Pathways

Exploring the Routes of a Movement Heritage

Edited by Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman and Sverker Sorlin

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PATHWAYS: EXPLORING THE ROUTES OF A MOVEMENT HERITAGE

PATHWAYS: EXPLORING THE ROUTES OF A MOVEMENT HERITAGE

Edited by Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman and Sverker Sorlin

With a Foreword by Tim Ingold

© 2022 The White Horse Press, The Old Vicarage, Main Street, Winwick, Cambridgeshire, UK

Set in 11 point Adobe Caslon Pro and Lucida Sans Printed by Lightning Source

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CONTENTS

List of figures

Author biographies Acknowledgements Foreword — Tim Ingold

Introduction Movement Heritage and Path Dependence: Layering the Past —

Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sérlin

SEecTION I — Past PRECONDITIONS OF PATHS

Chapter 1. Footpaths in England: Notes Towards a Radical History — Paul Readman

Chapter 2. Delineating the Landscape: Planning, Mapping and the Historic Imaginings of Rights of Way in Twentieth-century England and Wales — Clare Hickman and Glen O’Hara

Chapter 3. Appropriated Heritage? Access Campaigns, Trespass, and Local Rights in Early-twentieth Century Upland England and Austria — Ben Anderson

Chapter 4. Hefting the Land: A Locative Heritage of Hooves and Feet — Karen Lykke Syse

Chapter 5. ‘Following in the Footsteps of History’: Sixteen Multimedia Itineraries through the First World War Sites in the Stelvio National Park and Adamello Park (Italy) — Stefano

Morosini

SecTIon I] — Orr THE BEATEN TRACKS

Chapter 6. Archipelagic Paths: Narratives, Heritage and Community in Public Trail Walking on the Aland Islands — Susanne Osterlund-Pétzsch

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Chapter 7. Fusion: Co-created Heritage in Stories from the Camino de Santiago — Camilla Brudin Borg

Chapter 8. Tracing Memories: The Guided Trail as an Aid to Cultural Memory in Artworks by Janet Cardiff — Laura Bertens

Chapter 9. Walking and Worlding: Trails as Storylines in Video Games — Finn Arne Jorgensen

Chapter 10. Attentive Walking: Encountering Mineralness — Petra Lilja

Section III — Szarcuine ror New Patu HERITAGE

Chapter 11. Kodagu Walking Trails and Indigenous Heritage Making: A Bioregional Study — Subarna De

Chapter 12. Heritage Trails: Pathways to Sustainable Development Goals — John Martin, Joane Serrano, Jacqueline Nowakowski and Dominica Williamson

Chapter 13. Walking on Terrils. Ruderal Ecologies and Toxic Heritage in Wallonia, Belgium — Daniele Valisena

Chapter 14. Walking, Remembering and Enunciating the Place: Jewish-Israeli Memorial Trails in Nature — Maria Piekarska

Chapter 15. Walking the Kalderimi: Embodied Knowledge and Heritage Narratives in a Participatory Building Workshop at Zagori (NW Greece) — Faidon Moudopoulos Athanasiou and Tonas Sklavounos

Chapter 16. Forming Paths within Post-industrial Landscapes — Benjamin Richards

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LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter 1

Figure 1. The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, 24 April 1932. Figure 2. ‘Hiking’ (circa 1936), by James Walker Tucker. Figure 3. The Pilgrims’ Way, near Aylesford, Kent, England. Figure 4: A Public footpath sign in Derbyshire, England.

Chapter 2

Figure 1. Signpost including directions for The Saints Way as well as a Cornwall County Council Rights of Way arrow showing the interlinked typographies of Rights of Way and Trails.

Chapter 4 Figure 1. Accommodation for travellers at Langfjellet, by Johannes Flintoe (1787-1870).

Figure 2. A vertical movement to the mountain dairy in Bergen parish, by Johannes Flintoe (1787-1870). Figure 3. Milk maid with bell cow, Loken ostre, Rudshogda i Ringsaker.

Chapter 5

Figure 1. The Mount Scorluzzo (3,094 metres) Austro-Hungarian barracks. Recovery and en- hancement of the site and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research project.

Figures 2 and 3. General description of the project ‘Following in the footsteps of history’.

Figures 4 and 5. The Stelvio Pass-Mount Scorluzzo itinerary.

Chapter 6

Figure 1. Map of the Aland Islands.

Figure 2. A boy by the Geta caves, circa 1905. The cave trail has long been a popular walking path. Photograph by Otto Andersson.

Figure 3. The stamp station by the church of Lemland, Aland Islands. Pilgrims on the St. Olav Waterway can collect place stamps in their pilgrim cards ina similar vein to Camino pilgrims.

Figure 4. Uprooted tree left to rot. Messy, or sound forest care?

Figure 5. Building ‘stone trolls’ is a popular interactive practice among visitors to the cave trail in Geta. Many locals disapprove of this and view it as interfering with nature.

Figure 6. Helping hands — walking as community building. A group of church-walkers on the Lemland trail, Aland Islands.

Chapter 7

Figure 1.‘Roman road’, Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Figure 2. Material communication at the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Figure 3. Walking and talking at the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

viii Pathways

Figure 4. Early morning at the Iron Cross, Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Figure 5. ‘Keep going’, Camino de Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Chapter 8 Figure 1. ‘Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012), by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. On

screen we see several people simultaneously and unexpectedly dropping their suitcases, a direct reference to an earlier remark by the artist: ‘Memories are like a different form of travel. It’s like filling a suitcase that we pull behind us and we open and close when we need to.’

Chapter 9

Figure 1. Screenshot from Battlezone (Atari, Inc., 1980).

Figure 2. Screenshot from Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012).

Figure 3. Screenshot from Firewatch (Campo Santo and Panic, 2016). Figure 4. Screenshot from Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2019). Figure 5. Game map from Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2019).

Chapter 10

Figure 1. Walking in silence.

Figure 2. Mineral bones.

Figure 3. Technofossil silos.

Figure 4. Processed minerals in the shape of buildings clinging on the brink of the quarry. Figure 5. Pondering the exposed sediment layers.

Figure 6. Encountering mineralness.

Chapter 11

Figure 1. Kodagu walking trails on C.P. Belliappa’s coffee estate. Figure 2. Human trails on Kodagu’s forested coffee plantation. Figure 3. Elephant trails on C.P. Belliappa’s estate.

Figure 4. Gunflower bush in Rani Machaiah’s coffee plantation. Figure 5. Kodagu paddy fields and trails.

Chapter 12

Figure 1. Sustainable Development Goals.

Figure 2. Location of Ifugao.

Figure 3. Batad Ifugao community, showing forest, rice field and village.

Figure 4. Youths walking the Nagacadan Ifugao Rice Terraces trails.

Figure 5. One of the stops in the Open Air Museum is a traditional Ifugao house containing artefacts.

Figure 6. Location of Carwynnen Quoit. .

Figure 7. Finding quoit pathways. Left: Celebratory dance under the restored quoit. Right: The discovered Neolithic stone pavement, 2014.

Figure 8. Walking the trail by Fenton-Ia in the Reens. Top: Guest co-developer Brother Petroc stands on the Reens in the summer, reaching the highest point of the trail. Bottom: Co-de- velopers stall on the trail during the autumn to laugh over stories whilst some observe fungi

and the view, 2021.

ix List of figures

Figure 9. Participatory map-making by Fenton-Ia in the Reens. Top: Mapping of land use within the different categories of common land created by Philip Hills. Bottom: Using Green Map Icons to map movement heritage findings, 2021.

Figure 10. Location of Pilgrimage line.

Chapter 13

Figure 1. Liége-Seraing from one of the paths climbing Terril du Gosson, 2015. Figure 2. Terril du Gosson, 2015. Figure 3. ‘Libellule’ by Daniel Steenhaut, Terril du Gosson, 2015.

Chapter 14

Figure 1. The Martyrs’ Trail information sign by the Scroll of Fire memorial.

Figure 2. Crossing of trails by the Martyrs’ Cave. The green-marked Martyrs’ Trail leads towards the Scroll of Fire. The orange-blue-white mark signifies the INT.

Figure 3. The Martyrs’ Trail makes a narrow descent towards the Martyrs’ Cave.

Chapter 15

Figure 1. A mixture of different techniques, from dry-stone kalderimi (left) to concrete-paved slabs (right).

Figure 2. The architectural drawing of the eastern side of the pathway, showing the remains uncovered during the project. The surviving patches of the nineteenth century paving layer are visible among other structures. The suggested chronologies are preliminary and relative, based on the combination of a) the material culture retrieved from each area, b) archival research and c) oral histories.

Figure 3. Left: imported nineteenth and early twentieth century potsherds from Apulia and Corfu. Right: A material culture assemblage of the so-called Anthropocene.

Figure 4. The small assemblage of coins from Russia, China and Korea.

Figure 5. The eastern edge before (above) and after (below) the intervention.

Figure 6. Left: a coin with the value of 10 Para, printed in year 19 of Sultan Abdulmecit I’s reign (1858). Right: the decorative part of the flintlock pistol, partly preserved.

Chapter 16

Figure 1. Desire Path, Rjukan- Notodden World Heritage Site. Photograph by Benjamin Richards. Figure 2. Paths, Trails and Traces, Rjukan-Notodden World Heritage Site. Figure 3. Valued and forgotten forms, Rjukan-Notodden World Heritage Site.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Daniel Svensson has a Ph.D. in history and is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sport Sciences, Malmo University. His research is mainly within the fields of sport history and environmental history, with focus on environmental issues in sport and outdoor recreation. Svensson’s dissertation (awarded the International Ski History Association Ullr Award 2017) focu- sed on the scientisation of training methods in endurance sport and meetings between scientific and experiential knowledge in sport during the twentieth century. Svensson lives in the countryside in West Sweden and is proud father of two daughters with whom he loves to go for a walk.

Katarina Saltzman is associate professor in Conservation at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In her research she has investigated nature/culture relations and heritage making from an ethnological point of view, often in transdisciplinary collaboration. Her research areas include contemporary ver- nacular practices such as gardening, rural landscape management and recrea- tional walking, with particular focus on the landscapes where these and other activities are taking place. She has carried out field studies in rural, urban and semi-urban environments, including intensively tended private gardens and agricultural landscapes as well as transitory and temporarily leftover places at the urban fringe.

Sverker S6rlin is Professor of Environmental History at the Division of History, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, where he was also a co-founder with Nina Wormbs of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (2011). He has a long-standing career as scholar and writer fo- cusing on the science and politics of natural resource extraction and climate change. He has also published widely on representations of landscape and its significance in the formation of national and other identities. His seminal collection on the history of out of doors in Sweden (Friluftshistoria, with Klas Sandell) had a second edition in 2008. Increasingly working on ‘elemental’ Earth-, Cryo- and Atmospheric narratives and histories, his most recent book is Ice Humanities: Living, Thinking and Working in a Melting World (Manchester 2022, with Klaus Dodds).

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Ben Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at Keele University, and author of Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in Fin-de-siécle England and Germany (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). He researches the intersec- tions of modern identities with rural places over roughly the last century, from mountaineering and walking to post-war energy infrastructures, twenty-first century industrial heritage and cultures of ultraviolet light. He is currently working on how co-creative approaches to memory can offer more holistic paths to decommission the vast carbon infrastructures of the twentieth century.

Laura Bertens is assistant professor of Art History at Leiden University, with a Ph.D. in bio-informatics. Her research interests lie in the fields of memory studies, contemporary art and cultural studies. She analyses the construction and functioning of cultural and communicative memories in art, as well as everyday culture. She has published book chapters and articles for peer-reviewed journals such as Third Text, Holocaust Studies and German Life and Letters, on topics ranging from cultural memory in music videos to the Berlin Wall Memorial, Holocaust remembrance in art and the construction of memory through museum audio guides.

Camilla Brudin Borg, Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Gothenburg, specialises in literature, ecocriticism and environmental humanities, studying walking and narratives on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain by combining literary analysis and ethnographical methods. She is the convener of an international walking-research network focused on interdisciplinary methodological development. She is also the leader the citizen science research project Utopian Stories, which studies visions of a future good life and creative storytelling as a tool for sustainable transformation.

Subarna De is a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig Ma- ximilian University, Munich. She researches transformations of the environment and society, focusing on bioregionalism and indigeneity. Her research is situated at the interface of cultural anthropology, human geography, environmental history and environmental humanities scholarship. She holds a second appointment as a Research Associate at the Ideate Design Studio, New Delhi, where she applies bioregional research to work on field-based environmental, architectural, and conservation practices. Her doctoral thesis (2019), funded by the Central University Doctoral Fellowship (India), focused on the environmental history and ecological practices of Indian coffee plantations and was supported with a research stay at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK.

xii Author biographies

Clare Hickman is Reader in Environmental and Medical History at New- castle University. She currently leads the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘MedEnv: Intersections in Medical and Environmental Humanities’ network and the AHRC-funded ‘Unlocking Landscapes’network ‘History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making’. Clare is also Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping & Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain’ and the NERC-funded ‘Connected Treescapes’ project. Her latest book is The Doctor's Garden: Medicine, Science, and Horticulture in Britain (Yale University Press, 2021).

Finn Arne Jorgensen is Professor of Environmental History at University of Stavanger. His research is placed at the intersection of technology and environment, drawing on history, media studies, and science and technology studies. He has published two monographs on environment and infrastruc- ture: Making a Green Machine (2011) and Recycling (2019). He co-directs the Greenhouse, an environmental humanities initiative at University of Stavanger, with Dolly Jorgensen.

Karen Lykke Syse is an agronomist, ethnologist and holds a Ph.D. in cultural history from the University of Oslo in Norway, where she is Associate Professor at the Centre for Development and the Environment. Her research interests pivot around landscape history, animal studies and the cultural history of food. She has been a member of the Norwegian trekking association (DNT) for many years and has held various positions of trust both within the organisation’s Oslo chapter, nationally and by representing its interests politically.

Petra Lilja is an industrial designer, curator and Ph.D. candidate at the Uni- versity of Arts, Crafts & Design and The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. She explores ways to critically examine the contemporary role of the designer in the context of late capitalism, which disconnects design from the origins of material extraction and production. With a special focus on minerals, Lilja explores feminist and critical posthumanities that foreground materialities and more-than-human others that are otherwise backgrounded. Lilja is an affiliated researcher at The Posthumanities Hub and member of Design & Posthumanism.

John Martin, Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth. John’s re- search focuses specifically on interdisciplinary and co-production approaches to landscape (urban and rural) assessment and monitoring. This includes the

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mapping and valuation of culture ecosystem services. John uses various map- ping techniques ranging from ubiquitous technology tools (Apps, PQGIS) to participatory workshops and remote sensing methods. He has published widely in this area and holds numerous research grants. John is a visiting Professor at the University of the Philippines Open University and a visiting researcher at the University of Gothenburg. In addition to his teaching and research duties, he is also the Head of Research Strategy and Governance.

Faidon Moudopoulos-Athanasiou graduated from the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Crete in 2013. He completed two MAs, one in Aegean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield (2014) and another in Heritage Management (2016 — joint programme by the University of Kent and the Athens University Business School). From 2017 to 2021 he conducted his Ph.D. research at the University of Sheffield, investigating the archaeology of the early-modern montane Zagori (NW Greece) as a scholar of the White Rose College for the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH-AHRC) and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.

Stefano Morosini, Ph.D., teaches Environmental history at the University of Bergamo (Italy) and is an associate researcher at the Centre for the History of the Alps (LabiSAlp) — Italian-Swiss University — Mendrisio (Switzerland). He is also the scientific coordinator of heritage projects at Stelvio National Park (Italy). He has been a visiting scholar at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His rese- arch is dedicated to the economic, social, political, national and environmental characters of mountains, in particular in the alpine area.

Jacqueline Nowakowski, FSA, is a professional freelance archaeologist and educator who has been working in Cornwall for over 40 years and during that time has directed many excavations and landscape projects, working as Principal Archaeologist for Cornwall Archaeological Unit. A keen advocate and practitioner of community archaeology engagements and events, Jacky has been the lead archaeologist on the community projects Carywennen Quoit restoration project, Troon, The Hurlers on Bodmin Moor and Godrevy Warren at Gwthian in West Cornwall. Currently working on Tintagel Castle Research Project for English Heritage, Jacky leads walks, publishes and lectures in the UK and abroad.

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Author biographies

Susanne Osterlund-Pétzsch holds the Title of Docent (Associate Professor) in Nordic Folklore Studies at Abo Akademi University. She lives in Helsinki where she works as an archivist specialising in folklore and tradition material. Her research and previous publications focus on food culture, island branding, practices of everyday life, performance and various aspects of mobility, such as migration and everyday walking.

