And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wend,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke.
That, at least, was the case in 1387 when Chaucer began to compose the General Prologue for his Canterbury Tales. Now, standing in the wilfully quaint village square of Chilham in Kent – with its half-timbered buildings, white weatherboarded houses, eighteenth-century manor house at one end and old church at the other – I can see visitors from shires further than Chaucer would have imagined. These pilgrims from around the world may be broadly secular and their goal may simply be the chalking up of another sight. Even so, the nature of their journey takes on a deeper dimension when they leave the car and set off on foot.
There are some walks that seem to us so familiar that we are in danger of overlooking them altogether. The North Downs way – or, as it becomes at some stages, the old Pilgrims Road – is one that anyone who lives in the south will think that they know already. Orchards, hops, woods, spires: is there more? So instead, people go haring off in other directions, in search of greater novelty and more unusual sights. Yet this particular seven-mile section of pathway not only perfectly illustrates how landowners and walkers have found some sort of new understanding; it also, slyly, offers a vision of the future and of the past conjoined. It is a future in which walkers have a far greater part to play than they might ever have thought.
At the time of writing, there is a great deal of disquiet in rural Kent, and across the whole of the South East, concerning the government’s plans for new homes. The coalition is seeking to make it easier for houses to be built on greenfield sites. Those who live in villages near these mooted ‘extensions’ are not merely nervous that their views are going to be ruined, or that their tranquillity is going to be destroyed or that their property values are going to slump. They are also furious that precious land is going to be ‘concreted’ over. The very idea of taking a rich green meadow, and filling it with semi-detached homes, roads, and pavements, is akin to sacrilege.
This reaction – which seems universal – tells us that the land is no longer seen as a resource to be worked; rather, it is regarded as heritage, needing protection in the way that listed buildings receive it. You will hear the argument with increasing frequency: the land is our legacy. And now, extraordinarily, walkers might be viewed as guardians of that legacy. Imagine the 1932 Kinder Scout trespassers not being pushed back, but instead being invited to open up as many ancient tracks as they can. Imagine then their rights to walk those tracks being absolutely insisted upon by landowners and councils alike. Those trespassers would not have believed it. Yet this is where we are going; ramblers are certain to be co-opted into a new battle for the soul of the countryside. Our walking rights will soon be labelled ‘inalienable’. For the more that we appreciate local beauty spots, and elevate them to attractions, abundant with rare species, the harder it will be for property developers to move into such places.
Chilham, with its tempting proximity to high-speed railway lines, is exactly the sort of place that housing ministers must have in mind as they contemplate their housebuilding schemes. Yet the deliberately quaint historical atmosphere – one can almost hear harpsichords in the air in the village square – also seems fragile. It wouldn’t take much to snap it. I head down the hill out of Chilham churchyard, along the North Downs Way, and almost immediately straight up another hill towards Old Wives Lees. The mules of Chaucer’s day must have found this weary clip-clopping territory. The pale sky above is crisscrossed with white vapour trails. Just over seventy years ago, also in the month of August, those trails had rather more dramatic significance, as those below in the fields of Kent watched the war being fought above their heads. Even now, climbing past the first of many orchards, I find myself wondering how much shrapnel still lies in the soil all around. Recent history always has the sharper edge of emotional resonance.
Even on this most famous of trails, the walker is not entirely at liberty to stray; for some local farmers, barbed wire has clearly been seen as a necessity to guard those rich orchards, the trees of which are now filled with ripening dusty pink and golden apples – the strongest association is that of 1930s schoolchildren scrumping. Walkers, clearly, are just as prone to temptation. For all the historical resonance of this route – all that proud heritage of pilgrims and merchants – the pathway itself only became an official entity in 1978. The Ramblers’ Association pushed hard for its creation, and it was eventually officially opened by Dr Donald Coggan, then Archbishop of Canterbury. It was worth it. While it may lack the wild drama that so many walkers from the cities seek, it has an atmosphere that encourages quiet reflection; surely the more prized quality in a path. It is a route that can wholly take one out of oneself. It is exactly this quality that rural campaigners right across the country are bracing themselves to protect. Walkers were once the invaders; now the invaders are bulldozers.
