Kitty – a ferociously opinionated middle-aged comic character created by Victoria Wood – declared in one sketch that she had walked ‘the entire length of The Pennine Way in slingbacks in an attempt to publicise mental health’. Many others who now set out on this 272-mile adventure seem to be publicising their own mental health. It is estimated that those who do succeed in conquering its full length are rather an elite group: around two thousand a year.
A colleague of mine walked it some years ago with friends. The excursion started badly on the first night when their tent was pretty much torn asunder by a shrivelling wind, slicing across the moor. By the morning, there was snow on their sleeping bags. A little over two weeks later, after they had hauled themselves through innumerable bogs, they reached the end. At the northernmost point of the path, at Kirk Yelthom, in the Borders, there is a pub where, legend has it, Alfred Wainwright left an unusual bequest: for the landlord to supply a free half pint of beer to any walker who had completed the Way. My colleague claimed his drink. The landlord, he said, seemed rather glum about it.
The fact that such a path exists is a fitting memorial for a man who arguably did as much for the walking movement as Alfred Wainwright. This man was Tom Stephenson: a journalist who had covered the Kinder Scout trespass, and who threw himself into the organised walking movement, sitting on government committees and becoming president of the Ramblers’ Association in 1948. Stephenson was remarkable not merely for his commitment to the cause of walking, and of free access for all; he was also the perfect representative of an entire class of people who had, in effect, educated themselves through the countryside. How Stephenson rose to positions of such prominence and how he brought his great dream for a mighty Pennine path to fruition, can best be understood through the landscape that he loved the most. For Stephenson only had time for the uplands; they were elevating, in all possible senses.
Although he had to wait some thirty years for his long-distance Pennine trail scheme to come off – having first had the idea in 1935 – it is clear that by the mid 1960s, the time was more than ripe. In 1965 and the years immediately afterwards – from the opening of The Pennine Way, to the establishment in 1969 of the West Highland Way and in 1971 of the Offa’s Dyke trail – there was a further explosion of enthusiasm for walking and hiking. This was helped enormously by the fact that car ownership had multiplied so dramatically. Walkers no longer had to rely on train timetables, or on obscure branch lines. Indeed, many of those obscure branch lines had now been shut. Now it was within the means of the average walker to bundle everyone into the car, drive out of the town, locate some country with some kind of parking space, and head out into it, without worrying about time.
To rural communities at that time, the prospect of all these urban visitors was viewed as being akin to a hostile invasion and rising anxiety about careless, ignorant townies among farmers led to a barrage of publicity concerning The Country Code. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the gaps between children’s television programmes were filled with Public Information films, many of which concerned the innumerable trangressions of town folk. One such film was a cartoon featuring what can only be described as a comically plebian couple. There was a ferrety man and his rather plump, tarty blonde partner. Around them were the remains of their picnic, which they clearly had no intention of picking up. Meanwhile, the man was absent-mindedly removing the stones from the drystone wall behind him; and the tarty wife was amused by the sight of the cattle passing through the gate that she had left wide open. They were confronted by an apoplectic cartoon farmer. The townies could not understand why he was so angry. The chief prejudice among country dwellers seemed to be this: that people from towns were not only common and stupid, they were also malicious. And that their only purpose for being in the country was to cause havoc.
The mistrust was growing on both sides. By the mid-1960s inception of The Pennine Way, there was coincidentally, in some metropolitan quarters, the first inkling of suspicion about farmers and their modernised methods, and about the impact that these new methods would have on the landscape. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, farmers had been high in general public esteem as a result of their extraordinary efforts with the land. Just twenty years later, however, and members of small but influential groups like The Soil Association were reading a pioneering American book by scientist Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. Carson’s thesis was that a new generation of pesticides were causing immense damage; her theme was picked up in Britain where by that time over 200 kinds of pesticide were in use. The farmers concerned were simply responding to a greater consumer demand for more and better quality produce; as today, most shoppers wanted perfect, unblemished vegetables, not misshapen ones. The effect of this blunt chemical intervention on the land, as the pioneer environmentalists saw it (and as later evidence shows), was catastrophic.
