Finding Our Rights of Way
In this piece, I ponder why so few of us exercise our rights of way. What are the barriers preventing us from doing so? Physical and legal obstacles aside, I wonder what, in the first place, stops us from walking.
My own childhood shows that despite many deficits – of awareness, of transport, and rights of way – my parents (who did not drive) inculcated in me a desire to walk. Even so, as a small child in Liverpool 8, I was unaware of the countryside.
It was only on visiting Clwyd’s mountains, in a family friend’s new ‘bubble-car’ that I learned one could venture out of the city. After lifting its lid so that my parents and I could squeeze in, our friend Florence took us on a daytrip to Wales. Craning my neck upwards, I watched hills whoosh past. Being a toddler, however, hill-walking was out of scope.
Being held by my father, in the 'Beatnik Sweater' my mother said I’d be wearing.
Moving soon afterwards – to a prison estate in the Home Counties – my parents were enthused by the prospect of local ambles. They were soon thwarted by fenced off green fields. Fortunately, by the mid-1960s, we had escaped to Oxford. With my parents, I enjoyed the freedom to walk by the river, to town, and south to Iffley Lock. Rather than the prison’s mini-bus ferrying me to school, I was able to make my own way along the Iffley Road. And again, thanks to a family friend, I entered the enchanted woodscape that was Bagley Wood – since blighted by the A34.
So at the turn of the new millennium, I was thrilled by the enactment of the ‘right to roam’: the statutory right to wander, albeit only on some carefully-defined areas of England and Wales.
Fast-forward twenty years, to the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when the government imposed restrictions on movement not seen since the Second World War. On top of a reduction in public transport, this regimen, prescribed by law of one-hour daily permitted exercise, encouraged many to get out into the open air. But for others, it forged psychological barriers to accessing open spaces.
Without wishing to generalise from the particular, it seems to me that the effects of the state’s restrictions are now embedded in our atomised mind-set. For me, a regular rambler, still taking my frenetic local walk, this episode shows concretely how individuated and inward my outlook has become. I have yet to return to the countryside rambles that Inner London Ramblers Association volunteers so diligently organise.
What steps can be taken to dislodge those who have withdrawn into an inner world and who harbour an entrenched reluctance to venture forth, whether in the aftershocks of Covid or for other reasons? How do we ‘morph’ from being a single inert body and join the collective ‘walking public’? How can we extract folk from their indoor or virtual worlds?
Inevitably, the state must take a lead. ‘Municipal kindliness’, whereby local councils attempt to promote walking can take many a guise, not always successfully. Below, I describe some manifestations.
Illustrated and informative display boards, despite being interesting interventions in the urban or country landscape, can have their downsides. This brings me to another deficit: that of agency. Abingdon on the Thames in Oxfordshire, for example, is said to be the oldest town in England. To the south of its Caldecott estate, in Southern Town Park a newly decorated pathway marks the ‘Hedgehog Trail’. Hidden from the road and backing onto a wooded area, the path feels unsafe. The absence of children and their carers exploring the park or even using the playground is a sorry sight.
Display board showing route of the Hedgehog Trail, Southern Town Park, Abingdon-on-Thames
Hand-painted way marker on the Hedgehog Trail, by Lambrick Way
Moreover, one cannot ‘make a purse from a sow’s ear’. Against the backdrop of a century of town planning since the Caldecott estate was conceived in the 1920s, the air of desolation that hangs about the manufactured parkscape of landscaped grass bordered by a suburban road and the grating hum of passing traffic, the trail seems a desperate measure. Even in daylight, Southern Town Park feels a discomfiting space in which to find myself, a lone woman from London. I dread to think how children feel safe enough to wander within the park’s bounds.
Southern Town Park playground, from the footpath alongside Southern Town Park
Concerning in a different register was the destruction of art works on the road along which I walk most days. Specially commissioned boards to mark forty years since the Brixton riots of 1981, which started on Railton Road, were recently vandalised.
Turning to other media, might public sculpture for instance draw people out of their inner confinement?
One example is the figurative Folkestone Mermaid, which departing from her usual practice, Cornelia Parker conceived in 2011-12. The mermaid sculpture is likely visible from various points on the coast path, and appears as an insertion into the natural world of yet another unseemly object.
The Seven Sisters from Seaford Head Nature Reserve, Sussex, on the King Charles III England Coast Path
Perhaps the risks posed by locating public sculpture outdoors, so as to draw people from their private sphere, outweigh best intentions to mobilise wayfarers. As Barry Curtis’ writing suggests, such works can result in ‘an easy recuperability of public art and the congealing of significance to which it is prone’. Rather than setting in stone some ‘must-see’ public artworks, the way forward must surely be to promote greater use of rights of way. Perhaps joining up pathways so as to devise circular walks would work.
Policymakers should ask why some of us prefer to stick to the urban. It feels safer to walk within one’s familiar territory. When walking locally, I am less likely as a woman to be gawped at, for instance. Moreover, August’s riots foreground the ‘othering’ of members of minority ethnic groups, who, in consequence of the violent targeting of immigrants, will feel vulnerable about being visible in the countryside.
As Alexandra Harris indicates in her work, ‘local’ connotes ‘minor’; however, to go local is a starting point. A good example is the Mayor of London’s push, in conjunction with the Ramblers’ Association, to promote London’s longer rights of way which comprise joined up paths: the Capital Ring, the London Loop and the Green Chain. Five years ago, it was my privilege to be ‘back marker’ for a small group of those new to rambling who were sampling the last of these through some of South London’s green spaces.
Taking account of these shifting constellations of materiality, agency, locality and memory, policy makers might construct a policy framework to engage citizens as active users of hard-won rights to walk, unhindered by constraint – to persuade folk to make the leap from private to public space, and find their rights of way.
Michèle Sedgwick, a member of The Ramblers, is a critical walker. Drawing on her socialist and feminist family history, Michèle blogs at https://sedgword.home.blog/.
Further reading
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman (1993).
Richard Sennett, ‘Disturbing Memories’, in Patricia Fara and Karalyn Patterson (eds.), Memory (1998), pp. 10-26.
Barry Curtis, ‘Foreword’, Judith Rugg, Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism (2010).
Alexandra Harris, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape (2024).
Tad Tietze, ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, in Peter Sedgwick, PsychoPolitics (2022), pp. vii-xvi.