Glenn O’Hara is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University. A former schoolteacher and journalist, he is the author of a series of books and articles on post-war Britain and a regular commentator on current affairs in The New European and The Guardian, among others. He is the Principal Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping and Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain’, and is currently writing a book about the domestic politics of the New Labour government of the UK between 1997 and 2007.

Maria Piekarska is a Ph.D. candidate within the ‘Nature-Culture’ Interdisci- plinary Programme at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales’. Her research interests focus on the spatial, environmental and material dimensions of memory, especially the intertwining of memory practices with the natural envi- ronment and the possible fusions between the environmental humanities and the area of memory studies. Her doctoral dissertation in Cultural Studies addresses the development of the Jewish-Israeli memory culture in afforested spaces.

Paul Readman is Professor of Modern British History at King’s College London. Author or editor of seven books, he is especially interested in the in- terrelationship between land, landscape and British national identities, a subject he explored in Land and Nation in England (2008) and Storied Ground (2018). Since 2013, he has led a major AHRC-funded project on historical pageants in Britain, details of which are available via the Redress of the Past project website. He is Co-I on the AHRC-funded network, Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives. His essay in this volume derives from his work on this project.

Benjamin Richards is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Culture, Religion and Social studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). He is a researcher in the field of heritage and sustainability and a member of the research group Cultural Heritage in Use. He has a background in film, heritage studies, ecological economics and border philosophy, with an interest in visual, sensory and phenomenological research methods.

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Joane V. Serrano is a professor of the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU). She teaches Environmental Advocacy, Communication of Scientific and Technical Information and Socio-Cultural Perspectives on the Environment. She has a wide array of research interests, including sus- tainability, socio-cultural perspectives on the environment, development and environmental communication, health promotion, gender and indigenous knowledge, and open and distance eLearning (ODeL). She is currently the editor in chief of the UPOU-managed Journal of Management and Development Studies. She has published more than thirty publications and presented at ninety conferences and more than sixty public service engagements. She is part of the Won by Walking Network, Digital Literacy and Intuition Network with Ostfalia University, and Satoyama Initiatives with International Partnership for Satoyama Initiatives and Satoyama Development Mechanism.

lonas Sklavounos is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Antwerp and a researcher within the Marie Sktodowska-Curie Doctoral Network “TACK — Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and Its Ways of Knowing’. He graduated in Architecture at the University of Patras and completed his postgraduate studies on the Epistemology of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, where he also worked as Teaching Assistant in courses of Architectural Design. He is co-founder of the research collaborative ‘Boulouki — Itinerant Workshop on Traditional Building Techniques’ which from 2018 has been registered as an Urban Non-profit Company, based in Athens, Greece.

Daniele Valisena, Ph.D. in history of science, technology and the envi- ronment. Since October 2021, he has worked as a post-doctoral researcher in environmental humanities at the University of Liege, Belgium, and as a part-time lecturer in history of migration at NYU Florence. His background is in modern history, but his scholarly work delves into migration and heri- tage studies, environmental humanities and environmental history. Through my research, I focus on the interplay between migration and environmental history, touching also upon themes such as walking as method, ruderality and more-than-human storying, post-industrialisation, urban political ecology and critical heritage studies.

Dominica Williamson is an interdisciplinary artist called Ecogeographer, (www.ecogeographer.com) working in the field of sustainable design. New materialism is a strong aspect of her eco-phenomenological approach. She

Author biographies

largely works with co-production methods to empower people and uses abstract mapping methods to communicate ideas. During a Leverhulme Artist-in-Resi- dence Grant at the University of Plymouth she worked with John Martin. They co-developed a transdisciplinary methodology in order to elicit landscape data. This work is simultaneously building on heritage projects. Based in Cornwall, UK, she works with various partners including NGOs, utilising walking, model making and ethnographic fieldwork as primary foci.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘This book is, as most books are, the result of a long and winding walk. It is hard to tell exactly when it started, but it was certainly ongoing already in 2014. Back then, two of us worked together with archaeologist Inga-Maria Mulk in a project on movement heritage in the Swedish mountains. Without the deep knowledge of Inga-Maria, we would not have been able to conduct this research. Building on that project, we teamed up with Peter Fredman, Sandra Wall- Reinius, Annika Dahlberg and Kristin Godtman-Kling in 2016 and 2017 for a project about trails in the mountains of Jamtland, in Mid-Sweden. Through many walks and discussions (with Lennart Adsten, Ola Fransson, Jonas Kraik, Per-Erik Kuoljok, Anna Sarri, Marie Fors, Sven-Olof Arnell,and many others), our interest in issues relating to paths and trails continued to grow.

In 2017, we started a new three-year project about movement heritage in other parts of Sweden and Norway. It was within this project that we developed the idea to compile and edit an anthology on pathways, inviting scholars from many fields to contribute. The book, we thought might be seen as an attempt to assist the formation of an emerging field of interdisciplinary pathway stud- ies. In particular we were interested in the way paths and trails turned into wider landscapes of discreet mobility and how they sometimes matured further into what we had started to call ‘movement heritage’. The writing of this book was a collective effort. We held a digital workshop in April 2021, where draft chapters were thoroughly discussed. Apart from all the authors included in this anthology, we also had valuable contributions from Roger Norum, Sonja Laukkanen and Christoph Eggersgliif$. Many thanks everyone, for your efforts and perspectives!

We want to thank Sarah Johnson at The White Horse Press, who believed in our idea from the start and has been immensely helpful throughout the pro- cess. In addition, the anonymous reviewers at WHP gave us valuable feedback, which has helped us make a better book. We also want to thank the Swedish National Heritage Board, the Swedish Research Council for Sport Science, and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency for funding the research, which allowed us to initiate and pursue this book project. Ultimately, we owe our gratitude to the many who walked before us. Without them, there would be no pathways.

Malmo, Gothenburg and Stockholm, May 2022, Daniel Svensson, Katarina

Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

FOREWORD Tim Ingold

When I began my career as a university teacher, I considered myself ahead of the curve. I wasn’t just teaching new ideas; I was also using the latest instru- mentation to do so. My department had recently acquired a contraption known as an ‘overhead projector’. None of my more senior colleagues would touch it, but I was an avid user. I liked to include diagrams in my lectures, and I could prepare by drawing every diagram on a transparent acetate sheet. Placed on the glass of the projector with a powerful light shining below and an inclined mirror above, the diagram would be projected onto a big screen for everyone in the audience to see. I could even write on the sheets with a felt pen, either beforehand or as I spoke. Placing the sheets on top of one another, however, produced an odd effect. As the lower diagrams showed through, the image that appeared on the screen would be a mixed-up jumble of crisscrossing lines. Might this be analogous to the way landscapes are formed?

Observing a landscape, we see a ground likewise crisscrossed with lines of all sorts, including lines of passage like roads, trails, paths and waterways, as well as boundary lines like walls and fences. Some look to be of considerable antiquity, others more recent or even new. Could it be that this line-crossed ground has been assembled in just the same way as the composition on the overhead projector, through the superposition of multiple layers, each marked up with its own inscriptions? Does the history of a landscape stack up, as every present adds its own layer on top of those already laid in the past? Admittedly the lines of old look faint and, compared with more recent ones, are hard to discern. But this, we suppose, is because ground layers are rather less transparent than my acetate sheets. Every additional layer, then, would further obscure its predecessors as the latter sink ever lower in the stack. Nevertheless, as with the projector, the past still shows through, albeit dimly, and all the more so under powerful illumination.

This idea of a laminated ground is deeply ingrained in modern sensibilities, as in the scholarship informed by them. We find it, for example, in studies of language and literature, archaeology and architecture. Thus, linguists distinguish the plane of synchrony from the axis of diachrony; on the first is laid out the state of a language at a given time, and along the second the changes it under- goes as one state gives way to the next. Literary theorists describe how new texts and genres overlay old ones, as if on a clean sheet, through which words from the past still remain partially visible, complicating present readings. Ar-

Xxii Tim Ingold

chaeologists speak of layers in the occupation of a site, each with its distinctive artefact assemblage, and arrayed in a sequence of strata with the most recent on top and older ones below. Even architects, whose aim is to construct the future rather than to uncover the past, tend to suppose that every new project begins with an immaculate ground on which to build anew.

Behind these examples lies a common premise, namely, that /ife is lived in the present. We, today’s people, live in our time; the people of the past lived in theirs. But it is impossible, according to this premise, for descendant lives to prolong ancestral ones, or for ancestral lives to animate their descendants. Social life may be a long conversation but, for linguists, every utterance in the conversation — insofar as it is governed by a structure common to speakers of the language — takes place on the plane of the present. It is like running on one spot. For students of literature, likewise, the text is an expression of its era; in the literary canon, every genre is a generation, and writing goes on within genres rather than in generating those to come. In the archaeological record, artefacts hold fast to the date of their manufacture, while sinking ever further into the past. And in architecture, buildings belong to the centuries of their construction, surviving in the present thanks only to acts of preservation.

‘This premise, however, is also fundamental to the idea of heritage. Literally, heritage is an inheritance, a legacy that one generation passes on to the next. To be inherited, this legacy — whether of things or ideas, tangible or intangible — must be broken off from the ebbs and flows of life, and from the histories of place and people of which our own life-stories are the continuation. A past that lives on in the present cannot, by the same token, be inherited. Children do not, as a rule, inherit their parents and grandparents. Nor do they inherit the homes or the landscapes in which they were raised. They cannot inherit these persons or things because they comprise the very matrix from which they have grown, and are already constitutive of who they are. But while you cannot inherit your parents or grandparents, you can inherit their property. And while you cannot inherit the home in which you grew up, or the landscape around it, you can inherit the house, and the plot of land on which it stands.

What, then, does it take to turn the past into heritage? It is the same as turning persons into properties, homes into houses and landscape into land. In every case, it means taking the life out of them rather than regarding each as an ongoing nexus of growth and development. With this reduction, the person is but an ensemble of genetic or cultural traits, the home but a building, the landscape but its physical setting. The more life is drained from the past, in its conversion to heritage, the more it is consequently confined to the plane of the present. That’s why evolutionary biologists, for example, insist on the distinction

XXxiil Foreword

between ontogeny and phylogeny. By the former they mean the life-cycle of the individual organism, within a particular environment. By the latter they mean the transfer of resources (genetic, cultural, environmental) from one life-cycle to the next, along a line of descent. Here, ontogeny is to phylogeny as growth to inheritance. One is a life-process, but not intergenerational; the other is intergenerational but not a life process.

Here again, we find the idea that generations are layered over one another, each inhabiting its own slice of time, both separated and connected by the transfers of inheritance. What happens, then, when the object of transfer is a path? That’s the central question of this book. It starts from the recognition that paths are worn by the passage of many feet. Just one or two pairs is not enough. A single, bipedal human leaves only footprints, with spaces between them measured by the walker’s gait. A quadrupedal animal, such as a horse or dog, leaves a different but equally recognisable pattern of hoof- or pawprints. ‘These are tracks, and you can read much from them about the creature that made them — what it was, when it passed, where it was heading and even how fast it was going. But tracks are not paths. To wear a path, so many feet must pass the same way, whether in one mass movement or in numerous solitary movements over an extended period, that distinct prints are rarely discernible.

In short, when it comes to its formation, the path emerges along with the people who walk it, the homes they inhabit and the landscape in which it is inscribed, as the crystallisation of a collective life process. As such, it carries on through generations. As a child, you may have walked a familiar path with your parents and grandparents, who may have once walked it with theirs, when they were young. It is something that you and they make together. But precisely because it is continually coproduced in the collaboration of genera- tions, the path is not inherited. Perhaps that’s why so few paths, even today, are commemorated as vehicles of heritage. In our everyday experience to walk a path is, at the same time, to remember how it goes; it is a vital movement of prolongation that proleptically picks up the past as it anticipates the future. To turn a path into heritage would mean breaking this movement, converting it into an object of memory, like a story completed, ready to be handed over like any other heritable property.

To walk a heritage trail, then, is not to carry on a living tradition but to re- enact a past that is already over. To return to my comparison with the overhead projector, it is like placing one acetate sheet upon another that is already mar- ked up with a line, and then tracing the same line on the new sheet. Crucially, in this operation the traced line overwrites the original without ever making contact with it. On the heritage trail, we can never walk in the footsteps of our

XXIV Tim Ingold

ancestors, as once we walked with our parents and grandparents, since the logic of inheritance has placed us on separate layers whose surfaces can touch but whose lines can never meet. Perhaps this is the source of the peculiar idea that to walk a path is in itself to place a new layer over the ground. It is as if walking along a way of life were like rolling out a carpet. With the walk completed, a new layer is laid, only for the next pedestrian to do the same!

Except under artificial conditions which carefully protect the heritage path from the wear of passing feet, for example by placing it under glass, this is not what happens in practice. On the contrary, far from adding a new layer to the ground, the walker’s footprints contribute to its ongoing inscription. Meanwhile the ground surface itself is continually renewed, not through the addition of layers but by way of their removal, through natural processes of erosion. This, finally, is why the analogy with the workings of the overhead projector fails. To explain, let me return to the question of why older paths should appear more faint than recent ones. Long ago, when they were much in use, these ancient ways would have been deeply inscribed in the ground. But, since then, gradual erosion, principally through the effects of weathering, has brought the depths of these inscriptions almost to the surface, soon to disappear altogether. They are scarcely visible. Meanwhile, later paths, yet to suffer prolonged exposure to the weather, have left deeper marks; the most recent deepest of all.

‘The comparison, in this instance, is not with the overhead projector but with the product of a much earlier technology of writing, with pen on parchment, namely the palimpsest. This is formed when the same parchment is reused, over and over again. Between every round of inscription, the surface is scraped with a penknife, so as to remove as much of the previous traces as possible. But some always remain, casting their shadow on later writing. With the palimpsest, in short, past inscriptions do not lie beneath the semi-translucent surface of the present, but rather rise up to the surface even as the inscriptions of the present sink down. It is exactly the same in the formation of the ground. Like the wri- ter’s parchment, the ground is renewed not by layering but by turning, much as the ploughman turns the soil, bringing up nutrient-rich soil from below while burying the stubble of recent cropping. And this immediately puts it at odds with a discourse of heritage that works on the opposite principle, of renewal by superimposition.

This volume gently nudges us towards a different way of thinking of heri- tage. It is a way that repudiates the logic of inheritance in favour of what we might call perdurance. This is to treat heritage not as a legacy from the past but as an intergenerational life process, in which older and younger generations can once again work together in coproducing the future. It makes no more

XXV

Foreword

sense, in this view, to ask how old a path is, than it would do to ask the age of the wind, the river or the mountain. The path never grows older, never recedes from its point of origin, precisely because it is originating all the time, for as long as people of different generations wind along together. Here, generations are not stacked vertically but align longitudinally. Like the twisted strands of a rope, new people enter the weave even as old ones give out. Instead of layering the present over the past, it is by introducing the young into old ways that we can best restore hope of renewal for generations to come.

Aberdeen, June 2022

MOVEMENT HERITAGE AND PATH DEPENDENCE: LAYERING THE PAST

Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman and Sverker Sorlin

Humans are a walking species. We tread on the surface of the Earth. Without this primary mobility we would not be here and even when other means of getting around have become accessible, we don't cease to walk. Our walking leaves traces. This is inevitable. No culture or civilisation or society can escape from this primordial mark-making. Some of these traces cluster and congregate into patterns that remain. They become paths and pathways. With the spread of humans, they have expanded and densified to cover literally the entire planet. From this primary mobility came a primary layer of human planetary signature. ‘This network of paths and its meanings — at once discreet and monumental — is the topic of this book.

Humans added a layer to the earth. Nowadays the patterns of the paths are only one of the multiple signatures humans have left behind. The human footprint on the planet is immense and it has been argued that it is now big and lasting enough to be acknowledged on the geological time scale. It may be helpful, for a sense of continuity, to keep in mind that this imprint of humanity on the Earth and its complex systems in a way started with traces of upright walking people. In more recent millennia, the human footprint expanded, multiplied, overlapped into ever more layers of material blur. This footprint has now reached Anthropocene proportions — a civilisation weighing (in historical sum total) thirty trillion tons,' capable of covering the entire world in plastic,’ and with stratigraphic signatures from nuclear blasts’ to leaking ammunition alloys* to exploding carbon dioxide records.°

‘The subtle scribblings of human feet, although still significant, have become

Zalasiewicz et al., ‘Scale and Diversity of the Physical Technosphere’.

Leinfelder and Ivar do Sul, “The Stratigraphy of Plastics and their Preservation on Geological Records’. Zalasiewicz et al.,“When Did the Anthropocene Begin?’

Zalasiewicz and Zalasiewicz, ‘Battle Scars’.

