Given that there is such a thing as the ‘Thames River Path’, and given that it is advertised noisily by means of big signposts up from the Estuary, it is a matter of some surprise to find that even now, there are sections that one is not even allowed within 500 yards of. This necessitates confusing and maddening detours. I don’t mind quite so much when the path might happen to trail across the Berkshire gardens of former TV celebrities such as Michael Parkinson or Paul Daniels. But near Datchet, in Berkshire, the annoyance takes quite a different turn. This otherwise blameless and pretty little satellite of Windsor stands as a sort of metonym not only for everything that ramblers have been striving to achieve; but also for how, despite everything, they are still, occasionally, thwarted. All it really comes down to is a matter of three quarters of a mile; a trifling bagatelle in an otherwise magisterial 177-mile stretch. The immoveable obstacle that forces the walker off the river here has a wider symbolism in a battle that is still being fought.
The 1980s and the 1990s saw a great, final push towards the establishment of a ‘right to roam’. This was a period in the walkers’ movement where the anger and bitterness on both sides – walkers versus landowners – boiled even higher than before. The ramblers triumphed in a philosophical sense; but they could not claim complete victory. For by unfortunate coincidence, this was also a period when farmers and country people were hit by a succession of heartbreaking crises – combined with what seemed to them like ill will from Westminster. It was looking to many in the rural community as though it was no longer possible to make a living from farming; the big supermarkets were starting to exert unbearable pressure on small producers.
Then came the nightmarish outbreaks of cattle disease, wave after wave. All this at a time when the government was preparing to outlaw hunting with hounds, which to many country folk was a signal of bigoted class based hostility. This friction between farmers – who had already been forced to change the face of the landscape into that of blank zombie prairies in order to allow for industrial scales of growing – and the politicians had started burning again in the 1980s. This was exactly the time that the walking movement started to exert its own increased pressure. The Ramblers’ Association, seeing the need for further progress, put an heroic effort into changing views on wider access to paths. Walkers started to meet opposition that seemed almost as bad as that of the 1930s. While they grabbed some notable prizes – in terms of hearts and minds as well as opening up previously private land – there are some barriers that seem to be impassable, even today.
Outside Datchet, we find one of them. In my innocence, several years back, I had taken a quiet spring Saturday to wander along the Thames river path from Shepperton, at the far south west frontier of London, near the ceaseless roar of Heathrow. Initial impressions – brick suburban terraces, endless screaming jumbo engines – were not promising. Almost immediately, though, once actually at the banks of the Thames itself, this river path began to disclose an entire unsuspected watery world of hidden marinas, obscured boatyards, teeming weirs, and, most attractively, small islands on which sat houses; homes that could only be reached by means of a drawbridge.
This seems to me the ne plus ultra of the English domestic dream; safe and secure on one’s own tiny island, cutting the world off at will. It feels a little like a small child building a den with sofa cushions. This is a place that only walkers could ever see. The path threads along the water, and the road is far enough back not to get a glimpse, so that you are in a separate, slightly secretive realm. The walker looks at these lagoon dwellers, out on their balconies, and they look back at the walker. The river path winds on, and becomes more sylvan, more languorously willow trailed. After the austerity of the estuary, this section seems instead to have a silky decadence about it; even the wildlife feels richer, more luxuriant. It trails through to Runnymede, and it is here that one is supposed to feel the currents of history. But actually, it is rather difficult to imagine King John and Magna Carta in this place. It instead seems a shade too Pre-Raphaelite; you expect to see Ophelia under the water, rippling and pale.
At this point, you are aware that just a few miles off lies the ruritanian pomp of Windsor, and the idea of this path sneaking and snaking around the base of that biscuity fortress puts some pep in the pace. It is immediately deflated about a mile or so before reaching Datchet. For it is at this point that the Crown decides that walkers should not be permitted any sort of proximity to certain Royal acres. You are instead required to cross the Albert Bridge and start marching crossly along a road towards Datchet, now seethingly aware that you are not only separated from the river; but also on the wrong side of it. This is not merely a matter of private land and trespass, this is land paid for by the taxpayer, combined with the perfectly reasonable assumption that a river path is by its nature unobtrusive, and should be more open than any other kind.
Those on a careful lookout, and forearmed with local knowledge, can eventually pick the river path up again. It might be on the wrong side of the river, and it might not always seem as if the walker is completely welcome on it, but it is there.
However, that Saturday some years ago, I was not to know this. Without a map – why ever would I have needed a map to follow a river path? – I went wrong.