The new fight over the land will be intriguing, as most areas will frantically point to some unique aspect of beauty that would result in it being spared. This path, for instance: I head off down another hill and find myself strolling through a tight pergola formed of lime trees, on either side of which are more of those juicy red orchards. This is where the entire ‘Garden of England’ cliché comes back to startle the complacent. There is a vast difference between thinking of a Kentish orchard, and actually seeing the thing in all of its mouthwatering beauty before you. As a means of discouraging the scrumper, the pergola is a good idea; I find myself staring through a matrix of twigs and leaves at all those richly laden branches beyond, sagging under the weight of Bramley, Cox, and Empire, and all on a hill overlooking a verdant valley juicy with promise.
There are already many new houses in this area, by which I mean houses dating back to the 1950s. They cling to the slopes of the Downs, dotted along the roads. The housing ministers of Harold Macmillan’s day presumably thought that there was nothing especially sacrosanct about this area, so they built extra homes in villages such as Chartham. That presumably means that there could be room for even more houses. Perhaps in that very orchard I have been drooling at.
Even to me, the most committed of town-dwellers, just the idea reverberates with a dull clang of horror. It gives a sudden fresh gravity to that phrase ‘Garden of England’. I have never before considered myself much of a rural conservationist. But in none of the many walks I have taken around the country could I have pointed to a place and said: ‘Yes. Build here.’ Not even on the Thames estuary.
Now the path continues, ramrod straight, along a valley floor, scything through an insect-buzzing field of pale barley; it gives the impression it has done so for many centuries. The further you go on, the more the real weight of this path’s history begins to bear down. There is the tug that Chaucer’s assorted knights and millers and pardoners must have felt; that over the crest of the next hill must surely be the towers of Canterbury cathedral?
Even for the most secular walker, it is difficult not to feel it; the thrilling expectation of what lies over the horizon. They might not be motivated by the religious piety of the pilgrims, but nonetheless, the feeling is in its own small way spiritual. On this or any one of thousands of other walks across the country, the rambler will find with each step that his or her frame of mind has been changed, if only minutely. As a church service imposes its own peace and rhythm, so a good walk lifts the mind above the quotidian.
You are walking an impossibly old road. Even if you can’t hear the ghosts of pilgrims, you still find yourself staring as though in a trance at those rosy, gold-burnished apples, at the hills upon which so many thousands of these trees are growing, and down into the valley far below, along which runs the River Stour. What would be the point of being here if you did not feel Zephyr’s breath and allow your own veins to become bathed in such liquor? This is as much a road for lovers of literature as it is for those of a religious frame. The climax of seeing the cathedral spires is deferred, continually; the ridge of one horizon commands a view of another valley of apples. Even the most anti-religious walker cannot help but be struck by the subliminal associations: Canterbury, and the Eden-like orchards surrounding it. At this time of year, the pickers are poised. The hills around are filled with workers’ caravans, a modern day version of the cockney shanty towns that sprang up for the hop picking. This particular farmer is clearly rather more relaxed about us walkers, for I am now insouciantly strolling down the side of an entire forest of apples, trees as short as Shetland ponies, stretching for acres. One can imagine that one is a giant, towering over woodland.
It’s difficult for the town-dwelling walker not to stare at all those richly laden branches and try to work out how the business works. How many apples are there here, and how many supermarkets will they be shipped to, and how many people will they be sold to? More: how much will the farmer make, and – even on this great scale – is it really that profitable a concern?
In the latter stages of the twentieth century, farmers were viewed by many urban dwellers as cosseted; producing unnecessary crops in return for vast European subsidies. They were engaged in pretend agriculture; growing things that nobody wanted. Yet these were the same landowners who were aggressively ploughing up footpaths, and building fences across rights of way.
For any walker of my generation – brought up in the 1970s – the whole question of the purpose of countryside like this has been coloured deeply with the nostalgia of old films, and of elderly relatives harking back to a golden age of hedgerows. In this part of Kent, even as late as the 1950s, there would have been carts drawn by horses. In a curious way, this draws us round to the anxieties of today’s Council for the Protection of Rural England. It is beset by a terror of loss. Yet this sense of loss has been there since before the start of the twentieth century – all generations since then have fretted in some form about the countryside. Thomas Hardy was in a perpetual depression about the mechanisation of farming, and about the impact it was having on the land.