IPCC, Summary for Policymakers.

na BF wWN

PATHWAYS: 1-29 doi: 10.3197/63787710662654.intro

Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

dwarfed and marginalised, at least relatively speaking and especially as far as the impact on sustainability is concerned. Paths are mostly quite earth-friendly. They sit leisurely and inviting in the landscape and were, in fact, often begun by animals whose treading on the land opened ways for humans to follow. These have been called ‘desire paths’, referring to human needs to get from a place to the next, but also cow paths, pirate paths, kemonomichi (beat trails), donkey paths, Olifantenpad (elephant trails), depending on geographical context, but essentially referring to the same phenomenon.° But, albeit separate, special, primordial or even clandestine, they belong, when humans make them, essen- tially within the same overall formation of a tight, mutual and ever-growing material and spiritual human-earth relationship. They are a fundamental feature of it, one that has received too little interest.

In studying paths, we face horizontality and verticality at the same time. The path is a linear way from one point to another. As such, it is quite phenomenal and does tremendous jobs. Above all, it knows more than the walker does. It knows when there is a wet marsh ahead, so the path bends, it knows of a steep cliff and avoids it.“Who made paths?’, the Swedish poet Lars Gustafsson asks in a long and winding poem entitled ‘Ballad on the Paths in Vastmanland’.’ His answer: ‘Everyone and no one. We make them together.”* This is a very Anthropocene, contemporary statement despite being written nearly half a century ago. Paths are forms and features founded by collective effort, and quite often effortlessly, in the sense that they emerge without an original design idea. They are products of a searching for ways.

They are also part of a wider category of remains from time past. By definition, a path requires a past. The number of trampling feet must be reasonably large and frequent, and the purpose of walking just there must have been around for some time. Similarly, the erosion, regrowth and we might say slow closure of an unused path is also a process, gradually sliding into an even slower one, which is oblivion. Paths, in this way, often survive several generations of humans. Still, they are rarely thought about as heritage, or acknowledged as such. This may have to do with their fugitive, linear and somewhat provisional, even precarious, identity. A path is in a very concrete, almost brutal, sense subject to change that is not just local digression. The change is ultimately social and historical. People move, cultivate the land, build cities and roads, cut forests, or give up fishing and thus never walk down to the boathouse anymore. In many ways, paths cease.

6 E.g.: Whitridge, “The Imbrication of Human and Animal Paths’; Moor, “Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire’. See also chapters in this book by Karen Lykke Syse and Benjamin Richards.

7 Viastmanland is a county in Mid-Sweden.

8 Gustafsson, ‘Ballad on the Paths in Vastmanland’.

Introduction

Perhaps this precariousness becomes less problematic if the linearity of the path is supplemented with a verticality. To begin with, if written into the Anthropocene understanding, all the world’s paths immediately take their thin, fugitive but still recognisable place in a human layering of the Earth that has created archaeological and even geological records. Alongside paths, hu- man remains are left, stones are moved and walls have grown. In the so-called Great Acceleration since around 1950 ap, deemed the starting time of the Anthropocene by many,’ paths are part of the new stratigraphic signal system. Certainly not the strongest signal, but also there and to be counted with, con- necting the multiple presents with equally multiple pasts in what may seem a mycelium of mobility that reaches down into the cultural crust of the Earth.

In this volume, both these dimensions of pathways, the horizontal and the vertical, come into play. It extends, we think, the reach of heritage, and the reach of paths into how heritage may be thought and enacted. Heritage is of course a pretentious word, echoing statutes and status, sometimes legislation, but it is also a quite fundamental way of experiencing the relationship between past, present and future. According to a recent book on heritage ecologies, ‘heritage has become an indissoluble part of the Enlightenment humanist question of what it means to be human’. Paths are essential, omnipresent, yet fugitive and weakly articulated as part of common heritage, as if their passing horizontal properties have made them less useful material for conventional heritagisation.

In this respect, the vertical layering discourse that has accelerated with the arrival of the Anthropocene may have changed the scene. At least many of the contributors to this book on pathways have, as if attracted by an invis- ible magnet, been drawn to this kind of thinking around mycelial landscape threads, connecting people and places at the human pace. Layers are seen geo- logically, in landscapes where pathways pass. They are seen historically, as the forms, features and uses of landscapes are replaced and in palimpsest fashion overwrite each other. They are seen socially and politically, as practices and regulations reform and reshape the conditions of walking and access to land. They are also, culturally and aesthetically, seen as paths which become part of tradition, lore and everyday lives far beyond bare necessity. Paths become an infrastructure of pastime. They acquire, in some cases, design and architecture and they travel into the digital sphere, hence the technosphere, which is yet another in the Anthropocene sequence of spherical layers that paths occupy, from the geosphere and its underground to the lithosphere to the biosphere,

9 Zalasiewicz et al.,“When Did the Anthropocene Begin?’ 10 Bangstad & Pétursdéttir, An Ecological Approach to Heritage, p.7.

Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

the hydrosphere and the atmosphere. Even near the Earth’s summit, there are paths, piled over with waste and dead bodies, sacrifices of vanity but also signals from a culture of hyper-consumption, whose paths reach everywhere.

Artefacts of movement - paths and trails

Already here, only a few pages into this volume, paths are coming forth as a rich topic, one that crosses spatial and disciplinary boundaries, and links the material and the spiritual. It diversifies in multiple directions. As editors, we have embraced this diversifying drift. We think it is as welcome as it is inevi- table, ultimately because we need reflexive approaches to different paths for comparison and analysis. Paths as a topic has not been very comprehensively researched and the literature on paths and trails as heritage is especially scarce. ‘There is a need for empirical work, studies rooted in local and regional condi- tions, to broaden the foundation from which we can draw conclusions.

As editors, we have been searching for ideas and words that can draw things together and, perhaps most importantly, connect paths to other, broader topics where articulations are more established. That ambition also marks this intro- duction where we try to map the topical and conceptual landscape surrounding paths. We are not proposing that there is a ‘theory of paths’— our aim is simply to chart a set of possible approaches that can shed additional light on connec- tions and fault lines between the contributions in this volume. Together, we are on a continued quest to understand this widespread phenomenon and make more sense of it. We are in an early phase of forming what may become a field of research, and it should be a virtue to open things up, rather than pretending that we already have everything in place. To use a congenial metaphor: we will not mark a single route, instead we encourage a search along multiple paths.

Paths and trails exist because there is walking, or at least the trampling of many feet, human and more-than-human. However, their articulation as a distinct landscape and as cultural heritage depends on more than physical movement. Beyond the individual steps, some paths emerge as more than local concerns, and get elevated to a certain significance. Some even acquire names. They turn into trails, drawing on the physical and cultural remains of walk- ing and, with their surroundings, become articulated as a landscape genuinely suitable for movement on foot. They are artefacts of movement, although not much thought has gone into this fact, especially in the agencies and organisa- tions that are supposed to collect, cultivate, and curate culture’s past as heritage.

In thinking about this particular form of heritage over a number of years, we found it useful to distinguish between pazhs (in Swedish: stigar) and trails

Introduction

(in Swedish: /eder).'' The former are mainly the result of physical mobility (i.e. walking by humans and their co-species). They appear and disappear organi- cally, depending on local vegetation and soil geography, climate, culture and practice. Trails, on the other hand, are in this rendering designed, managed and maintained with the ambition of attracting walkers, attributed with potential to contribute to tourism, public health, recreation and other positive outcomes.” Ifa path is a result of walking, walking is one of the intended results of trails. Paths and trails are not mutually exclusive categories — they are similar in many ways, and there are probably many hybrid forms. Perhaps they could be seen as ideal types in Max Weber’s sense. In that spirit, and for the purpose of this introduction, we intentionally make a distinction between the two concepts, although in reality, and in several of the chapters of the book, that distinction may be blurred or not applicable.

Trails and paths are functional in the present, but many of them are also old. ‘This assigns them with yet another function. They are pathways to the past — and serve as a physical and cultural infrastructure of human memory and past prac- tices. Walking can be a means of going back, using the oldest possible version of human mobility and visiting places and landscapes where the rates of change occur on different time scales from those where daily life takes place, underscoring Reinhart Koselleck’s idea of the co-existence of multiple times. '* While pathways lead the way forward for anyone out walking, they also point backwards, towards history and into a complex pattern of layered times and meanings.

Acknowledging and enhancing the fugitive and ephemeral

Walking paths have often been neglected by posterity and rarely reached the status of monument or attained official memorability, although they may be deeply remembered in local settings. These subtle landscape features seem to be difficult to handle within established heritage management regimes, partly because of their fugitive and timid nature. However, their uses and impacts have often been decisive and important for individuals and communities across scales. Traces of people’s movements can be regarded as a distinct kind of cultural heritage, a ‘movement heritage’ that is dependent on continuous use or memory work to remain."

11 Svensson, Sérlin and Saltzman, ‘Pathways to the Trail’.

12 Timothy and Boyd, Tourism and Trails, Godtman Kling, Dahlberg and Wall-Reinius, ‘Negotiating Improved Multifunctional Landscape Use’.

13 Koselleck, Historische Semantik und Begriffigeschichte. 14 Svensson, Sérlin and Wormbs, “The Movement Heritage’.

Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

In this collection, we will explore possibilities to acknowledge human mo- tion, and traces thereof, as heritage. Today, with increasing interests in local and sustainable connections, and in bodily and spiritual enhancement, we see a growing use of walking tracks, both in landscapes in reach of urban centers and in more remotely located or ‘wild’ areas. Of course, landscapes understood as wilderness or ‘nature’ are in most cases distinctly influenced by human ac- tions and movements. While walking trails are typically regarded as pathways to experience nature and as tools to promote public health, they could also be seen and used as routes to culture and history. With the aim of exploring the multiple dimensions of walking, paths, and movement we will engage with and discuss the potential effects of such an expansion of the heritage register.

To walk is universal, yet walking — as pastime, recreation, therapy, pilgrim- age or emotional meaning making — is a distinct feature of modern societies. Starting typically as an elite practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it has spread widely.’ The rise of slow physical mobility on foot, ski or bike in the landscape can be associated with large trends in modern societies. One is the rise of the nation, the worship of which is to a great extent funnelled through an appreciation of national landscapes, which many have argued should be seen at first hand at close quarters.'® Religion and the spiritual sometimes come close to worship of the nation, and pilgrimage is part of both. Interest in and concern for nature and the modern ‘environment’ since the middle of the twentieth century have enhanced interest in walking.'’ Growing wealth and globalisation have made it possible for large masses to reach new walkable venues. An aspect of great importance is health, both public and personal, in turn part of the rise of welfare societies. Walking and paths have thus become instruments of fostering, reinvigorating and curing populations and citizens, and more recently also part of a sustainable, ‘good life’."* More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased the importance of landscapes designated for mobility on foot.'’ As tourists and hikers on designated trails, walkers count in the millions annually and the rate of growth has been for- midable, outpacing that of tourism in general.” The level of organisation and commodification has increased, with maintained paths in literally every

15 Amato, On Foot, Macfarlane, The Old Ways; Moor, On Trails. 16 Coates, Moon and Warde, Local Places, Global Processes.

17 Warde et al., The Environment.

18 Syse and Mueller, Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life. 19 Andersson et al., Idrotten och friluftslivet under coronapandemin. 20 UNWTO, Walking Tourism.

Introduction

community in almost every country, but with considerable variation in spread and frequency.

When looking for connections between walking and heritage, trails have often been interpreted as the routes connecting objects and vistas that are the heritage per se.” However, the concept of heritage is itself in motion, and the tendency over the last few decades has been to move away from what heritage ‘is’, towards what it ‘does’.” This transition to increasingly emphasise process rather than permanence, can perhaps also be described as a move towards what heritage becomes and how it is decoming.”> So, what happens if we try to expand the heritage register a bit, regarding the route itself, the track that walking humans have followed and still follow, as heritage too? What happens if we look at walking itself, the physical activity of people moving around in the landscape on foot, as heritage making, however fugitive? These questions kept us busy for several years in our research.” Ultimately, we thought they were intriguing and important enough to discuss at length with colleagues drawing on pathways knowledge from many fields. The result is this volume.

Tracks and trails, we gradually realised, are formed by human bodies and minds in motion, individually and collectively, over time. The footpath evidently connects us, here and now, with those who walked before us and those who might follow our footsteps. Although some old stone roads were made for walking, most paths need to be more-or-less continuously in use to remain. Furthermore, trails need to be maintained through hands-on activities such as cutting back vegetation, removing fallen trees and looking after the subtle infrastructure of signposts, markings, foot-bridges and railings. This mobility work, which must be done by someone and has to be done repeatedly, can be seen as a heritage practice, guided by a specific ‘regime of care’.”* In this sense, the heritage of walking paths and trails is made and constantly remade, quite literally, as part of a complex, historical social effort. The work on, with and for paths and trails has a wider social and political context. This adds dimen- sions to the horizontality and the verticality. Pathways are social and historical phenomena, finding their ways, connecting and constantly changing.

This decoming of trails needs to engage with other-than-human actors:

21 E.g. Timothy and Boyd, Tourism and Trails, Boyd, ‘Editorial: Heritage Trails and Tourism’.

22 E.g. Smith, Uses of Heritage, Harrison et al., Heritage Futures, Bangstad and Pétursdottir, Heritage Ecologies.

23 Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’, 35; Connolly, 4 World of Becoming.

24 Svensson, Sérlin and Wormbs, “The Movement Heritage’; Svensson, Sérlin and Saltzman, ‘Pathways to the Trail’.

25 Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’.

Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

water, earth, rocks, plants and many other forms of life — including animals in their path-making and -using. This process can be interpreted as a biosocial becoming.** Path-making activities in the landscape also remind us of Rodney Harrison's discussion on how heritage emerges in a dialogue between human and non-human actors ‘engaged in keeping pasts alive in the present, which function towards assembling futures’, and moves beyond the limitations of cat- egories such as ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ heritage.” Paths are both at the same time. Looking at paths as heritage inevitably does something to our understanding of paths, but it also seems to do something to our understanding of heritage.

Mobility remains

Quite a range of paths, but perhaps mostly the more advanced and arranged trails, have become named, signs of canonisation, but also tools in marketing and place-making. New Zealand has a listed canon into which a trail can be accepted only by decision of the government’s department of conservation; there are now ten and an eleventh has been chosen for inclusion in 2022 after a multi-year process.** Our approach is different, including more kinds of paths and with a wider register of functions. Yet, despite growing interest, not so many paths have become acknowledged as ‘heritage’ so far. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there are so few collections of paths, and hardly any museums in their name? Here is a paradox — why is it that such a common, indeed uni- versal human practice with such widespread presence has not merited status and qualification as something to observe systematically, remember collectively, and store and restore to maintain? Or, is precisely the asking of the question a signal that this may no longer be the case? Are we, just in this moment, seeing a change? This book is, also, a way to find this out.

Humans have always used landscapes for mobility on the ground. Walking, trekking, tramping, skiing, herding, hunting, collecting, wayfinding and count- less other practices have set themselves and material and immaterial processes in motion. Mobility has also shaped landscapes that have become what they are because of mobility. Mobility has extended reach and access. Its traces remain, at least for some time, as discreet infrastructures for a vernacular mobility on the ground. Some of these mobility remains have gained some kind of permanence

26 Ingold, Prospect. 27 Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’, p. 28.

28 General information from the Department of Conservation is available at https://www.doc.govt.nz/ parks-and-recreation/things-to-do/walking-and-tramping/great-walks/ (accessed 7 Feb. 2022). See also Fagan and Kearns, “Tramper Perspectives on New Zealand’s Great Walks in a Time of Transition’.

Introduction

and status.” Around the world, there have been efforts to register, analyse and maintain paths and trails and also to protect them. New Zealand is quite an advanced case of centralising authority on canonisation, but many countries (e.g. Scotland, Norway, Sweden, the United States) have institutionalised overview and management, either by government (local or central)*° and/or by civic organisations such as tourism or walking societies. Some paths and trails have gone down in collective memory, some have even had their history written and their importance thoroughly articulated.*"

Still, the paths that are documented and well-known are only a small frac- tion of the total. Increasingly, traces of walking may be interpreted as heritage, as part of what we may call a heritage of vernacular mobility. This collection asks the question: how do these discreet traces and pathways in landscapes become heritage? Do they at all?

Sustainable mobility - from the ground up

Walking is acommon denominator for most human life, though we acknowledge that a certain portion of the human population cannot walk, for a variety of reasons. While other forms of mobility have grown in importance and changed our societies in dramatic ways, most of us still depend on walking in our daily life. The massive number of human steps throughout history has not only cre- ated the rich and widespread network of pathways that cross landscapes around the globe. It has also resulted in a vast immaterial heritage through literature, art and music about walking. With Paul Readman, we can say that the ground itself has become ‘storied’.** Paths and trails accommodate both the material and the immaterial, and challenge not only conventional heritage management but also the very essence of the nature/culture divide.