Modernisation brought an end to many of the once familiar features of rural life. Figures such as wheelwrights – who had still been very much there in the war years, and even beyond – now lost their livelihoods, for the farms no longer had need of horses. Blacksmiths too were forced into retirement. For ramblers with a love of the countryside, there was more than the simple dislocation of modernism. Thanks to the developing industry of agrochemicals – producing fertilisers, weedkillers, and anti-insect poisons – smaller farms started to give way to much larger concerns. With a combination of the new farming machinery and pesticides, farmers could now amalgamate fields; there was no longer any reason for any diversity in crop production. The Midland counties in particular began to be transformed into vast cereal production centres. As well as being unutterably depressing to the eye, they were also blotting out many old paths; and the byways that were left were too dreary and monotonous – and soundless – to be enjoyed.
The reason that walkers were now more likely to hear the hum of distant motorways rather than the drone of insects was the knock-on effect of agro-industry: the coming of these US-style prairies had also resulted in the destruction of the hedgerows. Up until about 1990, around 230,000 miles of hedgerow was uprooted and destroyed. The impact on countless other species, from birds of prey to insects, was almost unfathomable.
So even as walkers made for the country in greater numbers throughout the 1960s, a small number of them were also starting to see that fast changing system of fields and meadows through an adjusted perspective; a perspective that was adjusted for them. By contrast, the pioneering Pennine Way path offered, serendipitously, a much more unspoilt prospect. Up on the high ground, they walked far from any offensive view of other tokens of modern agricultural methods: the vast industrial looking barns, the enormous combine harvesters, the long, low hen-batteries, the stark concrete and metal of the milking sheds. It is striking that in a decade otherwise so fixated on the ‘white heat’ of the technological future, and on the virtues of scientific progress, the Pennine Way was offering ramblers not merely the freedom of so many hundreds of miles, but also something in the way of a reassuringly old-fashioned rural heritage trail. It showed, through the smaller hill farms, that some agricultural traditions were hardier than others, and that there were parts of Britain that were still free from transistors and computers.
The rough brown hills of the Cheviots, at the far end of the Pennine Way, seem to discourage sentimentality, and to shrug off any woolly notions of romanticism. Though an eighteenth-century walking poem by Mark Akenside called ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ sought to draw out the deeper, more resonant attractions of the region:
O ye dales
Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where,
Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open, and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o’er the scene, some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands.
Akenside – and many other subsequent writers, including G. M. Trevelyan – sought to soften the hardness of this part of the world by invoking history: from the presence of the Romans and their ancient Wall to those ‘rustic towers’ of the Normans and Saxons. The subliminal comfort is there in the sense that people have always been drawn to these gale scoured hills. Any walker with no idea of that history might assume – while trembling in those freezing winds – that the opposite was true.
You sense that there was little in the way of sentimentality about Tom Stephenson. I now find myself wondering how he had been inspired to create this particular trail in the first place. In some ways, the forces that impelled him were fiercer than those that guided figures such as Benny Rothman. For Stephenson was the very image – an almost nineteenth century image – of the autodidact walker-botanist. His formative experiences – including conscientious objection, and prison – made his rise to national prominence all the more remarkable and admirable. Indeed, we can see now that he was one of the more emblematic left-wing English figures of the last century.
Tom Stephenson was born in 1893 in Chorley, Lancashire; his father was an engraver in a calico printing works. The father was a heavy drinker – his son recalled that he spent more time in the pub than with his family. Stephenson started full-time work at thirteen years old – which meant a crushing 66-hour week in the calico printing works. This intense and physical six-day week would have left anybody very little time for anything else. Presently, Stephenson’s family moved to the village of Whalley in the Ribble Valley. On his first Saturday off, he climbed Pendle, which stands at 1,831 feet. The effect upon this young man, who had been brought up under the blackened skies of ceaseless industrial activity, was transfiguring. He gazed upon all the distant heights, ‘sharp and clear in the frosty air. That vision started me rambling and in the next sixty years took me time and again up and down the Pennines and further afield.’
