Think Human 2024: The Lost Paths Talk

On the 18th of April, it was pleasure to be invited to Oxford Brookes’ Think Human Festival, to talk about my recently published book, The Lost Paths. This a history of the network of paths which connect communities across England and Wales, but it is also a personal exploration of how these paths have been forged by people walking and interacting with their landscapes over centuries. What emerges are stories of loss, transformation, and multi-generational continuity.

Jack Cornish pointing the way, alongside Glen O’Hara and Tom Breen

Forces of change and disruption

One of the reasons I found The Lost Paths such an exciting book to research and to write is that by talking about something so seemingly simple – the basic infrastructure which enables us to walk (or ride and cycle) – I was able to explore so many of the forces which have impacted people and land over thousands of years of our history.

But these aren’t just processes and factors which are confined to the past: they live in our path network to this day. To borrow from the Think Human Festival’s official blurb, and as evident in the discussion and questions following my talk, through looking at the past and present of our paths we can ‘discuss and reflect on the importance of understanding ourselves as human beings, our relationships with others and the challenges we face as part of a changing society in a complex world’.

There are some forces of change which live on from the past, and still linger in the form and shape of our path network. In some of the nineteen chapters of The Lost Paths, I write about forces of creation - the paths for the trade in salt in the 10th century in the West Midlands, networks formed by the powerful landowning monasteries in South Wales and routes created and sustained by the island-wide transportation of animals in the 17th and 18th centuries. There are so many types of path: for pilgrims, for the dead, for those destitute and homeless, and for today’s leisure walkers.

There have been shaped by disruptive and destructive forces. Enclosure, which alongside upending traditional patterns of land use saw wholesale change and restriction of how people moved around the landscape. We can still see the shadow of the Second World War on our public rights of way network, in the shape of some of the 360,000 acres of land over which airfields were laid within just a few years (one magazine at the end of the war catchily described Britain as ‘one vast aircraft carrier anchored off the north-west coast of Europe’).

There is a seemingly unbroken continuity in some of the questions and conundrums raised when considering our path network. When walking the streets and neighbourhoods of Crawley and, whilst reflecting on the opposition to the establishment of this new town in the 1950s, I think about where, in a country which is expected to grow to 74 million people by 2036, do we build houses and communities? And how can we ensure that people living in these houses have good, enjoyable places to go walking? Recent research commissioned by the Ramblers shows that there has been a long decline in the provision of public rights of way since the 1970s, with houses built in the 1990s having 19% more local paths than those built in the 21st century.  

In the ‘Railway Mania’ chapter of The Lost Paths I write about the febrile years of the 1840s, when in just four years proposals for the creation of 9,500 miles of railway were put before parliament (of which 6,000 miles were ultimately built, contributing to a network which, at its height, spanned 23,000 miles). There was significant disquiet and anguish about the coming of the railways and their impact of the traditional path network, opposition which contrasted the perceived health and cleanliness of the old ways with the dirt, decay and disruption coming from the new iron ways. The loss of a footpath in Blackburn was reported to be ‘the only…healthy summer’s walk for persons in this locality’ and in Essex ‘the old paths, which were healthy, airy and convenient’ were said to be being replaced with narrow-walled paths ‘in some places most disgusting’.

Some may see a parallel in the opposition to modern railway schemes such as HS2 (although, HS2’s direct impact on public rights of way is contested). Of course, the case made for HS2 partly rests on it being part of the solution for addressing the most significant challenge of our time – the climate emergency.

The Lost Paths by Jack Cornish

The climate emergency

We are in already in that emergency, a crisis that is already having a demonstrable impact on our path network. In my work as Head of Paths at the Ramblers, I support the delivery of a Path Accessibility Fund. Through this we are enabling more of our paths to become physically accessible for more people – vital improvements when polling suggests that 56% of people with physical and sensory disabilities say physical barriers stop them from using the path network.

With this fund we have removed many barriers, such as stiles, to be replaced by more accessible gates (and even better, gaps). But in recent months, we have seen a marked increase in applications for paths which are inaccessible due to more extreme weather and a changing climate – a request for resurfacing and for new boardwalks to cope with flooded paths.

The impact of a changing climate on our paths can perhaps be seen most starkly on our shorelines. In ‘The Climate Coast’ chapter of The Lost Paths, I write about some of communities along our shores which have been washed into the sea – Kenfig in South Wales, Dunwich in Suffolk (in the eleventh century, the tenth-largest settlement in England) and Ravensor Odd, at the mouth of the Humber estuary.

There we know the names of the some of the urban paths which are now somewhere under the North Sea – Newgate, Kirk Lane, Hull Street and Locksmith Lane. But alongside these, we simply don’t know how many miles of path have been scattered to the bottom of the sea, how many walks have been washed away. Britain’s cliffs and shores are already amongst some the fastest eroding in Europe and the diminishing of our coast is only set to accelerate. The legislation behind the England Coast Path, the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, is novel response to this reality – allowing the trail to roll back as the coastline erodes (provisions which are already coming into play).

Paths should be part of the solution in addressing the climate emergency. And I think it is a hopeful part of our answers – the polling demonstrates that over 70% of people want money, time and resources to be invested in our public paths. By protecting our existing public rights of way network, in reclaiming the almost 50,000 miles of historical paths which may have been lost from the map, by creating green routes in our towns and cities and by forging new paths (including from our old railway lines), we have the ability to create a network which enables more people to switch to sustainable forms of transport such as walking and cycling.

The Lost Paths: A History of How We Walk From Here To There, is out now, published by Penguin Michael Joseph and available in hardback, audio book and ebook: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446761/the-lost-paths-by-cornish-jack/9781405951289