When we argue that it makes sense to regard paths as a distinct kind of heritage, a ‘movement heritage’, this also points to historical and current forms of land use that are sustainable in the most basic meaning of the word.** These activities can be and de facto have been practised over long periods of time without causing large-scale environmental degradation. While walking can

29 Svensson, Sérlin and Wormbs, “The Movement Heritage’.

30 A national trails system was decided by the US Congress in 1968: see Johnson, ‘History of the National Trails System’; Berger, Smith and McKibben, America’s Great Hiking Trails.

31 E.g., Grundsten, Kungsleden: Walking the Royal Trail, Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Rhoades and Rhoades, Santiago de Compostela: Journal of our Camino.

32 Readman, Storied Ground. 33 Svensson, Sérlin and Wormbs, “The Movement Heritage’.

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also affect ecology and place negatively, and while the use of special equipment and clothing with potential negative environmental consequences has grown, few other forms of human mobility can make similar claims to sustainability.

So, while traces and remains from different kinds of movement may be small in their physical scale, and marginalised in the official sense, they are large, literally ‘monumental’, in their importance for the understanding of how a landscape has been used historically. Traces of mobility form lines that, in Tim Ingold’s terms, tie together the life worlds of the past with those of the present.* Indeed, walking connects our own bodies to the ground, as our movements are also stored, and storied, in muscle memory, shaping our en- durance, gait, health and appearance, associated with a wide range of positive health effects, including improved memory.** Movement heritage thus includes traces on the ground, and in ourselves. It puts the historical layers of mobility in landscapes and bodies in focus, and in perspective. It lays in plain sight the interdependence of people and path.

We are aware of the theoretical framework of path dependence and how it has been applied in various disciplines to analyse the impact of historical choices on our current predicament.*” Charles Tilly summarised it succinctly: ‘History matters.”** In this volume, we use the concept of path dependence both metaphorically and literally. Humans around the world have been depend- ent on paths for their everyday mobility, and paths would not exist without people and animals moving. But we can also all see, with our inner eye, the vast mycelial universe of pathways without which humanity as we know it would not exist. That profound dependence is metaphorical, but no less real.

Paths don't stop there. The demand for places suitable for movement, training, events and other bodily activities continues to grow, and hiking trails are a key component in the rise of nature-based tourism, sports such as trail running and mountain biking, and the increasing interest in outdoor life. The COVID-19 pandemic has further propelled these trends. The search for paths to walk has exploded, indicating the potential for a walking revolution and a

34 McCullough and Kellison, Routledge Handbook of Sport and the Environment. 35 Ingold, Lines.

36 E.g., Kelly, Murphy and Mutrie, ‘The Health Benefits of Walking’; Olafsdottir et al.,‘Health Benefits of Walking in Nature’.

37 E.g., David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’; Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’; van Bottenburg, ‘Why are the European and American Sports Worlds so Different?’.

38 Tilly, ‘Future History’, p. 711.

11

Introduction

possible new age of transformed mobility.” So far, the historical and heritage aspects of these developments have been insufficiently articulated. One example, however, is a project around historical hiking trails, initiated by the Norwegian heritage board together with the Norwegian Tourist Association (Den Norske Turistforening, DNT).* Similar attempts have been made in Sweden, England and elsewhere, as will be discussed in several chapters in this book.

Literary and artistic accounts also play a role in heritage-making. Histori- cally, travel guides and novels about walking have popularised, even iconised, certain paths and trails, and articulated them as important landscapes for rec- reational walking, training and spiritual journeys. The ‘King’s Trail’ (Kungs/eden) in Lapland — arguably Sweden's most well-known trail — was articulated by numerous accounts in the Swedish Tourist Association Yearbook, including es- says by high-profile citizens such as Dag Hammarskjold (UN Secretary Gen- eral 1953-1961)."' After the publication of the book Wild (2012) by Cheryl Strayed, the numbers walking the 4,270-kilometre Pacific Crest Trail along the west coast of the United States and Canada multiplied. Walking literature about pilgrimages has in similar ways popularised the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.” These are but a couple of examples of a literary movement that reinforced the walking trend and contributed to the immaterial heritage connected to trails and paths. In an ongoing project, the Swedish-Norwegian border region Finnskogen (the Finn forest) has begun the long and winding path towards applying for UNESCO world heritage status. A key ingredient in the argumentation is the walking practices in this area, both historically as a means of moving between the remote and sparsely populated forests, and since the 1990s as the 240-kilometre Finn Forest Trail that has become a magnet for regional and cross-border walking. Pathways of the past have formed historical layers that were articulated by travellers, authors and ethnologists in a series of waves over two hundred years, and ultimately became acknowledge as heritage.*

39 E.g.: Beery, Olsson and Vitestam, ‘Covid-19 and Outdoor Recreation Management’; Monz, Pickering and Hadwen, ‘Recent Advances in Recreation Ecology’; Balmford et al., ‘A Global Perspective on Trends in Nature-based Tourism’.

40 Riksantikvaren, Historiske vandreruter.

41 Hammarskjold, Fran Sarek till Having.

42 Sanchez-Carretero, Heritage, Pilgrimage and the Camino to Finisterre, cf. Brudin Borg in this volume. 43 Svensson, Sérlin and Saltzman, ‘Pathways to the Trail’.

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Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

Conceptual articulations - scapes, scales and faring bodies

Movement heritage is a complex concept and an equally complex, perhaps nebulous, emerging and above all interdisciplinary field of knowledge and inquiry that this collection sets out to explore. It is also a terrain where several existing literatures on heritage, landscape, mobility, and material practices meet and engage. Despite the increasing importance of trails and paths as cultural and natural heritage, neither humanities scholars nor the heritage sector en- gaged with walking and its discreet infrastructures to any large extent, until quite recently. Important contributions were made in the last decade, not least relating to walking as research methodology,” but the potential of trails and paths as heritage still largely remains to be explored.

‘There is now an extensive body of research on walking from geographical, historical, ethnographical, philosophical and sociological perspectives, although only small parts of it are directed toward heritage.* There is also a growing literature by geographers and others on ‘linear tourism resources and attrac- tions’, mainly focusing on management and tourism aspects of trails.*° Within this research, specific attention has been directed towards heritage trails.” This body of research tends to frame the actual trail primarily as a tool to reach or experience heritage, rather than as heritage in and of itself: The underlying assumption in much of the research seems to be that trails as such are not heritage, but merely infrastructure that enable transport, access and mobility between heritage sites.

However, some notable exceptions, such as pilgrimage trails, show the heritage potential.** In Scandinavia, recreational walking has deep historical roots.” Some trails evolve into complex ‘trailscapes’,*° which can in turn make up interesting dimensions of an ever-richer universe of ‘heritagescapes’.*! Cer-

44 Elliot, Norum and Salazar, Methodologies of Mobility.

45 E.g. Klepp, Pa stier mellom natur og kultur, Solnit, Wanderlust, Ingold and Vergunst, Ways of Walking, Humberstone et al., Routledge International Handbook of Outdoor Studies; Hall et al., Routledge In- ternational Handbook of Walking; Readman, Bryant and Burns, Walking Histories, Readman, Storied Ground, Osterlund-Potzsch, Gangarter och gangstilar.

46 Boyd, ‘Editorial: Heritage Trails and Tourism, 417.

47 Timothy and Boyd, Tourism and Trails, ch. 2; Boyd, ‘Editorial: Heritage Trails and Tourism’.

48 E.g., Selberg, ‘Pilegrimsveien som kulturarv’; Saul and Waterton, ‘A Himalayan Triptych’; Gian, ‘Pilgrim Routes as Contested Spaces in Norway’.

49 E.g., Nilsson, Fyal/turismens historia; Kilander, ‘En nationalrikedom av halsoskatter’; Ween and Abram, “The Norwegian Trekking Association’.

50 Fagence, ‘A Heritage “Trailscape”; Svensson, Sérlin and Saltzman, ‘Pathways to the Trail’.

51 Garden, “The Heritagescape’.

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Introduction

tain strands of human geography and critical heritage studies on landscape, place-making and heritage-making offer useful tools to link mobility, paths and trails as heritage.°” Geographical and historical analysis of Jandscapes is rich and theoretically astute. Landscape memory was for a long time connected to the strong, and politically problematic, tradition of nationalism and landscape in general was associated primarily with visual qualities.°’ Despite significant critique,” the iconic and representational approach to landscape has been im- portant to understand the formation of natural and cultural va/ue manifested for example in reserves and parks.

Over the last few decades, mobilities research has grown into a productive and dynamic transdisciplinary field, emphasising the ‘unstable and ever-changing interrelation of places, persons, technologies and natures connected through performances and practices’.°° Of particular importance in the context of this book are the ways in which scholars have approached the 4ody and the mobility of the individual walker in relation to outdoor environments and ‘nature’.** It would seem obvious, but it took some time to wield and push the understand- ing of landscapes into a sophisticated product of bodily movement, material practices and immaterial processes.*” We perceive this approach as kin with a growing pluralism of approaches to landscape. One of its main inroads has been to approach landscapes as parts of ‘life worlds’, shaped by walking and other forms of ‘wayfaring’.** These are complex practices of physical mobility, navigation and knowledge gathering. The formation of trails from walking is, hence, an activity that extends in time and space and transgresses boundaries between nature and culture, body and mind.

Environing and becoming - making movement heritage

Acknowledging the need for a heritage literature on paths and trails, this book aims also to search for conceptual and theoretical tools that can be used to ap- proach the diversity of phenomena that extended landscape mobility practices

52 E.g., Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country — Revisited, Harvey, ‘Landscape and Heritage’.

53 Daniels and Cosgrove, The Iconography of Landscape.

54 E.g., Rose, Feminism and Geography, Mels, Wild Landscapes, Olwig, ‘Representation and Alienation in the Political Land-scape’.

55 Sheller and Urry, Mobile Technologies of the City, p. 13.

56 E.g., Macnaghten and Urry, Bodies of Nature, Edensor, Geographies of Rhythm; Lorimer, ‘Walking’. 57 E.g. Merriman et al., ‘Landscape, Mobility, Practice’; Whatmore, ‘Materialist Returns’.

58 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, Ingold, Being Alive, Olwig, ‘Performing on the Landscape

Versus Doing Landscape’, Hastrup, ‘Destinies and Decisions’.

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Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

entail. Our primary observation in this regard is that many footpaths represent an extension of human presence into places that hold significant portions of nature. Pathways are as essential to place-making and land holding as are build- ings and other features of human presence. Paths and trails therefore belong in a wider category of human formation of environments. In that vein, we see paths as an outcome of a social process of environing.” Environing, we posit, is the practices whereby humans enfold nature into society and transform it into hybrid entities, both by design and by making. Paths — and trails — are such hybrid entities, leaning more to the making than the design. They are environmental, hence also products of material and conceptual processes that co-created their dual character and their place in and of the landscape, at the same time culture and nature.

It may also be useful to see the creation of a trail as an element in a wider process of articulation of territory, which is essentially a discursive and concep- tual dimension of the work of environing.” This approach investigates how a landscape is articulated through written, oral, visual or physical means as a place for and of certain activities. A classic is Stephen Pyne’s book How the Canyon became Grand (1998), which followed explorers, geologists, artists, photogra- phers, journalists, preservationists, politicians, and ultimately the President of the United States, in their work to narrate, story and articulate this place and elevate it into a work of natural wonder, known around the world and protected by federal law. This work, stretching from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, was not to any large extent a conscious effort to articulate the place. It is our privilege, coming after, to see that this is what they did while they were busy doing other things. Something similar is often the case with paths. Few people, perhaps ever in history, thought about their first probing steps on a piece of ground — moss, gravel, mud, turf... — as the first steps of a path to be. Yet that was what they became. It is a design without an idea, a collective effort provided by an assembly of humans who are not acting together.

Thinking this way has implications for how movement heritage can be delineated. From the outset, we thought about it as a concept meant to cover the broad range of remains linked to landscape movement on foot. Such herit- age not only includes physical remains in the landscape, but also ideas about mobility as articulated through concepts, literary and artistic representations,

59 Sorlin and Wormbs, ‘Environing Technologies’.

60 Macfarlane, The Old Ways, pp. 13-14.

61 Sorlin, ‘Monument and Memory’, Sérlin, “The Articulation of Territory’. 62 Pyne, How the Canyon Became Grand.

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Introduction

scientific descriptions, maps and place names.® Or, in other words, the full ar- senal of environing technologies that comprise the articulation process. Distinct from many of the earlier, organic and evolutionary processes of path-making, modern articulations of territory through man made trails are intentional and instrumental, which means that they are often more elaborate and standardised.

‘The wider geography of trails is always a product of historical change. It can be just a single path, meandering through a forest or meadow, but it can also be multiple paths, expanded, designed and deliberately connected into the above- mentioned full-fledged ‘trailscapes’: comprehensive areas,sometimes thematised (history, film, literature, scenery), criss-crossed by paths and trails. While often understood and presented as ‘historical’, ‘wild’, ‘remote’, ‘scenic’, such areas are today fully environed and articulated spaces, hybrid products of a sequence of material and conceptual interventions and reinterpretations. Although trail- associated landscape changes are usually more discreet than, for example, the large-scale remodelling of mountain landscapes for downhill skiing,” trails are nevertheless a form of managed infrastructure for, primarily recreational, mobility. Their historical geographies are more than a sequence of layers of ‘uses of history’. More than history is being used, and not all paths are trails. Many paths still uphold everyday functions in communities around the world.

Paths can thus be understood and ‘read’ as articulations of purposes and values just as much as they are obviously the result of the practice of walking. ‘Their becoming is both material and discursive. The relations of paths and trails to their geographies can be seen as a result of long-term processes of forming complex human-environment relationships — with mobility on the landscape scale as a creative element. This also reminds us that trails offer possibilities to move ‘beyond’ the nature/culture divide in heritage-making.® Trails are nature transformed into culture — yet situated in nature, refusing to abandon their belonging in both (or either). They are also ‘environment’ in the sense of a man-made artefact-nature, which has required ‘environing’ work. Environing can be material, or it can be conceptual, or both. It can happen by design, or inadvertently, or both.” These environed artefact-landscapes will thus ‘become’ through elaborate processes unfolding in time.%”

Adopting the idea of paths and trails as central to a movement heritage is

63 Svensson, Sérlin and Wormbs, “The Movement Heritage’; Svensson, ‘Skiing through Time’.

64 Anderson, “The Construction of an Alpine Landscape’; Anderson, Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in Fin-de-siécle England and Germany.

65 Harrison, ‘Beyond “Natural” and “Cultural” Heritage’. 66 Sérlin and Wormbs, ‘Environing Technologies’. 67 Connolly, A World of Becoming, Ingold and Palsson, Biosocial Becomings, Lien, Becoming Salmon.

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at the same time an effort to expand on what paths and trails (and signs, maps, fences, bridges, resting places, lodges, campsites and other frail elements) are. Through environing, they are integrated in the realm of human reflection and governance; in essence, a political space and part of a transformative political geography. This is also how paths in some cases turn into trails with a claim on the future too. They are pathways not only because their material remains function as an archaeology, which of course those of paths also always do, but because they were attributed functions and meanings throughout their entire existence. The past they can guide us to is, hence, the situations that occurred when humans used the paths, deliberated over them, or turned them into new modes of existence with new ‘uses of heritage’, including adoption into the realm of official acknowledgement to serve for their protection. They make up a heritage that does, rather than is.

Pathways through the volume

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have tried to design the book as a path, or perhaps rather as a hike along a path. It has been, as so often on a hike, a matter of choosing paths at numerous intersections where alternative routes were also possible. On the other hand, we moved with many fellow walkers/authors in what is actually a pathscape, where we were surrounded by a common terrain of concepts, ideas and practices from multiple places and landscapes in many parts of the world but chiefly in Europe, including the Easternmost Mediterranean. Sharing the pathscape, we are confident that we have covered enough ground to be able to make some general observations about the whole — as we do in this introduction — and not just to stick to the lines that each paper has followed.

‘The book’s tripartition into sections is, on the face, of it very basic. We start in section one with the historical roots of paths and trails, long before hikes were invented and anybody had thought about the making of heritage, let alone with paths as part of it. We follow their evolution, meandering all the way into our present, always bringing the social and political along, im- mersed in mobile conversation between social forms and Earthly conditions. ‘The second section talks of a more mature relationship to pathways in an ex- tended present, now of multiple kinds with very different roles and functions. ‘The diversity has become enormous, which means that there are also diverse narratives and narrative deviations, off the beaten track of the ordinary, into artistic uses and renderings of paths, digital walking, computer games and

68 Smith, Uses of Heritage.

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Introduction

traces of the COVID-19 pandemic. From this debating the long now, we move in section three into largely uncharted terrain, where existing paths are frail and form loops, sometimes leading nowhere, petering out into the unknown. Chapters here talk of experimental walking and trails as heritage and as tools for sustainable development. They also demonstrate how paths are also part of an ongoing (endless?) co-creation of heritage, as we go, and of a layering of the linear walk in soil and strata.