Now the vulnerability of farmers is more glaringly apparent; rather than being seen as irascible trespass fetishists, they are instead struggling figures working extraordinarily hard simply to keep farms afloat. As a result, the walker treads with more consideration.
The modern pilgrim is close to reaching the end of his road. There is the brief diversion of a DEFRA-supported patch called ‘No Man’s Orchard’ – wrinkly sixty-year old trees, bearing not only Bramley apples, but also the responsibility for harbouring all manner of biodiversity, including moths like the four dotted footman and the satin lutestring, as well as butterflies such as the peacock and the orange tip. Aside from this, the path into Canterbury is tugging the walker back into an all too modern age. It crosses over a dual carriageway; descends past electricity substations, scrubby fields and unfussy suburbs; and at last! As I walk around the edge of a vast roundabout, the spires of the cathedral suddenly materialise into view, about one mile off down a long, tree framed avenue, the perspective and the proportion rather startling.
The structure – from this angle, and with the busy wide road leading up to it – seems gigantic. Yet while the walker is corralled beneath a subway and pops up on the other side in a street of pleasant Victorian terraces, the cathedral disappears again. Indeed, it does not rematerialise in the walker’s eyeline until one has beetled the mile into town, and started weaving around the little lanes that surround its precincts.
We are lucky to be in an age where the walker at last has the moral high ground. Our enthusiastic activity brings health and happiness without side-effects. Our carbon footprints are dainty. Where we walk, innkeepers prosper. The clearest indication of the standing of walkers comes when one reads newspaper coverage of fresh disputes involving landowners. All the papers – from the right-wing Daily Mail to the left-wing Guardian – instantly take the side of the walker. The very notion of trespass – which of course always had a rather wobbly legal footing – now appears a quaint throwback, like smoking on tube trains.
The countryside is richly threaded with loudly proclaimed routes, clamouring for our favour. Here, in Kent, the Garden of England has thrown itself open to us all. How can a walk in these parts not have a temporarily transfiguring effect? It is places like this that make one realise, with a jolt, just how extraordinary the commonplace is.
However, if I were a religious man, and I had been making my way to Canterbury with a serious heart, I would be extremely upset at what I found in the city centre itself. A town that is given over to the pursuit of milking the cathedral crowds; crowds that have already been charged £9 to gain entrance to a once-sombre place of worship and pilgrimage. A place which is now, in essence, less a cathedral and more an over-lit, noisy, sub-Harry Potter theme park with a distended gift shop attached. As a walker, the aesthetic considerations are the same; but there are at least a couple of consolations.
Pilgrims to Canterbury were expected either to do penance or receive a blessing. After seven and a half odd miles, you are entitled at the very least to the blessing of a cup of tea. If not a pint. Both forms of refreshment are almost absurdly well represented in the lanes around the cathedral.
In a more figurative sense, for many dedicated walkers now, the level of access to land all around the country has created countless pilgrimage possibilities; not to shrines or temples, but to previously forbidden areas. There are woodland glades, previously the fiefdom of a privileged few, that can now be tiptoed through by all. There are fresh perspectives to be had from hills that were once closed to climbing. Of course, there are still large stumbling blocks. The creation of a round Britain coastal path – announced in 2009 – will take a number of years, and will be strewn with all manner of obstacles, not least from those who own property by the sea. Then there are the paranoid energy companies, turning land around power stations into Orwellian panopticons, viewed on CCTV from every conceivable angle. This is the modern equivalent of snobbish water boards; now walkers near power stations are presumed to be saboteurs and terrorists. In political terms, the new Conservative-led coalition does not seem to share Labour’s enthusiasm for the entire issue of walking, and of free access. But the Ramblers’ Association – recently re-branded as ‘the Ramblers’ – has all the traction; in the case of the coastal path, it is not if, but when.
