resulted in many more people seeing the photo. Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s single Relax comes to mind which sold even more copies after the BBC tried to ban it from the airwaves. In the case of Van Hoogstraten’s blocking of paths, the ultimate effect was the upholding of the principles that rights of way should not be blocked and that local councils have a duty to defend the rights of the public.
The Highways Act of 1980 states that “It is the duty of the highway authority to assert and protect the rights of the public to the use and enjoyment of any highway for which they are the highway authority.”
Cornish thinks back on all the defenders of and legislation regarding “the access to their land that the public deserve.”
There is a good deal about the rather strange sport of pedestrianism or competitive walking in the Lesiure section of the book. In the Rambling chapter we are recommended the Open Street Map community which has made “great efforts to bring our path network to everyone for free”.
The final section of the book is Urban and here we are told of the National Library of Scotland’s wonderful digitisation of Ordnance Survey maps which enable you to enjoy “jumping through time. Seeeing hamlets turn into villages which grow into towns and develop into cities …”
Side by side georeferenced maps viewer with layer swipe – Map images – National Library of Scotland
I have tried this and it works beautifully.
We are then treated to a history of the building of new towns. It was the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 which sought to limit unfettered development and introduced “listing for historic buildings, protecting woodlands and curtailing outdoor advertising.” It seems nothing short of tragic that our current government in particular has so comprehensively trashed these principles.
As with stiles earlier in the book, the author makes the interesting point that urban pelican and zebra crossings and staggered crossings either impede or attempt to channel pedestrian access, tacitly placing cars above people.
The epilogue is a call to arms: “We are all brief stewards of our world, with a duty to leave it better than we came into it.” We are urged to join the heroic ranks of those who seek to restore and preserve our rights of way. And to “walk – walk in celebration and in a continual reassertion of our history, so that our paths can live on long into the future.”
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