Section one: Past preconditions of paths

Paths and trails are part of our history. And history is part of all paths and trails. In the first section of this book, all five chapters relate, in one way or another, to historical walking and its ideologies, challenges and practices. They offer historical depth and background. They focus on materiality and the concrete remains of mobility in the landscape, as well as the structures of power and legislation that have governed the role of paths and walking through history. They show a literal path dependence, linking back to historical practices and laws about ownership of the land and who has access to it. This (very old) tradition of ownership is challenged by trespassers, trekkers and others. ‘The historical perspective allows us to spot differences and similarities between places and nations. Looking at the imagery of the chapters from a British context, paths and trails are often clearly delineated by fences. This is a clear difference from Scandinavia, where paths often meander through the landscape without taking much notice of ownership of the land.

In Paul Readman’s chapter, we learn more about the deep importance of paths and trails in English history. Indeed, they were instrumental in the articu- lation of a ruralised Englishness in the country that led industrial development for much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This role of walking and paths is not unique nor unfamiliar. Similar ideas about knowing the land for the sake of loving the nation have been part of nationalistic ideol- ogy for centuries. In Sweden and Norway, and many other countries, tourist organisations and other gatherings of intellectual and economic elites argued for the power of outdoor recreation as a means to counter radical socialism and public health decline due to the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. From this perspective, walking and paths could be seen as a top-down endeavour, designed to keep the people physically active but politically passive. What Readman shows, however, is that paths and trails are also a form of protest, which expands the walking register to include political dimensions with long historical roots and massive impact.

‘The impact on paths and trails of human naming and characterisation is

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Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

analysed further by Clare Hickman and Glen O’Hara. With the Rights of Way legislation in England and Wales as their case in point, they convincingly argue that remains of human mobility are deeply historical in more ways than the physical dimension. As they argue, history is ‘not only found in the creation of the physical track: it is also embedded in how these are legally represented and conceived’. The political and legal dimensions are important for the under- standing of many of the paths and trails in the Rights of Way framework, but the individual experiences of walkers should also be considered. Hickman and O’Hara thereby show how mobility — and movement heritage — is co-created by institutions and individuals over time, leaving traces on the ground as well as in personal and institutional memory.

Ben Anderson further builds on the political aspects of walking and paths, through his analysis of how predominantly urban walkers’ organisations used trespass as a method to bring the issue of access to local countryside paths onto the national agenda. As Anderson shows, access campaigns achieved a ‘reinven- tion of locally-held, rural resource rights as nationally-held, urban recreational ones’. He argues that trespass had a central role in the re-imagining of rural/ local land use and customary mobility as a movement heritage of national im- portance. Ultimately, trespass was a tool through which growing urban-based communities of walkers could articulate their demand for access to the land for recreational purposes. However, this was not a strictly urban ambition but rather something that was linked to an appreciation of the rural landscape and heritage. Anderson shows how walking, paths and trails have become entangled ina political history of the land. Ultimately, scrutinising ideas about who has a right to move through the landscape also provides significant historical insights on the development of society in general.

In Karen Lykke Syse’s chapter, we get to know the role of animals in the creation of movement heritage. Norway’s longstanding traditions of animal husbandry in remote mountainous landscapes have played a key part in the suc- cessive creations of paths throughout the landscape. This concept carries certain meanings and perceptions about the natural world and the actions of animals and humans in it. As Lykke Syse writes, ‘from a movement heritage perspective, the sound of animal bells is not just a convenient indicator of people; it is the sound of a cultural and historical continuum of grazing cattle and the people who hung, and still hang, the bell around their necks’. It was this pre-existing network of paths that came to form the backbone of the growing Norwegian nature tourism and outdoor recreation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is indicative of how movement heritage is always layered, and how later stages of history may be more easily articulated and thus obscure the

19

Introduction

long historical roots and more-than-human origins of many paths and trails.

The first section ends with Stefano Morosini’s chapter about another mountainous region — the Italian Alps. Building on a multidisciplinary research project with a focus on environmental history, the heritage of the mountains and valleys in Stelvio National Park and Adamello Park is analysed, focusing on military heritage from the First World War. Through a blend of walking and digital itineraries, the remains of war on the mountains are articulated as heritage which can be accessed through walking in the footsteps of soldiers. This is a movement heritage which was made through walking, and which requires personal mobility to be experienced. It is a reminder of how mobility has historically been affected by borders and war, and how such factors are still restricting and enabling mobility in many areas of the world. Furthermore, Morosini shows how not only the remains of war can be changed by climate. Warmer winters with less snow and ice have laid bare postings and barracks that were previously inaccessible, but continued warming and mountainside erosion may also threaten the heritage sites.

Altogether, the chapters in section one underline the importance of history in the study of pathways and trails. Whether in densely populated areas of Great Britain, mountainsides in Northern Italy or remote rural landscapes in Norway, historical traces, legislations, practices and ideas affect the possibilities and ar- ticulations of current movement heritage. This connects to other historical and currently ongoing struggles for land rights. When indigenous and rural people stand against extractive industries (or over-tourism for that matter), the paths that are a concrete result of experiential, personal knowledge are important. They are explicit evidence of what is in Swedish called Aavd (literally: claim). This concept refers to ancient traditions of repeated land use, which historically has been associated with a legitimate claim to land rights. Walking is, in a rather corporeal sense, to claim the right to use the land without destroying it. These claims can be made by individuals, groups, organisations, political parties and even nations. In tandem with other forms of claims — juridical, geographical, political, economic — they shape our understanding of paths and trails and who has a right to access them.

Section 2: Off the beaten tracks

‘The chapters gathered in the second section of the book lead us into a number of present-day examples of path-making and heritage-making activities that each in their own way shed new light on pathways. Here, focus is shifted towards the experiences and stories of walkers and path-makers, and to the narrative elements of walking. History is still an important component, but in these chapters more

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as a resource for storytelling and heritage-making. Such an interest in impres- sions and articulations of the past connects to understandings of heritage as a fundamentally contemporary matter. With such a perspective, heritage-making can be understood as a process whereby [t]he present selects an inheritance from an imagined past for current use and decides what should be passed on to an imagined future’.” At the same time, these chapters show that heritage is today regarded as a value of relevance for emerging practices of walking.

Highlighting the narrative aspects of walking and pathways brings intangible aspects of the landscape into focus. While the marks of human feet on the ground may be subtle, they are still concrete, material features. But the making of a path or a trail does not only entail the physical formation of a walkable passage. Pathways are also made and transformed in our thoughts, through immaterial processes that attach meanings and values to the matters that sur- round us. While threading through physical landscapes, paths and trails are simultaneously finding their ways into our minds, through stories, memories and imagination. And in turn, such immaterial aspects influence how we use, form and change the materiality of specific paths. In order to understand the movement heritage, we believe it is crucial to pay attention to the interplay between matter and mind in the shaping and constant reshaping of pathways. ‘The authors in this section provide guidance in this direction.

In recent years, and not least during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen an unexpected rise in the interest in recreational walking.” This has also led to an increase in projects to establish new trails and restore old ones, as demonstrated by Susanne Osterlund-Pétzsch. She shows how the recently increased interest in trail walking has resulted in an array of trail-making activities in small island communities in the Aland archipelago in Finland. With a specific focus on local initiatives and socio-cultural interpretations, she examines the complex interplay between stories, heritage and community. Additionally, she highlights the power of storytelling in projects to promote walking, for example in the establishment of the St Olav Waterway as a route for pilgrimage in the Aland islands. According to Osterlund-Pétzsch, narra- tivity is a key to understand how trails and trail walking are experienced and performed as movement heritage.

Pilgrimage holds a particular place in the heritage of walking paths, and one of the best-known ofall pilgrimage trails is probably the one leading to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The chapter by Camilla Brudin Borg examines the

69 Tunbridge and Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage, p. 6 70 E.g. Beery et al., ‘Covid-19 and Outdoor Recreation Management’.

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Introduction

role of literature in the making of the Camino that leads millions of pilgrims to the sacred tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela. In her view, the trail is a storied space, infused with narrative meaning, as well as a material space that is connected into the stories ‘along the trail’. A handful of Camino stories by Swedish authors constitute the empirical basis for this chapter, and Brudin Borg uses the metaphor of the palimpsest to detect the layering and co-creation of Camino stories and the topography and worldly conditions of the physical trail. Her chapter also reminds us that, through narratives, it is possible to experience movement along a path without moving our bodies or even being present on the ground.

Some of the chapters in this section foreground various forms of artistic practices in relation to practices and experiences of walking and trail-making. In one of these, Laura Bertens invites us to reflect on the possibilities of adding narrative layers to the experience of a walk by using audio guides. Here, two performative artworks by Janet Cardiff — one in Kassel, Germany and one in London ~ are used as examples of how memories and the act of remembrance can be brought into the experience of a place or a path. Bertens shows how the artist’s use of audio guides immerses the participant in a multidimensional soundscape while walking in a physical landscape, in this case an urban land- scape. Through the artist’s voice historical layers of previous events are added to the walk. In both cases, the artworks evoke an awareness of quite traumatic events that have taken place at the site of the walk. The result is an experience where the past and the present blend seamlessly along the way.

How use of new technology can affect the relationship between walking, pathways and heritage is explored by Finn Arne Jorgensen, who uses the virtual worlds of video games as the point of departure to go hiking in digital landscapes. Video gaming is today a major industry and has become impor- tant pastime activity for many, not least during the COVID-19 pandemic, with restrained daily routines and reduced possibilities to walk freely. With particular focus on a genre of games called ‘walking simulators’, this chapter demonstrates how walking trails in the virtual worlds of the games provides a shared space for narratives about movement, landscape and the relationships that evolve through movement. And with recent developments such as the now-widespread use of GPS units, the gap between the virtual and the physi- cal landscape is gradually closing. One of Jorgensen’s key arguments is that studies of game-based mobility can help us understand how trails function as media in the landscape.

Petra Lilja takes us on a walk of a different kind. In her chapter, we follow her in silence on a curated walk into a former limestone quarry in southern-

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most Sweden. ‘There, we are invited to encounter the vibrant materiality of the environment, and of our own bodies, while walking through the layers of time embedded in the limestone and in the remains of the industrial activi- ties connected to the extraction of minerals. Following the path down into the quarry, the author guides us to notice the matters — and in particular the minerals — on their own terms, rather than with an anthropocentric approach to matter as resource. Inspired by theories foregrounding more-than-human agencies, this chapter explores possibilities to ‘disrupt our extractive mindsets’ and think differently about our being in the world through the simple act of attentive walking.

All the chapters in this section, in one way or another, invite us to follow contemporary pathways that transgress boundaries which used to be seen as given, and to look for connections rather than divisions between, for example, mind and matter, nature and culture, past and present, virtual and physical, human and more-than-human.

Section three - Searching for new path heritage

Talking, as we do in this volume, about the making of a movement heritage as supposedly a new kind of heritage practice, section three searches for possible antecedents, or parallel processes, in cultures outside Europe or the Western world. It also brings together experiences of walking as a method of exploring past and present functions, and indeed agencies, of paths in contexts ranging from national natures to traumatic memories to education and sustainability. Subarna De takes us to an Indian mountain district, Kodagu, where coffee planting was introduced in colonial times. The arrival of the plantation economy led to the local population more consciously using the extensive walking paths to maintain memory and knowledge of plants, animals and traditional practices linked to the ecology of the ‘bioregion’. This ‘Indigenous heritage-making’ has been going on, albeit not using precisely that term, since the nineteenth century. Kodagu’s trails have kept evolving, as sites of heritage and manifestations of ‘cultural continuity’.

Observations of a similar nature are made by John Martin, Joane Serrano, Jacqueline Nowakowski and Dominica Williamson in their study of values fostered by paths in the Ifugao Rice Terraces landscape in the Philippines and Carwynnen Quoit, Cornwall, UK. These are two landscapes far apart but at the same time both are in or (Carwynnen) adjacent toa UNESCO World Heritage Site — ‘places on Earth that are of outstanding universal value to humanity’. When WHS’ are investigated or developed trails are often overlooked. Rather, they are typically identified as tourist-, health’, or wellbeing assets. Martin and

23

Introduction

his colleagues find values in both sites that came from paths and walking and at the same time supported the UN Sustainable Development Goals, suggesting a wider reach of the effects of paths on landscape values and services.

Paths can also serve as productive points of departure for discovering layered histories and landscapes. Daniele Valisena applies Michel de Certeau’s walk- ing methodology to widen the register of the path to include all senses: smell, sound, taste, vision, the tactile. His area of inquiry, the industrial coal and steel factory landscape in Wallonia, Belgium is rich and scarred. Walking through it, Valisena finds ruderal ecologies and conducts multi-species ethnography that build strata, at the same time geological, toxic and storied. Referring to Stacy Alaimo and Rosi Braidotti, he talks about transcorporeal relations and affec- tions in a narrative that is both about an Anthropocene experience of landscape layering and a revised environmental history of this Belgian mining region.

Also much inspired by de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Maria Piekarska explores the intricate dual use of the path as both a memo- rial tool and a recreational space in Post-WWII Israel. The Martyr’s Trail from 2013 is an outgrowth of the planted Martyr’s Forest, started in 1951 as an early product of the young Jewish state. The trail combines en route plaques of Holocaust victims with intense experience of lush nature, emphasising the modern experience of the Jewish people from suffering to redemption and freedom. It also serves as a vehicle of the old patriotic Zionist tradition used in schools and the military — to ‘walk the land’ as a sign of possession and gratitude. The path insists, in Piekarska’s reading, on its role as an ‘enunciation in de Certeau’s terms, a bodily speech-act expressed by the walker as part of the trail while moving on it, an act that transcends its functions as memory and recreation and becomes heritage.

Also walking, Faidon Moudopoulos Athanasiou and Ionas Sklavounos conduct a revisionist history of the ancient settlement of Aristi in Northwest- ern Greece. Following not just the official UNESCO cobbled street heritage but also branching out into a wider network of pathways in the village, they identify a multi-layered archaeology of abandoned quarries, prehistoric caves, World War II battlefields and sacred forests. Again, it is a more-than-‘literal’ engagement that the path approach opens up, captured in sensorial and oral registers and giving memory a vital role in the writing of this reformed archaeo- history. Their new path experience leads them to an articulate critique of the ‘historicism embedded in our literate societies’ and by implication towards a movement heritage that transcends the path itself and the linear history typi- cally written about it.

The walking methodology can also evoke ideas of how the heritagisation

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Daniel Svensson, Katarina Saltzman, Sverker Sorlin

process may unfold. Drawing on fieldwork in southern Norway, Benjamin Richards makes a distinction between (already) ‘valued trails’,where movement is curated for tourism or education, and ‘paths of meaning’, where meaning is more fluid and appears as we go, or drift, and more subjectively, too. You don't have to make a choice, he argues. Both types exist and speak to the fact that the heritage of paths and trails ‘is not a fixed thing, but the process of forming paths’, echoing something ongoing, ‘across time, across generations and across epochs’. To walk a ‘path of meaning’ may make us more attentive, but, coming to think of it, even such a path assumes some kind of prearranged ‘value’, such as being attentive, or just being aware.

‘There seems to be no escaping this blending of the designed and the in- advertent, the spontaneous desire in a path and its curated directionality, the subjective meaning making and the collective usefulness. In that respect, our exploration of paths speaks to a main feature of recent thinking on heritage- making, which is the capacity of heritage not just to exist, to sit there in a monumental fashion, but also to make. Paths almost quintessentially change, act, and perform in relation to humans (and others). In short, they do things as things are being done with them, mostly walking. As such, they cannot and perhaps should not be harnessed. But they are also a species with many virtues and healing and symbolic functions. They are precious, they are the core of holy spaces. We should take care of them, somehow. One way is to keep walking.

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2

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Section | Past Preconditions of Paths

CHAPTER 1.

FOOTPATHS IN ENGLAND: NOTES TOWARDS A RADICAL HISTORY

Paul Readman

Winding across field and meadow, through woodlands, along clifftops, up mountainsides and deep into urban areas too, footpaths are a distinctive feature of the English landscape. This essay explores their changing significance from the nineteenth century on. For it was in the nineteenth century that they first became a focus of public debate, in the overlapping contexts of enclosure, the rise of radical land politics, industrialisation and urbanisation, and the emer- gence of countryside- oriented tourism. Into and through the twentieth century, footpaths remained subject to heated political contestation. As symbols of a popular stake in the landscape, their preservation was not only about preserving a recreational amenity for a largely urban-dwelling people; it was also a means of asserting a demotic claim on the national territory. It helped make possible a ruralised Englishness in the context of industrial modernity.