I doubled back over the Albert Bridge, perplexed, looking for some way to rejoin the river on the side that I had been walking – perhaps there were signs that I missed. The outcome was the same. I ended up slogging the entire perimeter of Windsor Home Park on an uncomfortably busy road, until I reached the town of Windsor from the other side in a towering rage. All for the sake of about three quarters of a mile of restricted path. I should have consoled myself with a wider view. For the mere fact that there is a dedicated Thames river path at all – finally made official in 1996 – is itself a tribute to ceaseless campaigning, throughout a period of implacable opposition. This was partly to do, in the 1980s and early 1990s, with a substantial Conservative parliamentary majority. It is the party that has always traditionally represented the interests of the property owner; yet during that period, the interests of the property owner became almost fetishistic. With strength in numbers that could out-roar most other parliamentary voices, Conservative MPs became increasingly vocally hostile to the demands of the Ramblers’ Association.
It didn’t help that the Association’s demands were somehow conflated, in political minds, with the advent of the New Age Traveller. In the 1980s, there was growing rural anger about increasing instances of trespass, with such travellers installing themselves on private land, caravans festooned with anarchic symbolism. New Agers had also fought with police at the so-called ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ in 1985 when, on the dawn of the Summer Solstice, they sought to get unfettered access to Stonehenge. The image in the popular press was that of ‘crusties’ – unsettling anti-establishmentarians smelling of cannabis and patchouli oil, with mangy dogs on strings, and a maddening dependency on welfare benefits. As a grouping, they also had a most unfortunate ricochet effect on ramblers. For in 1986, in an attempt to curb the Travellers, the government passed an enhanced Public Order Act with new clauses to do with trespass. Such a Public Order Act applied to walkers too. Although it was generally intended to be aimed at those who were occupying land, or holding all-night raves, the Act could in theory also encompass those who were perceived to be causing a nuisance in other ways; for instance, if a landowner insisted that ramblers were damaging rare wildlife.
It encompassed the more unusual cases, too, such as those involving naked walkers. Every now and then, there will always be a militant naturist group that protests that it has the right to stage nude walks. Such a walk took place a few years ago in Dorset, raising money for a marine charity. The walkers concerned – all pretty old and all men – were escorted along the route by police who did not know where to look. The nakedness itself is apparently not illegal per se; the difficulty arises when said nudity causes alarm in others. Given that these walkers had on only rucksacks and boots suggests that the spectacle they presented was probably more comically revolting than alarming. Still, it was against people such as this that the new Public Order Act could be invoked. Also in 1986, Paul Tyler, the Tory MP for north Cornwall, made a speech to the Country Landowners Association concerning the very idea of a ‘right to roam.’ He stated:
The claim of a ‘right to roam’ is fatally flawed. Nobody has the ‘right’ to intrude into another’s property, be it in the towns or the countryside … an unrestricted ‘right to roam’ will cause untold damage to the more fragile ecosystems and possibly ruin the finer qualities of our rural environment. The object has to be an agreement on access.1
Now, while such a speech sounds like excuses for keeping people off land, it must also be said that the argument against such a roaming right is quite legitimate. For when a right is conferred, it is much more than simply allowing something to happen. It also suggests that there will be consequences and redress if that something is not allowed to happen. In the case of private land, and of walkers, the anxiety was clear to hear: what if invading armies of rambling yobs took this as a charter to maraud across fields and through gardens as they chose? What if landowners were sued by walkers who wished to gain access to the bottom of their back gardens? Would this mean that the rights of walkers had more weight in court than the rights of farmers and country dwellers?
There is an echo here of that old antipathy: country folk disliking the idea of urban daytrippers turning their meadows into picnicking grounds, strewn with debris. In the recent US TV series Mad Men, set in the politically incorrect early 1960s, one of the more shocking scenes involves ad man Don Draper on a picnic with his family. At the end, they shake the rubbish and leftovers from the rug on to the grass, and simply drive off, leaving it there. This is exactly what farmers and landowners over here thought that walkers did. This fear went deeper. Even as late as 1996, Prime Minister John Major was referring to a putative ‘right to roam’ as ‘a charter for rural crime.’ We have only to think of the later case of reclusive Norfolk dweller Tony Martin, opening fire upon one of the young men who sought to burgle his house in the middle of the night. Major was tapping into an idea of walkers as transgressors; as interlopers from the towns whose intentions were sometimes malign.
In the mid-1980s, just as the heat of the landowners’ rhetoric was intensifying, so too was the zeal of the Ramblers’ Association. In 1985, it launched its ‘Forbidden Britain’ campaign, aimed at opening up great swathes of the landscape, such as the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire. For the first time since the 1930s, there were mass rallies held in places such as Yorkshire’s Thurlstone Moor attended by many rambling veterans and pioneers, as well as contemporary politicians. This was also a measure of the continuing bi-polarity of British politics. On the whole, the walking movement tended to be a Labour issue; generally, it was opposed by the Conservatives. It is interesting, for instance, that that Public Order Act was toughened up further in order to take account of increasing numbers of Hunt saboteurs, who are also, of course, overwhelmingly Labour supporters.
