The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (15 page)

These paths to market are a far cry from their contemporary equivalents. Rights of way in our city centres have been comprehensively wiped from the map, as whole swathes of shopping districts become privatised and policed by surly young men in polyester uniforms. Signs reminding us that this is not a public right of way are welded to every CCTV post, and there are always plenty of those. For the first time in our history, we have granted wholesale ownership of huge chunks of our mercantile centres to fast-buck developers and their shadowy mates, and it is they who decide who goes, and who does not.

If transporting a basket of eggs a few miles in the Middle Ages was a formidable challenge, it’s hard to imagine the logistics for the drovers, as they steered whole herds of sheep and cattle hundreds of miles across the country. From at least the Norman age well into the twentieth century, hundreds of beasts at a time, in columns anything up to half a mile long, were moved at a steady two miles an hour from the wilder country of the north and west to the merchants and markets of the south and east. Some of the old drovers’ roads were tarmaced, but the majority were left to green over and sink gradually into the landscape, as paths official and not. A straggly line of hawthorns, sheep fleece fluttering in its lower limbs, alongside just a hint of a dip in the field, gives the gentlest of nods to its former life.

Walking or driving in rural Wales (or in parts of Scotland, northern England and the West Country), you are regularly reminded of the drovers and their impact on the landscape. Isolated pubs high in the hills often point to their overnight stops, as do small clusters of three Scots pines. When the drovers reached England, they would swap pine for yew trees to identify the inns and farms where they could shelter. Even in some of the most quintessentially English parts of the country, there are tangible reminders of the noisy cavalcades of Welshmen and their beasts that used to bustle through. A line of country lanes east of Leamington Spa is still known today, and marked on OS maps, as the Welsh Road, as is the Welsh Way near Cirencester in the Cotswolds. In true-blue Stockbridge, a Hampshire town of handsome Georgian houses and fine trout fishing, there’s an old drovers’ inn whose frontage is painted with the Welsh slogan
Gwair Tymherus, Porfa Flasus, Cwrw Da a Gwal Cyserus
(‘seasoned hay, sweet pasture, good beer and comfortable beds’). It’s as good a motto as any for a long walk, with or without the livestock.

Framfield path number 9 and Nicholas van Hoogstraten’s half-built Hamilton Palace, near Uckfield, East Sussex

OS Landranger, number 187. My dog-eared old copy, pre-dating the imposition of front-cover photos, is named Dorking, Reigate & Crawley, which sounds like a firm of solicitors you might find on one of the handsome high streets on this sheet. Brass name plaque, established 1894, although there’s only one Mr Crawley there now, and he’s dreaming of the day when he can take early retirement and move permanently to his Executive Plus apartment in an Andalucian golf resort. The map cost £1.40, although chances are I nicked it during my teenage carto-heist years. ‘Selected roads revised 1975’ is its most up-to-date legend, so it’s no wonder that the M25 is shown mostly as a theoretical light-blue dashed line, nudging its way across woods and fields, and looking about as disruptive as a gentle stream.

Map spread, I’m on the hunt for the homes and stomping grounds of some typically enthusiastic ramblers. This Surrey hinterland is a good place to look. Despite the motorways, the rat runs and the commuting hordes, there are plenty of green corners, wooded hills and bits tightly policed by the National Trust and their ilk. Footpaths too: not just the regular rights of way threading between villages and through copses and paddocks, but a wealth of named long-distance paths as well. On my older map, there’s the Pilgrim’s Way in Olde English typeface, an early medieval track from Winchester to Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, and the North Downs Way National Trail, opened in 1978 and making its cartographic debut. Frequently, the two form the same route.

Thirty odd years on, and the modern Landranger 187, as well as showing the brutal reality of the M25, is crawling with named LDPs. On the cover map, now relegated to the back, the North Downs Way is shown, but the ever-obedient OS also remind us that it is part of the E2 European Long Distance Path – not that any Surrey stalwart would ever refer to it as such, or at least not without a few choice expletives attached. Handy, though, for those occasions when the urge grips you to walk from Leatherhead to Luxembourg, and who hasn’t had one of those? Inside the map, the keen rambler is spoilt for choice: there’s the Eden Valley Walk, the Forest Way, the Greensand Way, the Downs Link, the Sussex Border Path, the Way South Path (or was it the Path South Way?), the High Weald Landscape Trail, the Sussex Ouse Valley Way and the West Sussex Literary Trail. There’s a corner of the London Loop, for those Hoxton hipsters who will exhaustively blog about their trundle through Cheam, Carshalton Beeches and the outer reaches of Purley. Most irresistible of all is the Vanguard Way, with the tough choice of which glittering trailhead to aim for, Croydon or Newhaven.