We are apt to tell the story of footpath preservation as a story of the defence of popular rights. The achievements of early campaigners such as Octavia Hill, Hardwicke Rawnsley and Sir Robert Hunter—the founders of the National Trust —are celebrated now more than ever." In more radical vein, footpath preservation is connected to public protest, much of which has been more-or-less socialist in flavour, with activists breaking down stopped paths, confronting gamekeepers and marching along disputed routes to assert the claim of the common man and woman. The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932, in the Peak District of Derbyshire, is the example everyone turns to here — and it has attracted more than its fair share of attention from historians.” Along with the wider history of access to the countryside, that of footpath preservation is associated with a progressive politics, one congruent with the motivations behind state-created National Parks, long-distance walking trails and the ‘right to roam’ agenda.

, For broadly positive reassessments of Hill, see Baigent and Cowell, ‘Nodler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles’.

2 D.Hey supplies a revisionist interpretation in his ‘Kinder Scout and the Legend of the Mass Trespass’.

PATHWAYS: 33-55 doi: 10.3197/63787710662654.ch01

34

Paul Readman

PEAK DISTRICT RAMBLERS IN TROUBLE: WALKING TOWARDS KINDER SCOUT ON THE OCCASION OF THEIR BATTLE WITH THE GAMEKEEPERS,

Figure 1.

The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, 24 April 1932. Unattributed photograph in the [/ustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 30 April 1932. Source: © Illustrated London News Ltd / Mary Evans Picture Library.

Now, I do not wish to dispute this story in any fundamental way. But I do want to give it a bit of a twist. My contention is that the dense network of public footpaths, despite being of high amenity value, is nevertheless compat- ible with a political economic regime of startling inequality, especially so far as the distribution of property in land is concerned. Although often directed at the grasping landlord who stopped the path of the people, campaigns for the preservation of pedestrian rights-of-way were functionally consistent with support for private property, the wider logic of liberal capitalism, and mainstream understandings of national identity. To flesh out this contention, I need to begin with a brief survey of the place of footpaths in English culture over the last two centuries or so. How and why did they come to be so valued?

35 1. Footpaths in England

The short answer to this question is that they had always been valued. For centuries, footpaths had been one of the main means by which ordinary people got from A to B over the course of their daily lives. As medieval historians have shown, peasants made and used pathways that were quite separate from the routes walked (or ridden) by their lords and masters; the footpath was thus specifically associated with the pedestrian practices of the common man, woman and child.’ It was how they accessed their places of work and worship; it was a means of recreation, exercise and courtship. But except in the case of disputes over their closure or diversion — which were relatively rare — documentary attestations to the value of footpaths were uncommon until the early nineteenth century.* ‘The enclosure movement changed this. Enabled by the political power of the aristocracy, landowners threw farms together, fenced off commons and extin- guished common rights — all in the name of maximising agricultural productivity through capitalist economies of scale. The effects of enclosure on the rural poor have been much discussed by historians; the consensus today is that these effects were generally negative.” Ordinary people were denied access to land that had previously been a means of sustaining independent livelihoods: the smallholder economy took a hit from which it never recovered. The poetry of John Clare stands as eloquent testimony to the sense of dispossession. As Clare’s poems record, enclosure cut paths as well as stole commons: a whole series of his sonnets had footpaths as their focus.° In his Village Minstrel (1819-20) he wrote of how

‘There once were lanes in nature’s freedom dropt, There once were paths that every valley wound— Inclosure came, and every path was stopt;

Each tyrant fix’ his sign where paths were found,

To hint at trespass now who crossed the ground...

It was in this context, towards the end of the enclosure movement, that the first footpath protection societies were set up in the 1820s,’ their establishment being given added impetus by an Act of 1815 that granted local magistrates the power summarily to close any footpath they deemed unnecessary.®

3 Kilby, Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape, pp. 59-68. 4 This is reflected in literary references to footpaths, which are scanty in pre-nineteenth-century writ- ing: Taplin, English Path, pp. 4-5. See esp. Neeson, Commoners. Taplin, English Path, p. 7. Taylor, Claim on the Countryside, p. 21.

‘Act as to Closing Footpaths’, 55 George III. c. 68, sec. 2 (1815). See Webb and Webb, English Local Government, pp. 201-04; Stephenson, Forbidden Land, p. 59. The statute was repealed in 1835.

aN DN

36 Paul Readman

For all that, footpaths were still required to service the post-enclosure economy. Wage labourers needed to get to work, and to church, and because of this many parliamentary enclosure awards explicitly declared paths to be rights-of-way. Some awards even created new such paths. Indeed, the loss of the common and the expansion of large-scale agriculture, with farms extend- ing over many hundreds of acres, made rights-of-way more essential to the functioning of the rural socio-economic order. Since land was now largely held as private property unmoderated by common rights, the footpath did not so much enable public access as define its limits. Literally as well as figuratively, to ‘stray off the path’ was to transgress, to trespass.

As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the significance of footpaths shifted. They remained unremarked-upon sinews of capitalist agriculture, quietly facilitating the efficient supply of wage labour to farmers’ fields. But alongside this, they started to matter in new, more visibly acknowledged, ways. By the 1880s, nearly three-quarters of the population of Britain lived in urban areas; commentators spoke of a ‘rural exodus’ sapping the nation’s health, even its racial ‘efficiency’, and politicians grew increasingly interested in schemes of allotment, smallholding and other reforms to get people ‘back to the land’.’ Related to this was a concern to maintain a sense of connection to the coun- tryside, and by extension to the English past. Facilitated by cheaper travel, paid and Bank Holidays, and the profusion of tourist guides brought out by John Murray, Adam and Charles Black, Edward Stanford and other publishers, more people saw rural England as offering recreational opportunities. Walking was central to this new interest in the countryside. In the late nineteenth century, walking groups mushroomed: Leslie Stephen's Sunday Tramps group of elite metropolitan intellectuals is the best known,"° but there were many others — from the white-collar Forest Ramblers of Epping Forest to the predominantly proletarian Sheffield Clarion Ramblers." And forall those drawn to countryside walking, whether organised in societies or not, the footpath was central to their recreational practice.

Given their centrality to walking for leisure, the value of footpaths seems obvious. But this is only because we now view such walking as an unalloyed good (except, perhaps, when it contributes to ecological damage such as topsoil erosion). It is worth remembering that, at least insofar as it had any presence in wider culture, purposive walking for leisure — especially long-distance walking

9 Marsh, Back to the Land, Readman, Land and Nation. 10 Whyte, ‘Sunday Tramps’. 11 Hill, Freedom to Roam, pp. 20-21, 32; Sissons et al., Clarion Call.

37 1. Footpaths in England

— was not widely popular before the later nineteenth century, and not really a fully established element of mass tourism until the interwar period, when it became associated with an increasingly assertive youth culture. One thinks of the Youth Hostels Association (YHA), which was founded in 1930, or the sartorially and behaviourally emancipated young women hikers — many of them members of the YHA — who attracted much public notice in these years. Not all this notice was favourable, of course, but the association between recreational walking and a liberated, progressive modernity was increasingly apparent. It is nicely captured by the then-fashionable stylised realism of Hiking (1936), a painting by James Walker Tucker (1898-1972) in which three young women

Figure 2.

‘Hiking’ (circa 1936), by James Walker Tucker. Tempera on Panel. Source: © Tyne & Wear Archives &

Museums / Bridgeman Images.

38 Paul Readman

walkers are depicted as confident, athletic and capable figures, making use of their map to traverse and know the landscape." In 1932, one newspaper article on the ‘phenomenon of hiking wondered ‘whether the countryside, especially in the vicinity of the towns, will be large enough to accommodate the ever- increasing hordes of bare-legged, sunburnt boys and girls’.’°

Before these heady interwar years, however, walking for pleasure was often viewed with suspicion. Trekking for miles cross-country was a thing tramps and vagrants did; it was not an activity for gentlemen, still less for ladies. Despite the peripatetic avocations of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets,"* recreational walking remained marginal to mainstream culture. Quite why such attitudes shifted repays examination. At one level, walking in the countryside came to be valued because it provided physical and mental benefits. The motto of the Clarion Ramblers was ‘A rambler made is a man improved’; while at the other end of the social spectrum, the patrician historian and Sunday Tramper G.M. Trevelyan opened his famous 1913 essay on walking with the observation that he had ‘two doctors, my left leg and my right’."® Increasing Victorian aware- ness of pollution and other ills of high-density urban living contributed to this perspective: walking conduced to bodily heath. It was also seen as a spiritual balm for a rapidly speeded-up modernity: its slow pace allowed for contempla- tive observation of nature. It was a context, too, for individual self-reflection, a low-intensity version of the romanticism that had animated Wordsworth and Coleridge and which, by the later Victorian period, had now entered wider culture, if in rather diluted form.

But this was not the whole story. Footpath walking was also an important context for sociability. Indeed, it can be suggested that a desire for social inter- action was the dominant germinator of the early twentieth-century efflores- cence of pedestrian associational culture. In this interpretation, bodies like the Ramblers’ Association, the YHA and the Countrywide Holiday Association were as much about social interaction as anything else.'’ Yet, such a perspective only gets us so far: the activity — walking — that was the raison d’étre of these groups mattered, and central to that activity was the footpath.

For those who walked them, footpaths were routes into physical and mental

12 For more discussion of this painting, see Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 113-14. 13 ‘Hiking: The Phenomenon of the Post-War Youth’, Sphere 129 (18 June 1932): 479.

14 Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture.

15 Hill, Freedom to Roam, p.32.

16 G.M. Trevelyan, ‘Walking’, in Clio: d Muse (London: Longmans, 1913), p. 56.

17 Thompson, ‘Fashioning of a New World’.

39 1. Footpaths in England

felicity, enablers of self-reflection and sociability, and means of accessing nature. But perhaps most significantly, the affordances of footpaths were historical. They conferred a sense of connection with the past. They were routes into knowing and imagining the past through embodied encounter with the landscape of which history was constituted. To adapt the social anthropologist Tim Ingold, if landscape was ‘history congealed’, and if the best way of reading landscape was on foot — just as most humans had read it across much of recorded his- tory — then the humble footpath gave as important a means of access to this history as documentary evidence did."

After all, footpaths were themselves evidentiary traces of human experience. Maintained through quotidian use over centuries, they can be seen — to use the helpful category that structures this collection of essays — as a form of ‘move- ment heritage’. For Octavia Hill and her fellow campaigners, footpaths were ‘the labourer’s heritage in his own parish’; created by the common people, they were ‘the common inheritance of Englishmen and women and children.” And the defence of this inheritance was bound up with a popular patriotism, one that was rooted in older traditions of radical Englishness but was also consistent with a modern and democratising idea of nationhood. The crowds who broke down landlord-erected barricades blocking footpaths often marched up the disputed right-of-way singing patriotic songs, such as ‘Rule Britannia or even the national anthem. This is what happened at Latrigg in the Lake District in 1887, for ex- ample.” And if such behaviour was not generally seen in later access disputes, the undertow of popular Englishness was still present: walking a footpath was a means by which those who did not own land could assert a stake in the national domain and, given the imbrication of landscape and national identity, it was nec- essarily an activity that could carry a patriotic charge. This was well understood by Hill, who, in appealing to the Commons Preservation Society (CPS) to take up the cause of the protection of footpaths, declared that she thought ‘men love a country more when its woods and fields, and streams, and flowers, and lakes, and hills, and the sky that bends over them are visible’— as preserving footpaths as rights-of-way open to the feet of all would help ensure.”

18 Ingold, Perception of the Environment, p. 150.

19 R. Hunter, Footpaths and Commons and Parish and District Councils (London: Cassell & Co., 1895), p. 6; O. Hill, ‘Footpath Preservation’, Nature Notes 3 (Oct. 1892): 196; A. Clarke, ‘Footpaths and Commons’, Nature Notes 7 (Jan. 1896): 9-11; Preservation of Commons: Speech of Miss Octavia Hill at a Meeting for Securing West Wickham Common (London: Kent & Surrey Committee of the Commons Preservation Society, [1892], [p. 1].

20 The Times, 3 Oct. 1887, 7.

21 ‘Miss Octavia Hill on the Duty of Supporting Footpath Protection Societies’, Cumbria Record Office, WDX/422/2/4.

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Onelater example of how footpath-enabled popular patriotism was mobilised to serve a nationalist agenda is provided by Michael Powell and Emeric Press- burger’s 1944 film, 4 Canterbury Tale. Set in wartime Kent near Canterbury, it tells the story of a Land Girl, a British soldier and an American GI getting to know the Kentish way of life. The film begins with narration from the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, accompanied by shots of a procession of medieval pilgrims, then a hawk in flight, then World War II fighter aircraft. ‘The theme is one of continuity with the English past, and the symbol of this continuity is a footpath, and specifically the famous Pilgrims’ Way:

Six hundred years have passed. What would they see, Dan Chaucer and his goodly

company today? The hills and valleys are the same. Gone are the forests since the en-

closures came. Hedgerows have sprung. The land is under plough. And orchards bloom with blossom on the bough. Sussex and Kent are like a garden fair. But sheep still graze

upon the ridges there. The pilgrims’ walk still winds above the weald, through wood and brake and many a fertile land.

Figure 3.

The Pilgrims’ Way, near Aylesford, Kent, England. Unattributed photograph for the Mustograph Agency, 1950s. Source: Mary Evans Picture Library.

4]

1. Footpaths in England

In the film, contact with Kentish landscape is presented as a way of ‘getting close to your ancestors’, of accessing ‘the old England’.”

As this implies, in addition to being valued as popular and patriotic move- ment heritage, footpaths were also prized because walking the landscape was a means of encountering the past. This had been true for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries such as William Camden, whose Britannia (1586) had relied heavily on observations made on foot.” Their practice had been carried on by later antiquaries such as William Hutton, whose History of Hadrian’s Wall (1802) was based on a 601-mile pedestrian journey from Birmingham up to Carlisle, along the course of the fortification to Newcastle- upon-Tyne and back, and then home again.”

‘The pedestrian practices of antiquaries survived into the Victorian period. To an underappreciated extent, they were also adopted by professional historians. For E.A. Freeman, ‘the finished historian must be a traveller’.** Indeed, even when plagued with gout, Freeman was relentless in his commitment to on-foot visits to the places that would feature in his monumental Norman Conquest — from the towns and farmland of the Conqueror’s native Normandy, to the New Forest of his son William Rufus, to the battlefields of Hastings and Stamford Bridge.” Such visits were integral to his method; they were made ‘to store my mind’, to shed ‘new light’.”’ It was a similar story for John Richard Green, who felt that ‘History strikes its roots in Geography’ and put this insight into practice in his enormously popular English Social History, a book suffused with sensitive attention to place and landscape.”

Later historians likewise had recourse to the archive of the feet, Trevelyan most famously.”’ Others included the medievalist F.M. Powicke, whose histori- cal sensibility was profoundly influenced by the Lake District, where for much of his life he had a farmhouse in Eskdale. The ineluctably historical quality of landscape inspired Powicke: he was first drawn to the Lakes by work he did

22 P. Newland, ‘Introduction’, in Newland, British Rural Landscapes on Film, pp. 2-3. 23 W. Camden, Britannia, ed. and trans. E. Gibson, 2 vols (London: R. Ware, 1753 [1586]).

24 W. Hutton, The History of the Roman Wall (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1802); W. Hutton, The Life of William Hutton (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1817), pp. 313-18.

25 E.A. Freeman, Methods of Historical Study (London: Macmillan & Co., 1886), pp. 314-15. 26 J. Bryce, ‘Edward Augustus Freeman’, English Historical Review 7 (1892): 499.

27 Letters to Dean Hook, April 1867 and to William Boyd Dawkins, 25 July 1867, in W.R.W. Stephens (ed.), The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (2 vols, London: Macmillan & Co., 1895), I, pp. 381, 389.

28 J.R. Green and A.S. Green, A Short Geography of the British Isles (London: Macmillan & Co., 1889 [1879]), p. xi; J.R. Green, 4 Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan & Co., 1874).

29 Gange, ‘Retracing Trevelyan’.

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for a Victoria County History article on Furness Abbey, the sight of the ancient sheepwalks tracking over the fells evoking the monastic life of the past and making a lasting impression on him.*° And to Powicke’s name could be added a host of others, including Eileen Power, A.L. Rowse, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the whole school of landscape historians inspired by Maurice Beresford and W.G. Hoskins.

