The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (34 page)

On large-scale Victorian Ordnance Surveys, Faxton looks a little too scattered across its blustery slopes, and not at all close-knit or comforting. Footpaths are marked in all directions: west to Lamport, where the mother church to the Faxton chapel-of-ease was found, south to Old, the nearest pub, north to Loddington and east to Broughton. The east–west track was the main one, even appearing as a relatively major road on Thomas Moule’s 1836 map of the county. Follow it today and you’ll notice something a little odd, in the shape of the smooth tarmac road running alongside, and marked as a private drive. This, the road that finally came when it was too late, heads up to the one solitary house that has been teased back from the brink. Up by the gate of the house, a path – the old cobbled main street of the village – cuts across a field towards a clump of trees and all that’s left of the doomed, devil worshippers’ church: a truncated octagonal column that records, on each of its sides ‘ON THIS / SITE STOOD / THE ALTAR / OF THE / CHURCH OF / SAINT DENYS / DEMOLISHED MCMLIX /
.’ The cross leered out of the stone, looking like something being brandished at a vampire in some Hammer Horror schlockfest – ‘Take that, infidel!’ It tickled me, but I still didn’t hang around too long.

From the village that died because the roads never came, it’s just a short hop across a couple of fields to the village that was born in the back of a speeding car. Mawsley Village, its name harking back to a medieval settlement that died centuries before neighbouring Faxton, is a fast-growing housing estate plonked in the middle of Northamptonshire nowhere. It was started in 2001, and identifies its new-century credentials even on the map, in the pattern of fussy little squiggles and swirls that, on the ground, translate into a set of bucolically named Ways, Closes and Groves. On a sunny summer Saturday afternoon, I wandered randomly around the village and saw only two other people on foot. The car’s the boss in Mawsley.

I first heard of the place as a result of a tangential google. What I was looking for, I can’t remember, but somehow I ended up in slack-jawed amazement reading numerous threads and debates on the Mawsley Village Forum. If ever there was proof that the internet is a fabulous way to talk to people far away, but a terrible way to talk to your near neighbours, this was it. Intemperate and inebriate rants, passive-aggressive posturing, unfounded accusations, grudges, whingeing and A-grade curtain-twitching filled screen after screen. The topics that proved most combustible were the predictable roster of dogs (and their shit in particular) and everything to do with cars, especially parking. I hadn’t realised that there were quite so many ways in which to get absolutely bloody furious about where and how you leave your car, but the Mawsley Forum soon put me right on that. Even reading it, I could feel my blood pressure soaring, so God knows what it must be like for the poor sods grinding the stuff into their keyboards at their flatpack desk in their flatpack house.

To be honest, I was hoping to make a cameo appearance in the Village Forum myself. There had been a couple of threads headed with things like ‘WHITE VAN JJ52 HDG – WHO HE?’, posted by upright Mawsleyans who had seen someone they neither knew nor liked the look of in their precious paradise, and wanted to alert everyone else to the fact. Some visitors made it into the threads just because they’d hung around a little bit too long, had said hello to some children or had parked where they shouldn’t have (a capital offence if Mawsleyans had their way). And I’m extremely disappointed to report that, despite parking right outside the One Stop shop and leaving my van there
for an entire Saturday afternoon
, despite daring to walk around Mawsley in broad daylight while being guilty of not wearing an England shirt on day one of the World Cup, despite being an unaccompanied bloke in his forties and despite even writing down the odd note in my notebook, no-one felt the urge to cyber-snitch on me. I was gutted. Should have parked in the ‘RESIDENTS ONLY’ spaces, I now realise.

Mawsley Village, and its growing number of compatriots, are the Tesco Value version of Prince Charles’s model town at Poundbury in Dorset, somewhere that he loves to believe is as organic as his biscuits. It isn’t. Poundbury is a chemical compound, a sub-urban Prozac, designed to smooth away the edges of reality into a no-peaks, no-troughs azimuth. Poundbury and Mawsley are not bad places, and some of the houses look genuinely lovely, but in order to function, they have had any potential surprise or spontaneity surgically excised from their DNA.