Ramblers were at pains to point out that Britain was pretty much alone in Europe when it came to questions of access. Sweden, for instance, had allemansratt – in essence, everyone had the right to go everywhere, except directly across crops or into private homes. The same is true for Norway. In the 1960s, West Germany enacted Forest Laws, opening up vast tracts of the north Rhine and Westphalia. This open access was eventually brought in across the whole of the country in 1975. Elsewhere, Spain, Portugal and France could be walked with ease. What exactly was it in the British character that made politicians and activists, landowners and walkers, take up such rigid and unyielding positions?
On the left, there was a great deal of romanticism attached to the issue, too. In the early 1990s, Labour leader John Smith was a passionate enthusiast for clambering over the Munros. His parliamentary colleague, Chris Smith, often accompanied him on these trips. After John Smith’s sadly premature death, Chris Smith was instrumental in proposing the idea of a ‘John Smith Memorial Act’. He told the 1994 Labour conference:
People have fought for hundreds of years for the right to roam where there is still fresh air and beauty to be enjoyed. We [the Labour Party] will enshrine that right in law – so that this land can be our land – and not just the Duke of Westminster’s. I stood with John at the top of a mountain. The snow was hard underfoot. The cloud was blowing across. We could see for miles and John looked and felt on top of the world. He would have wanted everyone to know the exhilaration of such moments.
But ramblers were associated with a sort of urban counterculture. For people who lived and worked in the country – for whom economic decline and changing working practices were causing increasing amounts of stress – the townie in all forms generated a new degree of irritation. Ramblers were perceived to have an urban arrogance about them; they gave the impression of behaving as they pleased without giving any recognition to farmers or tenants. They were perceived as being the enemy of the true countryman, in all their objections to hunting and other field sports. They were perceived as being fathomlessly ignorant when it came to farming methods, and the reasons why there had to be fences and hedges.
In this sense, things have hardly changed over the last 100 years. But in the 1990s – a time of great crisis for food producers, with scares about Mad Cow Disease, salmonella and listeria sweeping farms across the land – ever louder demands for access from walking groups met with a coalescing hostility. New Labour’s victory under Tony Blair in 1997 meant that ramblers finally had the purposeful heavyweight political backing from Westminster that they had craved. This support was met with increasingly bitter opposition, from bodies such as the Game Conservancy Trust, as well as the House of Lords.
By 1999, the government was ready to present a new Countryside Bill to the House that would incorporate, for the first time, the principle of a right to roam. For Blair’s ministers, this was a tribute to their late leader, John Smith. To the Conservatives, and various bodies in the countryside, it was an outrageous new burden – placing further weight upon the shoulders of already hard done by farmers and landowners. There were those on the anti-roaming side who argued that if walkers and their dogs had unlimited access to every moor, then the nesting periods of some of Britain’s rarest bird species would be irretrievably disrupted, and the very birds themselves would be in danger of disappearing altogether. Added to this was the argument that an enforced opening up of tracts of land would lead to extra levels of insupportable bureaucracy for landowners who were already making significant concessions to the walking movement as it was.
The largely unspoken source of tension at this time was a sense throughout the countryside that this new Labour government – perceived to be formed of smart Islington cliques – was imposing the views and values of urban dwellers upon the country, and was doing so maliciously. For there was not only a question of access for walkers, this Labour government was also explicitly committed to banning hunting with hounds. In other words, there were large numbers of people in the country who regarded Labour as a party determined to wipe out their way of life, a quasi-Stalinist regime that sought to dismantle every tradition. These dissenting country folk may have had a point; it was certainly the case that a number of Labour MPs did indeed have a scarlet faced visceral dislike of the Tory shires. The high emotions raised by the hunting issue – on both sides of the argument – were barely rational and more often quite simply hysterical. Those on the anti-hunting side saw posh people in red coats galloping across the country at will, for the sake of tearing innocent foxes to pieces. Those on the pro-hunting side saw sanctimonious left-wing city dwellers getting themselves worked up into a class war frenzy.
The issue of rambling got caught up in that battle, in the sense that the most prominent figures in the walking movement also happened to have close ties with the Labour Party. For newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph at that time, ramblers were Trotskyists. Conversely, for a great many ramblers, newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph, and its landowning readers, were advocating a sort of pre-1832 world, where property conferred absolute right and power.
For many country people, it seemed as though economic difficulties in towns and cities always galvanised the government into action; while similar difficulties in the countryside were ignored. It was perhaps inevitable that walkers would act as lightning rods for this new, ugly mood. Country commentators such as R. W. F. Poole advocated marches, where farmers and other country folk would exercise ‘their right to roam in the cities’. As he tartly went on to state, they would not leave the streets littered with crisp packets and lager cans and broken fences, as walkers in the countryside did. There were other flash-points. Around that time, an ominous outbreak of swine fever, leading to the slaughter of thousands of pigs, was attributed by furious farmers not to overly intensive pig farming, but to one careless walker who had, it was believed, dropped a half-eaten, infected sandwich which was subsequently eaten by a pig.
