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

vehicle that had been paraded drunkenly through every field. I might have lived the Escape to the Country dream for a decade, but that’s how much of a thick townie I still am. Only after a few days of walking through countless sheep fields, and noticing many such tracks and how they were made up of hundreds of cloven-hoof indentations, did the truth dawn. Presumably, one started walking in a particular direction (the Alpha Ewe, as we’ll call her), and the others all fell in behind her, excitedly wondering where they were going. And still they follow.
    As I pounded the paths and hills around, the mystery of the new signs and gates only deepened. They were everywhere, on seemingly every right of way, even those that are barely ever walked. And on those that can’t be walked: gates – even bridges – to nowhere. The oddest example was a sparkling new pine footbridge, straight off the shelf, gracefully spanning a small river between a dirt-track lane on the one bank and a tight thicket of brambles and pines on the other. There is an old right of way here, which, as part of my audit, I attempted to walk from the other end. It’s a soggy old holloway, but it soon vanishes altogether in the conifer plantations. On the late nineteenth-century large-scale OS maps, it was the main track along the valley, but no-one has walked or ridden it in decades, and no-one could now, however hard they tried. But they would have a lovely new bridge to not take them there.
    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