Stephenson was now a fifteen-year-old apprentice on short-time working. While this was an inconvenience in financial terms, it did at least allow him more time to pursue this fresh passion. ‘I would set out before sunrise and make a round trip of up to a hundred miles,’ he wrote. ‘Nights I spent rolled in a groundsheet in the lee of a drystone wall, or in a barn if one were handy … [occasionally] a village policeman would question me closely as a suspected runaway.’1 He was also bright. He studied hard at night, and eventually won a scholarship to study geology in London at the Royal College of Science. This was quite an achievement, but his quick intelligence was also matched with a certain steely obduracy. In 1914, at the coming of the Great War, when Stephenson was 17, he was called up – at which he declared himself a conscientious objector. Even now, it’s difficult to imagine the will and the bravery involved in making such a decision – especially at the start of the conflict, when jingoism was running at its highest. ‘Of course I was the subject of a good deal of abuse,’ he recalled, ‘accused of cowardice and all the rest of it and threatened I should be run out of the village, but I never suffered any violence there.’2
He was called up again in 1917, but steadfastly ignored the summons. This time he was escorted from home, under guard, into the Third East Lancashire Regiment, ‘and after three weeks in the guardroom,’ he recalled, ‘I was court-martialled.’ The result of this was a sentence of twelve months’ hard labour. He was sent to Wormwood Scrubs, a notoriously tough prison in west London. ‘The solitude of prison didn’t bother me so much as some people,’ he recalled, ‘because I had been accustomed to wandering day after day by myself over the hills.’ There was another unexpected upside: ‘I did a lot of serious reading I wouldn’t have done on the outside.’3 It takes quite an unusually strong-willed personality to be able to see the cheerful aspects of life in Wormwood Scrubs.
After the war, Stephenson returned to the block printing trade. One night, he joined an organised reunion of conscientious objectors – all those who had also been jailed – and on that occasion, he fell in with a number of senior Labour politicians, such as Philip Snowden. Soon, Stephenson was working with the Party: he persuaded Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell to address Labour meetings. Stephenson was there doing all sorts of fixing jobs behind the scenes when Labour came briefly to power in 1924, fell back into opposition, and then formed a second government from 1929–31.
Such spheres of influence could not help but benefit this canny political fixer and it was clear to his friends and colleagues that he had a gift for writing – his accounts of the 1932 Kinder Scout trespass for the Manchester Guardian had been eagerly read. Not that he was supportive of the methods used by the BSWF on that occasion; like many ramblers, Stephenson was sceptical about the wisdom of using such confrontational tactics (we might also see an extra layer of scepticism here too; that felt by the solid Labour man for the more extremist Communists).
In 1933, Stephenson was encouraged by Ernest Bevin to become a full-time journalist. As such, he started out writing weekly articles for The Daily Herald, specialising in ‘outdoor’ stories. He also got the chance to indulge his deepest passion by assuming the editorship of Hiker and Camper magazine.
Mass trespasses aside, this was the point at which all these outdoors activities were putting down very deep roots in the cultural life of the country. Both the urban working classes, and the steadily growing numbers of the young middle classes, shared this enthusiasm for escape. Stephenson was now required to attend meetings of the National Council of Ramblers’ Federations and the Co-operative Holidays Association. In 1935, he wrote the article for which he is still most famous: an essay in The Daily Herald about his dream of a ‘long green trail’ that would stretch from the Peak District to the Cheviots. While he had to wait thirty years for this dream – inspired by the Appalachian Trail in the US – to be realised, the article proved to have a more immediate resonance. In the countryside near Sheffield, the rights-to-access rallies continued. John Bunting now recalls the sight of around 3,000 walkers all gathered together, and how, as a young man, Mr Bunting mingled with the likes of Labour grandees-to-be Hugh Dalton and Barbara Castle.
In 1943, as the turning point in the Second World War at last seemed to have come, Tom Stephenson joined the Ministry of Town and Country Planning as a press officer. One might have imagined that such a Ministry would be rather sidelined at a time like that, but the shape and the nature of the land after the war were a pressing subject. Of particular interest was the nascent notion of National Parks, which Stephenson helped to publicise in 1945.