Paths come a long, long way behind roads in Mawsley. There is an old bridleway slicing the very corner of the development, and it was good to see a mum and two kids enjoying it on their bikes, their crash helmets glinting in the sunshine. Less welcome, but more Mawsley, was the couple who nearly mowed me down with a quad bike on the bridleway that brought me back to the village from nearby, long-dead Faxton. And at the northern end there are some meadows into which a path – actually, it’s a fully fledged pavement – meanders for a couple of hundred yards. Judging by the comments on the Village Forum, nearly all of Mawsley’s thousand-strong population have moved here from towns and cities for their slice of country life, and pavements across fields is as near as they dare get.

The nearest thing to a village green is, naturally, the central car park, around which are grouped Mawsley’s fledgling commercial enterprises. There’s the One Stop, an antiseptically bright barn housing huge piles of
Daily Mail
s, nappies and lager, together with a notice board offering car valeting, yoga and girlie parties where you get your make-up or nails (‘Real Gel Extensions!!!’) done by Terri or Traci. Should you not be looking quite good enough after that, you could nip across the car park and book an appointment at the hairdressers, Idolz, before heading next door for a skinny latte and naughty bun at The Sanctuary. Meanwhile, your little darlings are bouncing around the Day Nursery, which completes the retail complex. On the internet forum, there’s considerable grumbling that the promised pub has never arrived, and that the site designated for it is now being filled with more brick boxes. It’s a woman’s world, and you get the distinct impression that most of the decisions to move to Mawsley were taken by whippet-thin wives, which their considerably heftier husbands went along with for an easy life.

Nothing can shock us from our complacency quite as thoroughly as a bad photograph. We can suck our gut in a little in front of the mirror and then sally forth into the world convinced that we look that way for the rest of the evening, but then are horrified – and not a little mystified – by the digital image taken only six seconds ago that shows all too plainly how the said gut has now happily freed itself and is having a party all of its own. No wonder people plaster the fridge with these pictures; nothing could put you off that last chunk of pork pie or nicely chilled chocolate bar than the sight of your elephantine alter ego leering from the door.

I’ve had a few of these photos taken, but none slapped me as hard as one snuck by my boyfriend one recent Sunday morning when we were camping. From inside our camper van, he’d taken a photo of me sitting outside, hunched over a map. There’s a look of quiet madness in my posture, a Quasimodo concentration of rounded shoulders, furrowed brow and clenched everything, and all seemingly poured into the OS sheet I’m almost devouring. Worse, he’s lined up the angle so as to have me framed by the two stickers on the van’s windscreen: one proclaiming our membership of the National Trust, the other my membership (he’d have killed me if I’d enrolled us both) of the Caravan Club of Great Britain. Signing up was an insurance requirement, I feel bound to point out, but it’s not much of an excuse, and certainly not enough of one. I’m still debating where I should put this picture as my much-needed warning; where is the equivalent in the house of the fridge door for something that, instead of cautioning me what a fat bastard I’ve become, shows in gruesome detail what a boring tosser I can be if left to my own devices? I’ve just asked my partner that very question. ‘By your map shelves,’ was his immediate response.

One fortuitous by-product of Caravan Club membership is that it brings me something that works as an even more effective preventative than that photo: the monthly members’ magazine, its double-spread letters page in particular. Most of the letters start with the words ‘My wife and I’, and go on to either praise some super new caravanning gadget, something like a tiny kettle that doubles up as a can opener and gets Freeview, or rant fulsomely about the very many horrid ways modern life has gone so hideously wrong. In recent months, there’s been a blizzard of letters on one subject: people who dare to walk across their pitch at the camp site. This they – and their silent spouses – insist is a relatively new problem, for in the Good Old Days, no-one, absolutely no-one, would have dreamed of cutting across the corner of your allotted yardage. It’s Broken Britain manifesting itself in a neatly clipped field just off the A577, and My Wife and I are absolutely
furious
.