I’ll call my mythical rambler from Landranger 187 Dave. He lives in one of the villages south of Weybridge, and walks every morning to the station (Effingham Junction perhaps, if only for the comedy value of the name), where he catches a train to work, at the University of Surrey in Guildford. Dave came to Guildford as one of its earliest intake of students, back in that apocalyptic year of 1968. Originally from the Potteries, he’s never felt much at home in Surrey, but his degree became an MA, then a PhD, then a lecturer’s post and, for the last 12 years, he’s been head of department, so although he likes to keep his vowels as flat and northern as possible, he’s lived in chi-chi Surrey for well over two-thirds of his life. Dave’s north Staffs tones get even stronger when he’s had a pint or two (real ale only; lager is the devil’s work), as does his absentee devotion to Port Vale FC.

To be honest, Dave hates his job, but he’s far too near retirement to think about quitting. As someone who came to a university that was forged brand new in the white heat of technology and the blazing flames of potential revolution, he just wants to slap the pallid little remote-controlled excuses for students that file through his seminars these days. Not that he ever would, of course. Dave is a lifelong pacifist and socialist, though he voted Lib Dem last time round, as the Labour vote in Surrey had shrunk to Monster Raving Loony proportions, and he quite liked their stance on Iraq and tuition fees. He’s kept very quiet about the latter since. His most radical daily activity is buying the
Guardian
from the tiny pile at the station newsagents, dwarfed beneath tottering mountains of
Daily Mails
and
Telegraphs
. Even that just makes him feel worse, though. He hates the
Guardian
’s incessant wittering about Twitter and Facebook and Borough bloody Market, and would, if truth be told, rather have the
Telegraph
, because the crossword’s better.

Dave and his wife Maureen have never made great friends locally. When the kids were growing up, they were pals with other nearby couples from the school run, but most of these have since upgraded to Richmond or retired to the coast. They have the immediate neighbours round every Christmas for a stilted hour or two of sloe gin and avoiding contentious topics. That aside, cats are fed, cars waved at, parcels looked after and residents’ association meetings occasionally patronised. Dave hates those meetings, the golf club Hitlers and their Neighbourhood Snoop schemes, but 40 years in Surrey has taught him that it’s best to show your face once in a while, or who knows what whispers might fill the vacuum.

Walking came to Dave’s rescue 15 years ago, when the kids were leaving home and barely a week went by without some new named path being unveiled in the local paper. Age and a grumbling knee had put paid to his squash playing, so he took to heading out into the hills most weekends, usually alone but sometimes with Maureen or his colleague Roger, and had soon walked most of the waymarked routes in Surrey, Sussex and Kent. He tried joining the local Ramblers’ Association group, but it was just the residents’ association in gaiters. Twice now, he’s had week-long walking holidays in the Peak District, which brought back fond – and some difficult – memories of his childhood; he was surprised to find himself quite so glad to be going back to the Hornby train-set prettiness of the North Downs. Walking became not just a hobby, but an ideological passion, a one-man crusade to reclaim his land, his history. He’s read up on the Diggers and the Levellers, on enclosures and Kinder, and the knowledge gives a spring to his every step.

Politics used to be so straightforward for Dave, but all the black-and-white certainties of the seventies social revolution and the them-and-us Thatcher years had long since dissolved into a murky grey soup. He’d been briefly excited, and not a little amazed, by the strength of local feeling against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and had helped organise a coach from the area to the huge march in London, but then spent all day praying that he wouldn’t bump into anyone he knew, lest they saw him marching under placards saying ‘Dorking Churches Say It’s Not On, Mr Blair!’ and, worse, thanks to its witheringly posh sentiment and even posher rhyme, ‘We Don’t Want a War in Iraq, We Just Want a Walk in the Park.’

Dave writes a good letter; over the years, he’s had a few printed in the
Guardian
, the
Independent
,
Private Eye
and the
Surrey Advertiser
. He’d become an active member of the Ramblers’ and the Open Spaces Society, and diligently lobbied politicians and council officials about blocked paths and the debate over the right to roam. One case had excited him over all others, had reminded him of his red-hot, long-lost beliefs. He wrote letters to MPs, councillors and one terribly wry one that he was thrilled to see printed in the
Observer
. He’d even driven down to Sussex, in his and Maureen’s tiny Fiat, to join a demonstration of ramblers, under police protection, as they attempted to walk the notorious path that had been blocked by the man Dave hated more than any other on Earth. More than Jeremy Clarkson. More even than Thatcher.