It was also at this time that the idea of a Pennine Way was itching ever stronger at Stephenson. A limited form of access to mountains and moors had been won, but what about the freedom to trek across the very spine of the nation, through some of its wildest and most unforgiving scenery? At the very idea of it, there were some in Whitehall – ministers and civil servants alike – who seemed fearful that such a thing might come to pass, contrary to the interests of property owners. To them, the idea had a sniff not merely of Socialism, but of Communism. The precedent it would set would seem to hint that no land could remain completely private. Come May 1945, there was a new Labour government, led by Clement Attlee and ushered in on the back of victory in Europe. There was also a new minister at Town and Country Planning: Lewis Silkin. Stephenson at this time insisted to him that there ‘must be facilities for access to the wild, uncultivated parts of Britain, drastic revision of footpath law, and the creation of national parks and long-distance footpaths’. In 1948, Tom Stephenson became Honorary Secretary of the Ramblers’ Association. Seventeen years after that, he was standing proudly in Edale, there to celebrate the inauguration of the Pennine Way.
John Boyle, a former policeman who was one of the very first to walk the Way, put his finger on the curious appeal of this rather wild and woolly route: ‘On Saturday 24 April 1965, I was one of twelve Manchester City Police Cadets who set off to walk the 280 miles of the newly opened Pennine Way,’ he told the Ramblers’ Association website:
The group were aged between seventeen and nineteen … and had been trained in map reading and compass work in preparation. Campsites were set up along the route but each lad would carry their own personal equipment and take a turn at leading the route.
I remember the bleakness of the moors and the fact that it appeared to rain all the time … As the walk progressed, we were walking on autopilot due to tiredness and the conditions. The camaraderie of the group and the challenge kept us going. We were determined to finish the walk.
On Friday 5 May, we walked into Kirk Yelthom to be greeted by local dignitaries who congratulated us on being the first organised group to walk the full length of the Pennine Way. At the time, I did not fully understand what a tremendous experience and opportunity I had been given. I continue to walk with family and friends – but now at a more leisurely pace.
As well as his great achievements for the walking movement, Tom Stephenson was also an interesting example of a self-taught botanist and geologist, passions that were very much woven into his appetite for walking. In that sense, he was part of an admirable tradition that stretched back as least as far as the seventeenth century. That particular period had brought a whole new way of looking at the world. The intricacies of plant life were starting to become a source of immense intellectual fascination. There are records of a Cromwellian soldier called Thomas Willisel, who was commissioned by a society of London botanists to walk all over the country in search of fresh specimens. ‘Our English itinerant presented an account of his autumnal peregrinations about England, for which we hired him,’ the botanists wrote. In the eighteenth century, one Lady Bentinck also commissioned people to explore the corners of the British Isles in order to bring back fresh species – not merely flowers and plants, but also insects and fossils – for her to study and display. But Lady Bentinck’s men did not find their missions easy: because of the Enclosure Acts, any deviation from the roads on to private land, to explore hedges or even to get up on to high ground, laid them open to accusations of trespass, with landowners going further, and labelling them highwaymen.4
Among the first groups of urban walkers, in the early parts of the nineteenth century – those men and women who would leave the industrial towns for air on Sunday – there were many who had a lively fascination for plant species and rare flowers. There was, for instance, the Natural History Society of Newcastle and the Tyneside Naturalists Field Club and the Bristol Botanical Society. Meanwhile, one nineteenth century Sunderland newspaper urged its readers to go out into the country for long, exploratory walks: ‘To the student in the science of geology, it affords a rich field for inquiry; it gives to the invalid new life and vigour; cheers the moody and depressed spirit.’5 So it was that weavers and miners alike developed a fascination with the flora to be found on field trips. Tom Stephenson himself recalled a weaver from Burnley. Ernest Evans had risen from this occupation to become head of the Natural Science Department at Burnley College, after his botanical walks had led him to teaching the subject in night-classes in the Burnley Mechanics Institute. Stephenson acknowledged Ernest Evans as being an extraordinarily influential figure: ‘Evans was a great rambler and many of his students rambled with him. He was above all a practical naturalist, making frequent field excursions, and introducing his students to geological features.’ The Burnley Express went a little further, stating that Evans ‘knew every crag and moor, every hill, valley and clough around Burnley – and he knew the home and haunt of every plant and animal in this area of Lancashire.’