In late 2000, Parliament voted through the Countryside Rights of Way Act (widely known as CRoW); it was an extraordinary moment. From that point, there was now such a thing as a ‘right to roam’, even if it carried restrictions. You had the freedom to walk over mountain, moorland, heath and downland. Such rights were still to be negotiated in some regions, such as the South East, but the legislation carried both the weight of symbolism and also what seemed like an irreversible philosophical position: that walkers and ramblers were not trespassers. However, any jubilation that walkers’ groups felt was swiftly, horribly extinguished. For early in 2001 came the epidemic of Foot and Mouth; and it was at this point that, despite Parliament, walkers became a focus for rural anger. For it was believed by a great many farmers that walkers were carrying the virus on the soles of their walking boots. The abiding images of that time are of dead cattle burning on pyres; stark illustrations of just how heartbreaking and devastating this outbreak was to those who had farmed all their lives. When the outbreak began, apparently in Northumberland, it appeared to catch the quintessentially urban government unawares. Then as the highly-contagious disease spread from farm to farm, from parish to parish, and then county to county, all the way across England and Wales, with terrible speed, fierce measures were enacted.
Farm tracks were awash with disinfectants; motorists were told to avoid certain of the smaller roads (for fear of the virus being picked up by tyres); and most pressingly to ramblers, thousands upon thousands of footpaths were closed. The paths ran too close to livestock; walkers could conceivably come from anywhere and, according to farmers, walkers were in any case notoriously careless and indeed uncaring about the countryside.
So it was that for a period of months, the countryside in effect closed down. For walkers, this meant not merely the footpaths that ran through fields with animals; but also the picturesque trails, from the Lake District to the South Downs. Meanwhile, to farmers and other rural dwellers alike, the effect was apocalyptic. Not only was there the dread, then the trauma, when livestock showed symptoms of Foot and Mouth; there was also the economic impact, which was nuclear.
Many farmers – through the National Farmers Union – campaigned for footpaths to remain strictly barred throughout the crisis (there were occasional indications of rogue walkers breaking embargos). But those farmers soon found themselves coming under pressure not only from local walking groups, but also the Department for the Environment and indeed local tourist boards. For it was found that the absence of walkers was having a doubly catastrophic effect upon rural economies: bed and breakfasts had no business; little villages found that visitor numbers had dwindled to a trickle. Ironically, then, this was also a crucial moment for the walking movement; for it was at this point that it became abundantly clear just how vital ramblers were now to the rural economy. No matter how much distaste there might have been in certain quarters for people with sticks and cagoules, it was now blazingly apparent that the country needed them.
After about a year, when the raging epidemic had burnt itself out, and after countless thousands of cattle had been slaughtered right the way across the country, the footpaths began to re-open. At first, the process was very cautious, almost polite and hushed, as though a national funeral was taking place; walkers were still advised to avoid, if they could, following routes that led them alongside livestock. Though it was merely coincidence that the right to roam and the ravages of foot and mouth came at the same time, it seemed to some that both things were pointing in the same direction: industrial-scale agriculture was no longer enough to sustain farms or small communities or even entire rural regions. The thought here was: let the walkers walk – why not? Far greater damage had been inflicted upon the land by forces rather larger than rambling enthusiasts. There was a silent capitulation from a great many landowners – and indeed it seemed to some that the future now lay in encouraging as many revenue bearing visitors and walkers as possible. Long sought after walkers’ destinations – such as the previously forbidden Chrome Hill in Derbyshire – were now, theoretically, available to all.
Glitches remain of course. Some along the Thames Path, with a few irritating forced diversions. Datchet and Windsor are not the only offending areas; there is a staggeringly vast and ugly Thames Path digression that you must take around the River Darent just outside Dartford in Kent. Meanwhile, the picturesque urban river stroll between Greenwich and Tower Bridge still has several infuriating sections where you are not only obliged to leave the river, but also to walk through some of the most formidably gloomy streets in Europe in order to re-join it. The obstacle to the river in that particular case comes in the form of old naval wharfs that successive governments have taken literally decades to decommission. No offence to the people of Deptford but the Pepys Estate – through which you have to walk instead – does not fill the soul with elation.
Much as you might think, then, that the major battles have all been fought and won, this is still not quite the case. Just as the very notion of a right to roam coalesces and settles in, are there some final fences and barriers that we will never be able to cross? Are we ever going to be able to find any kind of accommodation with those – from motorists to jealous woodland owning landlords – who seek to keep us away from their own dominions? What sort of future can we imagine for the pursuit of rambling?