Public footpaths not fit for purpose

It’s crazy that it can be easier to walk within cities than in the countryside

Start a walk at Queensway underground station in London, and you can go on a glorious three-and-a-half mile, 80-minute walk to Downing Street through four beautiful parks - Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’s Park.

London also has a host of clearly signposted walks, such as the Green Chain Walk, stretching from the River Thames to Nunhead Cemetery. It spans fields, parks and woodlands across 50 miles and passes such sights as the 18th century Gothic folly, Severndroog Castle, the Art Deco masterpiece, Eltham Palace and dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park. Other places of interest along the way include Horniman Museum and Gardens, the Thames Barrier and birdwatching at Southmere among boats and fishermen. It passes numerous parks and commons, including Lesnes Abbey Woods, which contains the ruins of an abbey dating from 1178, and ancient Oxleas Woods, which thankfully Margaret Thatcher failed to install a dual carriageway through in 1993.

Public footpaths in Suffolk: photo by Ben West

Conversely, it is surprising how difficult it can be to go on a walk in many rural areas of the UK, other than Scotland, which has the right idea with its access laws, giving walkers the right to walk on most land, provided they act responsibly. While of course there are many huge tracts of land like Dartmoor or the Yorkshire Dales where walking isn’t a problem, it is also common to drive for miles looking for public footpath signs without success, and if you do, there’s nowhere safe to park nearby.

Of course, you can simply rock up at any agricultural field that has no marked right of way and start walking around the perimeter of it (or tramping over crops across the middle of it if you are not so thoughtful), but that opens up a different kind of field - a minefield. For the law is so murky here.

For the public does not have automatic and unfettered rights to walk over agricultural and other private land. However, they do have rights of access to certain areas of land under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. This right is commonly known as the 'freedom to roam’ or ‘right to roam’ and includes land shown on maps as ‘open country’, land higher than 600 metres above sea level, registered common land, and ‘dedicated land’ which landlords and certain tenants can grant for public access.

Indeed, if you really look into the laws of land access deeply enough you’d probably not go on another ramble without being in the company of a specialist lawyer and a GPS-equipped cartographer.

Nick Hayes, in his well-regarded tome, The Book of Trespass, comprehensively challenges the concept of trespass (and by the way trespassing in the UK is a civil offence, not a criminal one, making ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ signs meaningless). He points out that by law of trespass we are excluded from 92% of the land and 97% of its waterways. He unfolds a history of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights, and argues that we should have far more rights of access to land.

There’s no way of knowing that this is a public right of way: photo by Ben West

I’ve had a surprisingly large number of run-ins with farmers walking on the borders of fields that have no public footpath. I used to live in Suffolk, surrounded by fields. With few public footpaths nearby I would simply walk on the edges of fields near my home if I wanted to go for a stroll, rather than jump in my car and go on a drive to find a public footpath. On a number of occasions a farmer would career over in his tractor and tell me to get off his land, and I was always incredulous why my walking on the side of a field with no animals in it - and often no crops - should have been a problem.

I was walking in Cornwall last year along a footpath and when it reached a field there were no signs indicating which way to go. So I opted to turn right. Again, a farmer spotted me and immediately drove over in his tractor. He did this in a threatening way, driving straight up to me at speed and slamming on the brakes just a few feet in front of me. I pointed out that there was no indication which way the public footpath continued, and a tense discussion followed. I just couldn’t understand why walking on the side of a field could incense him so much. Perhaps he’d just had a lover’s tiff with one of his sheep, but that was no excuse for his aggressiveness.

Often public footpath signs are obscured or removed - so it can be difficult to find out where you can roam: photo by Ben West

Many times public footpath signs have been obscured or removed - for example on a walk in Buckinghamshire just this week - and this seems more and more common as council budgets have been decimated in recent years and a decreasing number of things they are responsible for, like public footpath signs, are maintained.

So many times I have walked along public footpaths and bridleways regularly lined with ‘keep out’ and ‘private land’ and ‘no trespassing’ signs, which quite comprehensively kills off the relaxing atmosphere a walk should promote. I’ve also occasionally seen misleading signs, such as those indicating bulls in a field that aren’t there, which is an offence.

Bridleway or private road - which is it?: photo by Ben West

Of course, no landowner wants people to litter, leave gates open or introduce uncontrolled dogs to their livestock, However, the majority of walkers are considerate and do absolutely no damage to the land they walk on. Most will observe the Country Code and avoid damaging crops by using paths and tracks where possible, or walking only on unsown ground.

Being bombarded with ‘private land’, ‘no trespassing’ and ‘keep out signs;’ is hardly conducive to a relaxing walk: photo by Ben West

Farmers sometimes say that they don’t want walkers on their land because there can be animals, chemicals and other dangerous things present in a field. If that’s the case, a few signs around such fields indicating dangers would no doubt suffice. And that argument doesn’t wash in Scotland, where access rights, which are similar to the ’everyman’s right’ or ‘freedom to roam’ in parts of Scandinavia, the Baltic states and Central Europe, include access to farmers' fields.

The whole ‘right to roam’ issue is too big to cover in this short article, but at the very least landowners should ensure their public footpaths, often enshrined in law for centuries, are easily accessible and councils ensure they are adequately signposted. It’s not much to ask. Walking has so many health benefits and in these stressful times going for a rural stroll should never need to be difficult.