Extraordinarily, Britain will be among the first countries where full access to the coast in its entirety will be possible. It is already pretty much the case in Wales. The idea is eye-rubbingly astonishing. Contrast this with the United States, where so much of the coastline is privately owned and fiercely guarded. This will be the really dramatic climax of the Ramblers’ work. It is not merely a question of a pressure group winning an argument; it is getting the rest of society to the point where no one could understand how anyone could be opposed to their aims.
Walking has assuredly changed my view of the entire country, and certainly the way that I engage with new landscapes. By which I also mean that I am no longer afraid of cows. As a Londoner, I rarely ventured out beyond the M25. Doing so, to different corners of the country, has deepened my understanding of different regions. I know that I have only dipped a toe in. As a walker, I have not explored either the most secret or most hidden byways; I have tended towards the more popular because, as I say, there is no point in being familiar with a place purely on someone else’s terms. Before going there, I had formed a strong image of Kinder Scout, because of the countless accounts from keen fans of the area. Yet not one of these accounts could fully match what I saw and heard for myself. One person’s familiar is another person’s strange and beguiling.
When you get way from the maddening uniformity of high streets and edge-of-town retail warehouse lands, there is still much to startle, and to jolt one out of clichéd preconceptions. This is also why I increasingly dispense with maps. We currently live in a sat nav superstate; rare is the journey these days that isn’t plotted out by some silky voiced android on a tiny screen. But walking is different; it is about freedom, and about the thrill of random choices. Now that we have the opportunity to place our feet on so much land that was previously cut off, why do so through the nagging exactitude of maps? Isn’t there more fun doing it the Alfred Watkins way – that is, scrambling to the top of a hill, and taking in all the landmarks for miles around, and trying (and failing) to orientate yourself by them? If, after all, you are walking in ordinary English farmed countryside, then what really are the consequences of getting lost? Starvation? Lunacy? Your crow-pecked bones eventually found in a hedge? This is simply one man’s opinion. There are many who rightly adore maps, and can spend hours poring over them, their eyes and their imaginations flickering over all those contour lines.
Walkers now have a moral duty to roam as much, and as widely, as they can. We live in an age of multiple anxieties, but one remarkably constant fear, stretching back decades, is that we are in danger of losing the countryside that we love. That by aggressive speculation, or neglect, or simple ignorance, or by buying cheap food, we are contributing to the destruction of fields, of precious habitats, of rare, almost extinct species. The encouraging side of this terror, however, is that we have paradoxically entered a golden age of conservation. For every batch of those unwelcome new-build properties on greenfield sites, there are now meadows set aside by farmers especially to encourage the return of wildflowers, and delicate little known insect species. Meanwhile, impregnable Sites of Special Scientific Interest are now dotted all over the map of the British Isles. Old woodlands in many areas are protected with a ferocity that borders on the medieval. Into the middle of this new covenant with the countryside – a relationship where the town-dwelling visitors show a new and proper level of consideration to those who work and protect the land – strides the walker. They yearn to see rare wildflowers, and listen to the songs of birds thought long gone. They know that in many areas, their feet are there on the soil on condition of good behaviour – whether it is a ripening cornfield or a stretch of protected downland. You will find that walkers treading the edges of bio-diverse marshes show more quiet reverence, and more lightfooted delicacy and respect, than any of the noisy visitors who throng modern day Canterbury Cathedral.
The fear that we are losing our native natural wonders is having the effect of propelling large numbers of walkers out into all corners of the countryside. The beneficial result is that they bring with them revenue that, in a virtuous circle, helps provide further protection for those wonders. We modern walkers are also unconsciously honouring the rambling pioneers; those nineteenth-century working class men and women who headed out on Sundays into the open, noting as they did all the botanical and geological splendour. Not to mention the 1932 Kinder Scout trespassers, who were not afraid to face prison sentences in their struggle to establish natural justice: that the open acres of the country should be free to all.
Generations have fought very hard, and with amazing persistence, to throw open those fields and meadows and river paths and coastal walks and great long moorland yomps. The best we can do is to get out there, enjoy them to the hilt, and ensure that the generations to come enjoy them too.