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

people on it. As it was, and as it should be in remote rural areas like this one, I had to engage with them, and the walks were all the richer and more enjoyable for it.
    In fact, outside of the forests, the only paths that were absolutely blocked were on the land not of the old farming families, but of a particular breed of incomer. Most of us rat-race refugees in an area like this fall into one of two camps: vaguely hippyish or vaguely Ukippyish, sometimes a bizarre hybrid of both. The hippies want organic veg, chickens in the yard and Enid Blyton adventures. The Ukippies want to escape the brown and black faces of their home town and hole themselves into their compound. There are strange similarities between them, for the impetus driving both groups is often the same misplaced search for a fantasy version of their own childhoods, a prospect condemned to remain for ever out of reach. They differ hugely in their approach to paths, however: the hippies embrace (sometimes, all too literally) anyone wandering across their land, the Ukippies retreat behind barbed wire and stern, monolingual English signs telling you to keep out. The fact that they have become the immigrants that they so despise at home is an irony that never seems to trouble them.
    From my audit, the dubious accolade of biggest path-blockers of all went to the Forestry Commission, whose wholesale re-ordering of the local map has been little less than Stalinist in its scope and execution. Dozens of paths on the map failed to appear in reality and, often, there was no trace whatsoever of their former selves. Of course, the need for timber was desperate, especially when the Forestry Commission was created in the aftermath of the First World War. And areas like this one, with mile upon mile of thinly populated, marginal land of no great potential for crops or livestock, were obvious candidates for afforestation. As a major local industry, it swept in on the back of the slate quarries and mines just as they were juddering to the end of their working lives. Forestry was much-needed work, and real work at that too: sweaty, bloody, outdoor and bursting with the kind of manly camaraderie that makes my generation, most of whom click a mouse for a living, go a bit weak at the knees.
    In the village where I live, the Forestry Commission took over an old prisoner-of-war camp and filled it with workers, their families, a kids’ playground, a village hall and community centre, a snooker club, a sports field, a library and the inevitable tin tabernacle. Events were plentiful and enthusiastic. Whist drives, am dram, jumble sales, WI meetings, eisteddfodau, parties and concerts whirled by in a cloud of gossip and giggles. In the winter, the Christmas concert was a must for all, but the big annual event was the summer gala, where folk donned fancy dress (dragging up and blacking up were especially popular) and schoolgirls were crowned as Forest Queens and paraded around on the back of logging trucks. Newspaper reports of the day make it sound like something straight out of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The lorries were decorated with ‘evergreens and flowers of the forest’, while the young Queen herself was clad in a white satin gown and a ‘fur-collared mantle of dark green – symbolic of the forests’.
    The first Forest Queen was crowned in 1954, the year that the Forestry Commission took over the camp and created the village-within-a-village. Queen Blodwen was her name, a 15-year-old from a big local family. ‘This is a happy village,’ gushed the area’s lady of the manor to the county newspaper, but she was largely right, and so it remains. The local vicar went even further, thanking the Forestry Commission for stemming the exodus of locals: ‘It was true to say,’ he went on, ‘that the neighbourhood was one of the few in North Wales which was not seriously suffering from the modern rural malady of depopulation.’ Other Welsh towns and villages watching their slate