Anyone who now sets out on a hike with a smartphone and Internet access, enabling them to instantly identify any unusual flower or plantlife that they come across on a ramble, should give some thought to the dedication, fervour and memory of these Victorian self-educated rambling botanists. There was a Manchester shoemaker called Richard Buxton whose zeal for studying the natural world, while out on twenty or thirty mile hikes, was intense. One who met him described his range of knowledge thus in a letter to the Manchester Evening News:
In the summer of 1857 or 1858, I went on a walking tour to Cornwall, when I made a pretty large collection of plants, many of which when I got home, I could not find names for, so I went to interview Buxton and see if he could help me. He knew every one, of course, and could tell me all about them.6
You might be tempted to think that unlike the later Kinder Scout trespassers, and various other walking campaigners, the natural historians and the botanists formed a pretty apolitical branch of the rambling movement; that their concern was not so much with access, as with the discoveries that could be made. But this would be a simplification, for these walking groups were not separate from wider communities – they were part of them. After vigorous hikes in the hills, or through the valleys, they would go to the pub and discuss all sorts of pressing current issues. The slight difference here is that such walking groups by and large met with the approval of the grander London natural history societies and institutes, and the findings and studies of men like Ernest Evans were appreciated. Botanists like Richard Buxton were concerned with private property, as they wanted to appeal to the better natures of the big landowners in allowing men such as himself to make a study of their land. In the 1850s, Buxton made this measured – yet emotionally rather cunning plea – to such landowners, worded so as to emphasise subservience as opposed to aggression:
The lords of the soil will yet allow the pent-up dwellers in the crowded city to walk about and view the beauties of creation – yes, not only permit it, but derive much true pleasure from seeing the sons of toil rationally enjoying themselves in rambling through their domains and exploring the wonders of nature … I therefore would venture to request the landowners, at least to preserve the old footpaths which cross their fields and woods, if they should decline to allow fresh ones to be made, like their forefathers of old.7
There were concerns elsewhere, however, that the labouring classes in general were losing all touch with the countryside. R. C. K. Ensor, in 1902, took some workers from Manchester out on a field trip and commented that ‘none of them knew or could name forget-me-nots, daisies, dandelions, clover, pansies or lily of the valley.’
Around a hundred years later, with the establishment of the first National Parks in the 1950s, the botanical fascination became a cornerstone of the entire walking movement and the Nature Conservancy Council was founded. By then it had become glaringly apparent – in country and town alike – that years of industry had had a nightmarish effect upon a number of different species. By this time, the London reaches of the river Thames were pretty much dead. Thanks to all the industrial effluent flowing through those waters, there was not a fish to be found.
In the country, the biggest threat to wildlife – intensive farming – was only just beginning. As if sensing, early on, the dangers that lay ahead, one of the purposes of the National Parks was to ensure that rare species continued to flourish. Later, the spirit of those walking botanists, from Buxton to Stephenson, also found fresh life with the creation of the Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), which gained a particular boost with the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. As an acknowledgement of the importance of the environment – hitherto extremely faint on any politician’s radar at that time – these Sites were very strictly administered, and gave the fullest possible protection from what were described as ‘damaging agricultural operations.’ Now, in some parts of the country, it is only in the Sites of Special Scientific Interest that a walker can get a sense of being somewhere that belongs to one particular regional locality – as opposed to standing on the edge of a vast brown wind-blown prairie that could be in either Cambridgeshire or Oregon.
As soon as it opened in 1965, the Pennine Way was an immediate draw for thousands. Six years later, again through the clear good influence of Stephenson, came the epic trail of Offa’s Dyke, snaking along the English–Welsh border, from Chepstow through to Wrexham and to Prestatyn in North Wales. Like the Pennine Way, Offa’s Dyke swiftly became something of a cult in its own right, appealing especially to hardcore long-distance walkers.
The contrast with the Pennine Way is – in many parts – highly attractive. Instead of rough brown moor and peat, the Offa’s Dyke walker is faced with springy green hills, trees, rivers and deep, hypnotic valleys. It also has the charm of a certain obscurity. Far from big towns or cities, or motorways, the winding trail of Offa’s Dyke can occasionally give you a glimpse directly into centuries gone. There is a clear sense of history having happened here: from the old woodland of the Wye Valley to the small market towns of Shropshire; from the ruins and glimpses of historical industrial remnants, such as the old lime kilns near Oswestry, to the blowier regions of the north of Wales as the Path at last begins to approach the sea.