These are the people who would look at a blank wall for a whole day and swear that it’s not as good as it used to be this morning. Their whole life is a sagging balloon, fondly imagined as pert and perfect back in the day, but ever since slowly hissing out every last iota of pleasure and possibility. Locked on to this trajectory of diminishing returns, everyone is out to get them, undermine them or rip them off. They’d quite like to put man-traps around the perimeter of their homes, but have had to make do with a few ‘No Turning’ signs instead.

My haughtiness is, of course, tempered by the very real terror that I will become that letter writer. And liking a walk – loving one, in fact – is no guarantee that I’ll avoid the fate. Quite the opposite, it seems, for my year of walking the tracks of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland had shown all too graphically how easy it is to combine the great outdoors with ever-shrinking horizons. It’s quite some feat, in truth, for there is nothing more liberating than progressing through the landscape at your own pace, entirely under your own steam, whilst revelling in both the perfection of nature and the ingenuity of man.

Despite the clouds of doom being whipped up over budget cuts, I’m hugely optimistic about the future of our paths network. Something has fundamentally shifted in the last 20 years: our level of knowledge as to what we have, and an understanding of what it means to us all, have become embedded in a quite new way right across our collective identity. The recent kerfuffle over the sale of English forests has shown quite dramatically just how deep our assumption of access has rooted. It’s thanks to a number of factors that coincided almost perfectly. Two decades ago, there was the sudden increase in named long-distance paths, which sparked much interest and a considerable surge in their usage. Around the millennium, there were the debates about the right to roam and the eventual, and long overdue, measures in the resultant CROW Act of 2000, and its even bolder Scottish twin. Hard on the heels of that came foot-and-mouth, whose blanket bans on walking and access served as the most chilling reminder possible of what we stood to lose without our rights of way network. And since then, barely a Sunday night has been free of some lavish landscape porn on the TV, our countryside showcased in its most coquettish glory to a swelling Elgar soundtrack. Garnish all this with growing localism and environmentalism, together with the power of the internet to bring like minds together, and it has resulted in a far deeper connection that is not going to be jettisoned overnight. Neither is it dependent solely on the amount of public money thrown at it. But we’re British, so we’ll continue to moan and bicker about it, to see loss where there is none and to live in a state of perpetual impending doom, always lurking just around the next corner. It’s what we do best.

Along with footpaths, that is. A year of walking, in every landscape and almost every part of these islands, has been an extraordinary experience, one of the purest pleasures I’ve ever had with my clothes on (though I have of course shed them on one or two remote walks; you’ve got to keep the likes of Nicholas van Hoogstraten secure in their prejudices). My inner map of our islands has been much coloured in, and the glorious reality of their places and people way exceeds anything even the Ordnance Survey have managed. I’d found too that walking is a surefire way to enhance the landscape, for even places that I was used to looking tired or dull through a moving windscreen took on amazing new hues of subtle interest and beauty as I walked by them. Leslie Stephen, founder of the Sunday Tramps, put it thus: ‘Walking gives a charm to the most commonplace British scenery. A love of walking not only makes any English county tolerable, but seems to make the charm inexhaustible.’ He’s right. I’ve walked in Hertfordshire, one of my least favourite counties, and it was lovely. So strong is the spell, it might even work for Bedfordshire.

I’m glad too that I waited to do this until well into my forties, for in my younger years, I was in far too much of a hurry to hear the pitch and rhythm of the land, or to wallow in my own insignificance as I crossed it at a steady two miles an hour. Walking is a gloriously middle-aged pastime, and there’s no shame in that. It sits alongside gardening, silence, gin, olives and classical music as things most of us take time to ripen into. It cannot be forced. Amongst the acres of PR twaddle in the Ramblers’ Association document used to precipitate its glitzy rebrand, there was one tiny glimmer of truth that went entirely disregarded. Asked the question, ‘What one thing could the RA do to attract people like you?’, one focus group member sagely responded, ‘Too young to join. Something to do later in life.’ To the officers of the RA, such thinking is treasonable. To anyone else, it’s practical good sense, and a pretty sharp summary of the true shape of our three score years and ten. ‘The flowers smell sweeter the closer you are to the grave,’ warbled the Beautiful South; it was a line that sang in my soul as I sauntered through the cycle of a British year, drawing limitless inspiration from all that floated by.