‘The pedestrian footpath-enabled practice of antiquarians and historians was the tip of a larger cultural iceberg. It was the intellectualised expression of a broader desire to connect with the past through embodied experience of landscape. This desire found most obvious expression in recreational culture, with guidebooks aimed at the ‘antiquarian tourist’ proliferating from the late nineteenth century on. A feature of these publications was the emphasis placed on on-foot exploration. Some were entirely structured around walking tours, detailing how these could give access to the historical associations of landscape. Typical titles included H.H. Warner’s Holiday Tramps through Picturesque England and Wales (1902), W.H. Burnett’s Holiday Rambles by Road and Field Path (1889) and Ernest Belcher’s Rambles Among the Cotswolds (1892). But even more general guides, such as the county handbooks issued by Murray, Black, Stanford and Ward Lock, were filled with suggested walks. And the focus of these was frequently on landscapes whose historical associations were as important as their picturesque or ‘natural’ beauty (though in the picturesque, of course, visual and historical qualities were often conjoined).

Footpaths, then, were prized as movement heritage in themselves, but their heritage value was also connected to a more widespread engagement with landscape as history: they offered embodied access to the past. As the Yorkshire antiquary Edmund Bogg remarked in his 4 Thousand Miles of Wandering Along the Roman Wall, “To see ... time-honoured remains in situ ... is to relive in the past’.°! Themselves inheritances from the past, footpaths facilitated imaginative historical knowing, which for someone like Trevelyan was key to the poetry of history. As he told his daughter Mary, ‘It is not — yet it is, that world of the Time Past’, and the past’s simultaneous is- and is-nottedness derived from its tangibility in the places of the present, from the associational value of landscape experienced via footpaths such as one of Trevelyan’s favourites, that along the line of Offa’s Dyke over the Black Mountains and down off the ridge to the

30 Southern, ‘Sir Maurice Powicke’, 300-02; F.M. Powicke, Three Lectures, given in the Hall of Balliol College (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 71ff.

31 E. Bogg, A Thousand Miles of Wandering Along the Roman Wall (Leeds: Edmund Bogg, 1898), p. 13. 32 To Mary, 5 Sept. 1926, Trevelyan papers, Newcastle University: MM 1/4/14/28.

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inn at Llanthony Priory, in the storied landscape of the Welsh borders.** To invoke the philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood — whose own historical sense was shaped by on-foot exploration of his native Cumberland — footpaths made possible the ‘re-enactment’ of the past in the mind of the present-day observer.** And as Collingwood taught, this is what history is all about. We forget, sometimes, that our understanding of history is derived not only from books and documents, but from what Collingwood called ‘the entire perceptible here-and-now’.* Footpaths bid us to remember this truth. They provide routes into an embodied form of historical knowing; indeed, as Robert Macfarlane has noted, the English verb ‘to learn is etymologically derivative of a Proto- Germanic word that means ‘to follow or to find a track’.*°

‘The point here is that, by the late nineteenth century, the historical affor- dances of footpaths had given them special importance as heritage. It was at this time that a national movement for their preservation got underway, first spearheaded by the National Footpaths Preservation Society (NFPS), then the CPS (precursor of the present-day Open Spaces Society) and later still the Ramblers’ Association. And it is surely significant that there was a close relationship between the campaign for the protection of footpaths and that for the preservation of landscape and open space.*” This relationship found institutional expression in the merger, in 1899, of the NFPS and the CPS: commons, like footpaths, were the inheritances of the people. And at a local level, many footpath societies were involved with efforts to preserve valued landscapes, as well as the footpaths that traversed them. One example is the campaign launched in 1907 by the Reigate and Redhill Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society to raise funds for the purchase of Colley Hill in Kent, then threatened with housebuilding. A shilling fund was launched, which generated £1,250 from 13,000 donors. Further monies were raised by an historical pageant, which involved a procession of costumed performers along the ancient route of the Pilgrims’ Way, on the slope of Colley Hill itself.**

Many similar campaigns were waged in the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries, the successes won indicating a recognition of the heritage value of footpaths and the landscapes to which they gave access. The factual story of

33 Trevelyan, ‘Walking’, pp. 72-73.

34 Collingwood, Idea of History, esp. pp. 282ff. 35 Ibid., p. 247.

36 Macfarlane, Old Ways, p. 31.

37 Hinrichs, ‘Out for a Walk’.

38 T. Winter (ed.), The Pilgrims’ Pageant, Reigate ([Reigate]: Reigate and Redhill Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society, 1913), pp. 9-10.

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Figure 4. A Public footpath sign in Derbyshire, England. Photograph by Phil Sangwell. CC BY-2.0.

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1. Footpaths in England

state intervention to improve and regulate public access to the countryside is a familiar one and does not need repeating here. Landmarks included the 1949 National Parks and Countryside Act and a long string of access legislation, from the generally ill-regarded 1939 Access to Mountains Act through to the post-war measures of 1981 and 1990, and finally the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000.* Public footpaths are now marked on maps, regulated by

law and overseen by local government.

Many accounts of the story I have just told might stop here. Despite a recent flurry of concern about vanishing footpaths,” it is a happy story for those of a liberal mindset. Footpaths, once shut willy-nilly by tyrannical aristocrats, are now regulated by the state, the neat green signs (and green dotted lines on OS maps) making it clear that the walker has a right to be there, to walk the path (see Figure 4). The rambler need not fear the thuggish gamekeeper or irate farmer; her stake in the national domain that the footpath embodies is recognised in law. Footpaths give the English — and I do mean the English particularly — a powerful sense of quasi-proprietorial connection to the green and pleasant land of home. They have contributed to ensuring the centrality of the English landscape to mainstream constructions of national identity. This is because it is largely by means of footpaths that the landscape, and the history of which it is constitutive, remains accessible through embodied experience.

In performing this function, footpaths have done conservative cultural work. I don't mean by this that they did so because they supported constructions of national identity in which the countryside loomed large. After all, rural preoccupations of all kinds — from esteeming the art of Constable to agitating for land reform, to allotment gardening, youth hostelling, botanising, hiking, preserving open spaces and footpaths, and very many other things besides — are in no way necessarily indicative of political or cultural conservatism. As the work of David Matless and others has suggested, cultural ruralism — even in its nationalistic iterations — was not antonymous with urban-industrial modernity; it is better seen as a function of this modernity.’

What! mean, rather, is that footpaths performed conservative work through

39 Shoard, This Land is Our Land; Shoard, Right to Roam.

40 See e.g., K. Rushby, ‘Ramble On: The Fight to Save Forgotten Footpaths’, Guardian, 7 Aug. 2019; ‘Love it. Save It: Don’t Lose your Way’, https://www.ramblers.org.uk/dontloseyourway (accessed 2 April 2021).

41 Matless, Landscape and Englishness; Readman, Storied Ground.

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providing a popular sense of territorial connection to the landscape — and the continuous national history that was constituted by this landscape and was so important a component of Englishness — without challenging a political- economic system that concentrated actual landownership in the hands of a few. As Henry, Lord Thring, told a CPS meeting in June 1888, while introducing a speech by Octavia Hill,

Preserve your footpaths ... and you convert England into one great park. The poorest

man in the land, if the footpaths are preserved, can enjoy as richly the pleasures and the beauty of English scenery as if he were the possessor of the soil.”

Thring’s use of the hypothetical conditional is important here: ‘as if he were the possessor of the soil’; the point is, of course, that he (or she) was not. Footpaths were a key means through which ordinary people established affective ties with the countryside in a context in which, by the 1870s, approximately 75 per cent of the land area of Britain belonged to about 5,000 people, a little over 700 of whom owned one-quarter of England and Wales.** Footpaths conferred a sense of possession without the reality of ownership. In the preface to one of his popular walking guidebooks, E.S. Taylor quoted the poet Edwin Arnold to the effect that ‘Everyone is a landed proprietor who has enjoyed ... those quiet bypaths which reveal delights unknown to rail and road, and reserved only for the pedestrian’. In these and similar publications, the happy memories deriving from such walking excursions were presented as ‘precious treasures’, as possessions ‘which neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and into which no thief can break through and steal’.*

Whether or not this was a good thing depended upon one’s ideological perspective. From that of the land nationaliser or communist, it likely was not. But it was a different matter for liberal-radical defenders of footpaths as the poor man’s inheritance, or — as Octavia Hill put it —‘the great common inherit- ances to which as English people they are born’.* It is right to view Hill and her CPS comrades as progressives rather than reactionaries.” But in common with most people in Britain across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

42 ‘Miss Octavia Hill on the Duty of Supporting Footpath Protection Societies’.

43 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, pp.54—56; D. Spring, ‘Introduction’, to J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (5" ed., Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971 [1883]), p. 12.

44 Walker Miles [pseud. E.S. Taylor], Field Path Rambles (Canterbury and Kent Coast Series) (London: R.E. Taylor & Son, 1904), p. xii.

45 H. Evans, The London Rambler and Footpath Guide to the Surrounding Districts (London: H. Vickers, 1884), p. 87.

46 ‘Miss Octavia Hill on the Duty of Supporting Footpath Protection Societies’. 47 For readings of Hill as progressive, see Baigent and Cowell, ‘Nodler Imaginings’.

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1. Footpaths in England

on the political left as well as the right, they did not support any wholesale redistribution of real property rights, let alone land nationalisation. And since a substantial re-ordering of landed property was seen as practically impossible, even if it were desirable, then the value of footpaths was great indeed. For the liberal Sir Robert Hunter, a leading member of the CPS and a founder of the National Trust, footpaths helped ‘make the whole country one open space’.

‘The merits of footpaths were also apparent to conservatives, for whom the provision of regulated access to land without challenging property rights had considerable appeal. From its foundation in 1884, the NFPS drew support from liberals and radicals, but conservatives too were prominent among its member- ship.” The society’s first president, Thomas Taylour, the Earl of Bective, was a Conservative MP, and other scions of landed families served as vice-presidents, their names adorning the society’s official letterhead — among them prominent Tory and unionist politicians such as Lord Randolph Churchill, the 4° Earl of Onslow, and the Marquess of Hartington.* Its patron was Hugh Lupus Gros- venor, the Duke of Westminster, one of the wealthiest landowners in the country.

Patrician backing for footpath preservation did not go unnoticed. Signifi- cantly, it drew the attention of the Fie/d, the self-described ‘country gentleman's newspaper , which welcomed the foundation of the NFPS as a body that might do much to spread awareness of the law relating to rights-of-way, so obviat- ing controversies that could spill over into disruptive protests.°' The Fie/d was not disappointed in these hopes, writing in 1892 to commend the NFPS for defending public rights while at the same time ‘consistently discourage|ing] illegal trespass’. For the paper, proof that ‘the landowners of England are not the rapacious personages’ radicals presented them as could be found in‘a glance through the list’ of the society’s ‘leading supporters’.

As the Fie/d implied, landlord support for footpath preservation was part of a wider effort to rebut the liberal-radical critique of ‘landlordism’, then gather- ing pace and driving proposals for land reform as well as mounting hostility to the aristocracy-dominated House of Lords.** The blocked footpath was a

48 Proceedings of the General Meeting of the Commons and Footpaths Preservation Society, 7 May 1913, National Trust Archives 4/1.

49 For a list of early members of the NFPS, see Malchow, Agitators and Promoters, p.252. Of those whose political affiliations can be determined, 29 were Liberal or radical and 22 Conservative or Liberal Unionist; of those members who were also vice-presidents, the equivalent figures were 9 and 13.

50 Examples of such nobility-encrusted stationery can be found in NFPS correspondence, for instance

that relating to Lake District footpaths, e.g. Cumbria Record Office, DSO/24/7/3. 51 Field, 28 Nov. 1885, 777. 52 Field, 12 March 1892, 380. 53 Readman, Land and Nation; also Taylor, Lords of Misrule.

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potent symbol of the pettifogging territorial tyranny of the landed elite, and it was one that had traction with public opinion — especially since footpath closure impinged not only on the pleasures of the ordinary inhabitants of the countryside, but also those of the increasing numbers of largely middle-class tourists for whom the pedestrian excursion was an important holiday activity.

Along with support for the voluntary provision of allotments, agricultural co-operatives and various rural charities, aristocratic and gentry involve- ment in footpath preservation sprang from a desire to demonstrate that the established socio-economic order conduced to the welfare of ordinary people. It expressed a demotic social conservatism, one that acknowledged a popular stake in the land — and the popular movement heritage of footpaths — while refusing to countenance any significant challenge to the claims of private property. It was, in short, a technology of control; it helped define the bounds of the permissible so far as walking the land was concerned; it made clear who was, and who was not, a trespasser. For its exponents, it implied an assumption of the responsibilities of stewardship, an idea nicely caught in a short story by Rudyard Kipling, which was published in 1909 just as anti-landlord sentiment approached its climax. In the story, a wealthy American couple — George and Sophie — move to England, take up residence in the country, and as Lords of the Manor learn the duties of benevolent paternalism. Strolling over their land one Sunday, the couple fall into conversation:

‘D’you see that track by Gale Anstey?”

They looked down from the edge of the hanger over a cup-like hollow. People by twos

and threes in their Sunday best filed slowly along the paths that connected farm to farm.

‘Tve never seen so many on our land before,’ said Sophie. ‘Why is it?’

“To show us we mustn't shut up their rights of way.’

“Those cow-tracks we've been using cross lots? said Sophie forcibly.

“Yes. Any one of’em would cost us two thousand pounds each in legal expenses to close.’

‘But we don’t want to,’ she said.

“The whole community would fight if we did.’

‘But it’s our land. We can do what we like.’

‘Tt’s not our land. We've only paid for it. We belong to it, and it belongs to the people—

our people they call’em. ...

‘They passed slowly from one bracken-dotted field to the next — flushed with pride of

ownership, plotting alterations and restorations at each turn.*>

54 For some examples, see W.H. Onslow, 4" Earl of Onslow, Landlords and Allotments (London: Long- mans & Co., 1886); F. Impey, ‘Lord Tollemache, the labourer’s lord’, New Review 9 (Sept. 1893): 299-313; H.A. Russell, 11" Duke of Bedford, 4 Great Agricultural Estate (London: J. Murray, 1897), ch. 7.

55 R. Kipling, ‘An Habitation Enforced’, in Actions and Reactions (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1909), pp. 36-37.

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Kipling wrote this before the First World War, often seen as a decisive mo- ment in the decline of the old rural order, many young heirs meeting bloody ends in the mud of Flanders. Yet, the landed elite survived the war and still survives today: very large territorial estates remain an enduring feature of Brit- ish economic life.** At the time of writing about one-third of the land area of Britain is in aristocratic hands, with 24 dukes alone owning more than four million acres.*” And indeed, throughout the twentieth and into the twentieth- first century, the defenders of the agrarian status quo did not abandon support for the public footpath as a technology of control.

At least until the Second World War, they were assisted in this by the pres- ervationist movement, many of the leading voices in which remained focused on footpaths and open spaces rather than supporting more general rights of access to uncultivated land. The long-serving secretary of the CPS, Sir Law- rence Chubb, was an important figure here. Chubb distanced the CPS from the Kinder Scout trespassers, publishing a letter condemning them in the Fie/d; privately, he told the Secretary of the Ramblers’ Association that the arrested hikers deserved prosecution.** Chubb’s influence was also a key factor behind the limited nature of the 1939 Access to Mountains Act, which — had it come into force — would have restricted access rights to tightly defined areas.”

The 1939 Act was nevertheless a landmark of sorts, pointing the way for more substantial state intervention in the regulation of recreational land use — not least the creation of National Parks.® But while the agency of the state did certainly work to improve public access to the countryside, it was also a means through which this access could be regulated. For all that they tended towards politically conservative views, farmers and landowners were not averse to state intervention to achieve this. If pedestrian recreation in the countryside was a modern phenomenon, the expression of a modern (and largely urban) national culture, their instinct was to impose order on this modernity. If the hordes of hikers from the towns could not be prevented from exploring rural England, their activities could at least be disciplined. In a 1938 article on “The Trespassing Public’, the Fie/d expressed this point of view in urging that footpaths be made more visible, not least by the provision of local authority-supplied signpost- ing. This would ‘do a very real service to landowners in ensuring that at least

56 Christophers, New Enclosure, Shrubsole, Who Owns England? 57 Hayes, Book of Trespass, p. 218.

58 Hill, Freedom to Roam, p.77.

59 Stephenson, Forbidden Land, pp. 165-81.

60 Sheail, ‘Access to Mountains Act 1939”.

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the public enter their land on the correct paths ... Each footpath ... should be signposted at all junctions from end to end. Each branch from the public path should be marked private. A notice should be erected in woods where there are pheasants that game is preserved...’. The message was clear: through such measures, the property rights of landowners might more effectually be protected, since any trespassing that did then occur would be done knowingly and so could be dealt with by the full ‘severity’ of the law.®

If anything, in fact, the apparatus of the modern state made the footpath more potent as a means of shoring up the claims of property. Some powers over footpaths had been granted to parish councils, which had been created in 1894. But local authority control over their creation, maintenance and regulation was greatly extended by the 1949 National Parks and Countryside Act, under the provisions of which county councils were instructed to oversee surveys of all footpaths and bridleways under their jurisdictions, determine which of these were rights-of-way, and mark them on official ‘definitive’ maps. Given the significant presence of landowners in rural local government, this was not a process that involved any revolutionary extension of the people’s rights. ‘The determination of paths as rights-of-way was largely intuitive, and subject to landowner influence; and those paths that were defined as rights-of-way in turn defined the limits of public rights over the land, restricting future opportunities for challenge. Country Life understood this well, welcoming the measure as ‘a sort of Domesday Book of Rights of Way’. For such commentators, the definition of what was and what was not a right-of-way would help ensure property rights were respected. It was in this spirit that the same magazine welcomed the publication of the first OS map to show county-council mandated footpaths in May 1960: the document, it felt, would ‘deprive some people of an excuse to trespass’.