The Pennine Way might have Hadrian’s Wall at its furthest extremity, but Offa’s Dyke is an almost continuous line of historical development, starting with the Anglo-Saxon earthworks themselves, erected by King Offa of Mercia in the eighth century as a means of keeping out the Welsh – or, to put it another way, ‘aboriginal British hordes.’ It ensured that the ‘Men of the West would never escape from the isolation of their peninsula,’ wrote historian Norman Davies, ‘that their language and culture would develop in directions not shared by other insular Celts, and that far into the future, they would assume a separate national identity.’8
Rather like the West Highland Way – another long trail inspired directly by the success of the Pennine pioneer – the Offa’s Dyke trail invites you to walk along a line of still vivid history. In the case of the Highland path, that history can be picked out in the form of the old military roads that were driven through the glens as part of the campaign to subdue the Scots. Offa’s Dyke offers perhaps a more cultural sense of conflict. Though two thirds of the Path lies directly within the Welsh border, there are other parts that continue to teeter along the border between England and Wales, delicately flipping from monolingual to bilingual signs.
Tom Stephenson himself was a very firmly upland, moorland man. He confessed that the prospect of lowland walks simply could not excite him in any way. But the winding trail of Offa’s Dyke offers something rather better than the occasional brown, wet monotony of the peatlands; it climbs and dives and swoops, deep down into river valleys, up sharp, unexpectedly steep hills – the rather demanding ‘Switchback’ section of the Shropshire hills being a firm favourite among many. For the long-distance walkers – a taste, incidentally, that seems to be growing in popularity, much like long-distance running – the prospect of 177 miles is no less a lure than the Pennine Way. Though for some, there can be outbreaks of unrealistic enthusiasm. Recently, a friend of mine found, on a stretch of Offa’s Dyke near Oswestry, that after seventeen and a half miles of walking her feet suddenly failed to respond. As she put it, ‘they just went on strike.’ Her walking companions had no option but to call it a day and take her to the pub. ‘After some wine, my feet were better,’ she said cheerfully. Historian Marion Shoard said of Offa’s Dyke path, a little more poetically, ‘We can feel the presence of previous ways of being by retracing the steps of our ancestors along the routes which they have bequeathed to us.’9
Throughout the 1970s, Britain came to be crisscrossed with such routes or ‘Ways’: from the north Highlands to the South Downs, long-distance walkers found less in the way of hindrance. In England and Wales, there is The Cleveland Way, the Cotswold Way, the Glyndwr Way, the Hadrian’s Wall (Way), Pembrokeshire Coastal Path (Way), and good old North Norfolk Way. In Scotland, they have been even more lavish in the distribution of the Ways: from Rob Roy Way to the aforementioned West Highland, from the Great Glen Way to the Arran Coastal Way (a path that circumnavigates the neat west coast island). Not forgetting the Formatine and Buchan Way and the East Highland Way. All of these long-distance trails opened up the mostly uninterrupted opportunity to ramble along for days, and on terrain that is nearly always easier than sucking bog. In one sense, walkers might view these mighty footpaths as great pulsing arteries – or, if we switch metaphors, as motorways for ramblers. And we can attribute much of this current enthusiasm for long-distance trails and indeed all other paths to the work of Tom Stephenson. Even in his old age, he was a vehement campaigner. In the 1980s, he was prominent in the protests to do with the lack of access to the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, a vast chunk of which is owned by the Duke of Westminster. Even that late, thousands of acres were peppered with ‘private’ notices and signs expressly forbidding trespassing.
If we see the walking movement in Britain in terms of – yet one more metaphor – waves, then Tom Stephenson’s inspiration formed a high tide through the 1960s and the 70s; the long-distance trails opened up a country to many who had previously not given much thought to hiking at all. Stephenson died in 1987, just at the point when the walking movement was making further determined pushes against the entrenched interests of landowners and local authorities, and when it was once more facing the implacable hostility of an unfriendly government. Throughout his walking life, though, Tom Stephenson had been the most perfect representative of every ideal that the walking movement stood for: a man who asked for nothing more than the chance to stride across moorland, and savour all the wildlife on it. He had no need of the Country Code; respect and love for the land was clearly hardwired into him. Although it does not count as ‘uplands’ in any sense, the Ridgeway, running from Bedfordshire to Dorset, also stands as a sort of legacy to his work. It is also on this path – especially on one stretch in the Chiltern Hills – that one can navigate the modern day idea of trespass, and explore its limits in the most startling way.