Every pantomime needs its villain, and in the long-running
Cinderella
that is the story of the rambling movement, no rapscallion ever came with a more dastardly swank and hollower cackle than Nicholas van Hoogstraten. The battle over the Sussex footpath past his home near Uckfield occupied more column inches, drew more protestors and caused more fury than any since Kinder Scout. There were a lot of Daves out there, and they rose as one. To the local authority, East Sussex County Council, the Hoogstraten path is known as Framfield 9 – even the name sounded like a gang of imprisoned hostages or victims of a miscarriage of justice.
Free the Framfield 9
!

Where do you start with Hoogstraten? The name, perhaps, for the ‘van’ is, of course, pure affectation. And that’s not his only name, for he has admitted to using up to 20 aliases, reportedly including Nicholas Hamilton, Dr Karl Brunner, Paul Clark and Reza Ghadamian. According to a 2009 report in
The Times
, when Hoogstraten was cleared, on technicalities, of charges in Harare of illegal currency dealing and possession of pornography (many of the images included Old Nick himself with his latest Zimbabwean squeeze), he changed his name by deed poll. Changed it to – cue blanket green lighting and a thunderclap – Adolph von Hessen. He’s behind you!

Perhaps I should let him paint his own portrait, for he’s not been shy of speaking up. On his upbringing: ‘My mother was just an object, something I inherited. She used to wind my father up by telling him what a bastard I was. The only relationship I had with her was: “Give me some money.”’ Or that of his own five children, by three different mothers (‘Once you’ve had black, you never go back’), none of whom were deemed suitable Mrs van H material (‘Do I look stupid?’). One of his broodmares said that when her waters broke on a valuable carpet, he ordered her to clean it immediately: ‘Of course. It was a blooming twelve thousand pound Persian silk carpet. When one owns art one has to be a custodian of it. She was only the carrier of my child. Anyway, the baby didn’t come for ages.’

His business methods are even less savoury. At its height, his empire included 2,000 properties, mainly in London and Brighton, and thousands of tenants, or ‘riff-raff’ as he preferred to call them. Evicting a tenant once, he allegedly assisted in hurling their furniture out of the window, describing it as ‘the best bit of fun I’ve had in ages’. Others were beaten up, or came home to find staircases and roofs removed: ‘That was just amusement,’ he explains. ‘Entertainment. Of course I threaten tenants on a daily basis. It’s perfectly legal; people have got to pay their rent.’ In 1968, he was imprisoned for ordering the firebombing of one of his tenants, a Jewish holy man. When he came out of prison, he allegedly kidnapped his own accountant, who he claimed had stolen £140,000 from him: ‘Look, I was justified. I took him to Paris and locked him in a property I own there for two years. I fed him on sardines and biscuits and he worked for me until he’d repaid the debt.’ The properties with which he was linked were often in a shocking state of disrepair. Five people died in an arson attack on a third-floor flat in Hove in 1992. There was no fire escape, a fact that the council had repeatedly reported, although they had found it nigh on impossible to prove actual ownership of the property, as, true to form, this was vested in a labyrinthine network of stooges and paper companies. He wasted no time in mourning the dead, however, describing them as ‘lowlife, drug dealers, drug takers and queers – scum’.

Previous convictions included demanding money with menaces, forcible entry, bribery, handling stolen goods, assault and contempt of court. In 2002, he was convicted of the manslaughter of a business associate, Mohammed Raja, who was stabbed and then shot in the face by hired hitmen in front of his grandchildren. He was sentenced to ten years, but freed on appeal after a year in Belmarsh. ‘Raja was nothing,’ he said then. ‘If I had a list of people I wanted executed that maggot wouldn’t even have figured.’ He was contemptuous of the dead man’s family for seeking compensation from him (‘They’re a bunch of shit-bags, they always were’), and the way that he had been brought to trial (‘The police and judiciary are dishonest and incompetent. They fitted me up. I had to keep my mouth shut during the trial but now I’m going to fuck the lot of them’).

In 1985, he began building a lavish mansion on a site he – or rather, an opaque network of companies – owned near Uckfield. The largest private house to be built in Britain in the twentieth century was to be his mausoleum and the home for his art collection. Rumours swirled that it was a retirement home for Robert Mugabe, whom Hoogstraten had described as ‘a hundred per cent decent and incorruptible’. Planning permission was only granted a decade later, not that such civic niceties ever made much difference to Hoogstraten. And as for a public footpath running through the estate, well, that was beyond irrelevant. He blocked it with a padlocked fence, two lines of barbed wire, a vast shed built right across it, and a stack of old refrigerator units piled high.