Indeed, the utility of publicly defined footpaths in this respect explains the dissatisfaction expressed by landowner and farming opinion at the slow rate of progress in the creation of the maps. In truth, the delays were primarily a function of practical difficulties: determining rights-of-way imposed consid- erable administrative burdens on often under-resourced local authorities. But this did not prevent both Country Life and the Field from voicing concern about the apparent tardiness of local authorities in discharging their statutory duty, the latter complaining in one 1961 editorial that only 22 of 61 counties

61 R. Davey, ‘The Trespassing Public’, Fie/d, 24 Sept. 1938, 732. 62 Shoard, This Land is Our Land, pp. 271-73.

63 ‘Rural Footpaths’, Country Life, 29 April 1949, 978.

64 ‘Footpaths on the Map’, Country Life, 26 May 1960, 1172.

51 1. Footpaths in England

had prepared definitive maps.” This, the paper made clear, did not serve the landowner any more than it did the rambler, since it rendered less legible the behavioural ‘conventions’ to which the ‘desire for healthy recreatio ought to be subject. Local authority-sanctioned rights-of-way defined the parameters of this recreation, preventing it from overstepping its proper bounds: “To the extent that the establishment of well-defined footpaths regulates the behaviour of visitors, they are an inducement to respect the farmer’s land’.

This understanding of the use-value of footpaths persisted into the late twentieth century. Of course, there remained landowners and farmers who closed or deliberately neglected paths that tracked across their land. But the typical landowner was not brusquely heedless of statutory public rights over his property. He (or less frequently she) did not need to be. And he did not need to be because these rights — as embodied in footpaths — were limited by those same footpaths. Hence, by the 1970s, we have the spectacle of Country Life reporting on efforts by farmers and landowners to maintain footpaths, preventing them from becoming overgrown and clearing them of debris. As an editorial in January 1971 saw it, well-looked-after footpaths protected the landowners’ proprietorial interests: “The weekend invaders from the towns are bound to go somewhere, so it is in everyone’s interest that they should walk on designated footpaths rather than over crops or among livestock. The wise landowner will regard footpath clearance not as a nuisance but as an activity to be encouraged’. To an extent, it was ever thus. More than a hundred years earlier, the American radical Elihu Burrit, in his Walk from London to John O’Groats, had noted how many footpaths in England crossed cultivated fields. But ‘so far from obstructing them’, the farmer ‘finds it good policy to straighten and round them up, and supply them with convenient gates or stiles, so that no one shall have an excuse for trampling on his crops, or for diverging into the open field for a shorter cut to the main road’.®

A generalised right of access to land remains elusive: the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 applied to just ten per cent of England and Wales.”

65 ‘Footpaths and their Proper Uses’, Fie/d, 19 Jan. 1961, 101. 66 Ibid. 67 ‘Footpath Explosion?’, Country Life, 28 Jan. 1971, 170.

68 E. Burritt, 4 Walk from London to John O’Groats (2™ ed., London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1864), pp. 9-10.

69 Shrubsole, Who Owns England?, p. 288

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Paul Readman

Public rights over rural land thus remain to a significant extent confined to and defined by public footpaths. As I have argued, these footpaths constitute an important element of British movement heritage, providing embodied connection to history as congealed in the landscape. They have supported an enduring sense of rural Englishness in a country whose population has long been concentrated in urban areas. But while this Englishness is popular, of the people, the language of patriotism that underpins it is a conservative demotic — conservative with a small if not necessarily a large ‘C’. And it is conservative not least because of the support it gives to an inherited political economy of astonishing inequality insofar as the distribution of real property is concerned. Public footpaths are compatible with this system of inequality. Now regulated by the state rather than subject to the discretion of paternalist landlords, they are consistent with a liberal-capitalist order that the heads of still-mighty aristocratic families, rich businessmen and faceless corporations find equally congenial. As Nick Hayes has written, ‘Every pathway that is secured by law further strengthens the fence between us and the land either side of it’, the legally protected footpath being ‘a causeway of legitimacy while all around the land has been washed away into a sea of private ownership’.”

One response, of course, is to trespass, and it is the one advocated by Hayes in his stimulating recent book. He gives plenty of examples from his own experience. One woodland encounter with ‘wild-eyed and unpredictable’ red deer is the kind of thing he feels ‘is only available off the path ... I would swap a hundred nice walks along a pretty Right of Way for this one moment of magic’.”’ On another occasion, having escaped the confines of the ‘Wilder- ness’ music festival to ‘roam free through the ancient Wychwood, dabbing at a small bag of MDMA, he and his trespassing friends climb a fallen tree to loll about like tactile, loved-up big cats in its branches. Revelling in his transgressive idleness, Hayes muses that “This is what Octavia Hill was talking about when she wanted to turn the cemeteries and waste ground of inner-city London into “open-aired sitting room” — very simply: to be at home in nature’.”

Octavia Hill — who was nothing if not strait-laced — probably would have disapproved of the behaviour of Hayes and his pals. But that her example can now be invoked in support of a radical position — albeit one riffing on an Ecstasy-fuelled reverie — is suggestive. Hill may not have endorsed trespass, but many other nineteenth-century advocates of rural walking certainly did

70 Hayes, Book of Trespass, pp. 90, 91. 71 Ibid., pp. 81-82. 72 Ibid., pp. 296, 297.

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1. Footpaths in England

and, in a sense, Hayes is following in their footsteps. Leslie Stephen’s Sunday Tramps used habitually to indulge in what Stephen called ‘a little trespassing’in their walks in the countryside around London.” If challenged by gamekeepers, they would repeat in unison a formula devised by one of their members, the eminent jurist Sir Frederick Pollock: “We hereby give you notice that we do not, nor doth any of us, claim any right of way or other easement into or over these lands and we tender you this shilling by way of amends’. As The Times reported, when chanted by the assembled politicians, men of letters, artists and other assorted members of the intellectual aristocracy that comprised the Tramps, ‘the effect on the gamekeeper must have been devastating’.”

Most of us, however, have not the cultural capital or social status of Leslie Stephen and his Sunday Tramps; we lack the resources to project such confidence in a gamekeeperly direction. Neither, alas, are we all possessed of the assertive righteousness of a Nick Hayes. We shy from confrontation with authority; we don’t want to break the law and face prosecution, by so doing risking our jobs and livelihoods. Although the penalties for transgression were far greater for him than for us, our perspective retains some affinity with that of John Clare in the 1830s:

I dreaded walking where there was no path

And prest with cautious tread the meadow swath, And always turned to look with wary eye,

And always feared the farmer coming by;

Yet everything about where I had gone

Appeared so beautiful, I ventured on;

And when I gained the road where all are free

I fancied every stranger frowned at me,

And every kinder look appeared to say,

“You've been on trespass in your walk today.’”

Prey to such sentiments as these, most English people tend to keep to the path, the modern-day legal status of which hardens the line between public and private. In doing so they pay homage both to the genuinely popular movement heritage that footpaths embody, while also acknowledging — and implicitly accepting — the limited extent of their inheritance in the land.

73 L. Stephen, ‘In Praise of Walking’, Monthly Review 4 (Aug. 1901), 98-114, at 111. 74 ‘The Sunday Tramps’, The Times, 18 July 1930, 11. 75 J. Clare, ‘I dreaded walking where there was no path’ (c. 1832-37).

54

Paul Readman

Acknowledgements

‘The research presented here draws on work undertaken as part of my involve- ment in the AHRC research network, ‘Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives’ (AH/T006110/1); I am grateful to the AHRC for their support.

Bibliography of secondary sources Baigent, E. and B. Cowell (eds)., ‘Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles’: Octavia Hill, Social Activism, and the Remaking of British Society (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2016).

Cannadine, D., The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992).

Christophers, B., The New Enclosure (London: Verso, 2018). Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).

Gange, D.,‘Retracing Trevelyan? Historical Practice and the Archive of the Feet’, Green Letters 21 (2017): 246-61.

Hayes, N., Zhe Book of Trespass (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Hey, D., ‘Kinder Scout and the Legend of the Mass Trespass’, Agricultural History Review 59 (2011): 199-216.

Hill, H., Freedom to Roam (Ashbourne: Moorland, 1980).

Hinrichs, J. ‘Out for a Walk: Pedestrian Practices and British Preservationism, c.1850-1950’, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2020.

Ingold, T., The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000).

Kilby, S., Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2020).

Macfarlane, R., The Old Ways (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

Malchow, H. LeRoy, Agitators and Promoters in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli (New York and London: Garland, 1983).

Marsh, J., Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet, 1982).

Matless, D., Landscape and Englishness (2"* ed., London: Reaktion, 2016).

Neeson, J.M., Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Newland, P. (ed.), British Rural Landscapes on Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Readman, P., Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity and the Politics of Land 1880-1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008).

Readman, P., Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Sheail, J., “Ihe Access to Mountains Act 1939: An Essay in Compromise’, Rural History 21 (2010): 59-74.

Shoard, M.,.4 Right to Roam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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1. Footpaths in England

Shoard, M., This Land is Our Land (London: Paladin, 1997 [1987]).

Shrubsole, G., Who Owns England? (London: William Collins, 2019).

Sissons, D. et al., Clarion Call: Sheffield’s Access Pioneers (Sheffield: Northend Creative Print Solutions, 2017).

Southern, R.W., ‘Sir Maurice Powicke 1879-1963’, Proceedings of the British Academy 50 (1964): 275-304.

Stephenson, T., Forbidden Land (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

Taplin, K., The English Path (2"™ ed., Sudbury: Perry Green, 2000 [1979]).

Taylor, A., The Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Taylor, H., A Claim on the Countryside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

Thompson, S., “Ihe Fashioning of a New World: Youth Culture and the Origins of the Mass Outdoor Movement in Interwar Britain’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, King’s College London, 2018.

Wallace, A.D., Walking, Literature, and English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

Webb., S. and B. Webb, English Local Government: The Story of the King’s Highway (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913).

Whyte, W., ‘Sunday Tramps (act. 1879-1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

CHAPTER 2.

DELINEATING THE LANDSCAPE: PLANNING, MAPPING AND THE HISTORIC IMAGININGS OF RIGHTS OF WAY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLAND AND WALES

Clare Hickman and Glen O’Hara

Introduction

‘The interlinked network of rights of way that crisscross the English and Welsh landscape perhaps appear at first glance to be ahistorical elements of near-invisible infrastructure, or even just simple means of transit. As Timothy Earle has argued in his work on how different routes move through many distinct terrains, they ‘capture the different ways that movement is significant and becomes etched in the landscape’. Their perceived antiquity and course following natural contours of the land perhaps adds to this impression. This is reflected in much of the scholarly literature, where the focus is often less on what is underfoot than on the experience of movement by walkers and others, including the way in which trails allow human and nonhuman animals to connect with the surrounding landscape. In this, the literature perhaps reflects historiographical trends overall, summing up the workaday nature of most human experience as ‘the everyday’, permitted and underpinned by little-noticed but commonplace systems. Recent work including Joe Moran’s 2009 book On Roads, or Matthew Gandy’s 2014 volume The Fabric of Space on water geographies, are just two examples.’

It can be very easy, given these trends, to emphasise transitory human experi- ence, not the interaction between people and physical space. The extreme age of many paths on the one hand, and very brief experiences of moment-by-moment walking on the other, can lead to a condition Marcus Colla has recently framed as ‘presentism’ — a “dissolution of both ... temporal and spatial coordinates’.* ‘There are however notable exceptions to this ‘presentism in terms of pathmaking

1 Earle, ‘Routes’, p. 269. 2 Moran, Roads; Gandy, Fabric. 3 Colla, ‘Spectre’, esp. 124-25.

PATHWAYS: 56-73 doi: 10.3197/63787710662654.ch02

57 2. Delineating the Landscape

history, which includes recent work by Spooner and collaborators on rights of way in Norfolk from the 1930s onwards.* In some historical works, it therefore becomes clear that tracks themselves are inherently historical features that have always been named, characterised and sorted into different types by humans, as well as actually being created via movement. More ancient examples have been created by generations of human and nonhuman animal movement, but the important point is deep historicity of all paths — and the role of human language, understanding and imagination as key parts of their very existence.* What is also required, therefore, is research that focuses on the interaction between humans and the landscape, not on either the immediate experience of following trails or the perceived ‘deep history’ of some long-lasting paths. Such work could bring out the impermanence and contingency of how we understand movement in the landscape. As Earle has also argued: ‘paths ... should be considered no more permanent than the patterns of household movements ... paths, trails, and roads are the physical imprint of repeated economic and sociopolitical interactior’.° Such an emphasis on the human use of space can take us in new directions, away from the more common heroic stories of time-hallowed trails or long- distance treks, and towards men’s and women’s movement in quite humdrum settings that still might be thought of as simply ‘everyday’. In many and often literally ‘edgelands’ between and within urban and suburban areas, the most obvi- ous paths have usually been — and still are — ‘lines of desire’ crisscrossing planned spaces, in defiance of their designers’ wishes. The poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts have recognised these ‘as the kinds of paths that begin over time, imperceptibly, gathering definition as people slowly recognise and legitimise the footfall of their peers’. They can become ubiquitous in newly planned spaces such as Britain’s New Towns or Green Belt: but they can also be ‘as old as the earlier transhumance, as the first drovers and movers of livestock, or even older’.’ In order to explore how different histories are mobilised in the often ‘ordi- nary’ spaces between grand narratives and individual experiences, this chapter attempts to uncover how rights of way were understood and delineated. As a secondary and more specific aim, it will furthermore consider the various ways in which ‘historical’ narratives have been assembled as part of the attempts to pin down rights of way in an authoritative series of county maps serving post-war England and Wales. Despite paths and other tracks often moving in response

Gregory and Spooner, ‘Public Rights of Way and Countryside Access in Norfolk 1880-1960’. Bates, “Track Making’, 21-28.

Earle, ‘Routes’, 255.

Farley and Roberts, Edgelands, p. 24.

ND MN f

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to changing needs, desires, economic circumstances and landowners’ behaviour, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed an ongoing at- tempt to create definitive legal maps in order to preserve these etched lines of access running across the countryside. The 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act is only one, and perhaps the most famous, statutory example of these efforts. However, the 1932 Rights of Way Act replicated and permitted the continuance of a complex process of local negotiation under which any route could be defined as a public path if the public could show twenty years of use, though landowners could challenge that length of use and the onus was on path users to prove it.®

‘History’ is, therefore, not only found in the creation of the physical track: it is also embedded in how these are legally represented and conceived. As Natural England commented in 2008, ‘there is a legal principle, “Once a highway, always a highway”. All public Rights of Way are highways, so that once a right of way exists it remains in existence unless and until it is lawfully closed or diverted.” This legal principle however brings with it other issues, particularly the status of rights of way that have fallen into disuse or dispute. This was evident at the start of the post-war period, as in the Hobhouse Report of 1947 (the report that paved the way towards the 1949 Act) which already argued that ‘in spite of the maxim “once a highway, always a highway” it is a fact that a very large number of rights of way are being lost through disuse’."°

Based on the recommendations inthe Hobhouse Report,the 1949 Act required ‘the council of every county in England or Wales ... not later than the expiration of three years after [the commencement of the Act] ... [to] prepare a draft map of their area’."' "These would be marked on draft maps which could be challenged, and then captured as Rights of Way which could either be given protection or extinguished from the record. As Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning in 1949, noted when bringing the Bill before parliament, ‘it requires the county councils to make a survey of existing rights of way within three years. It requires that, wherever possible, the district councils and parish councils should be used in making this survey ... District councils and the parishes would have a much more detailed knowledge of the existing rights of way than a county council.”

8 Hodson, ‘Ordnance Survey’, 105-07; Feldman, ‘Property’, 39.

9 Natural England, Guide, p. 2.

10 Cmnd. 7207, Report of the Special Committee, see Cullingworth and Nadin, Planning, pp. 272-73.

11 Geo. 6 Ch. 49, National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (27) (1), https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/12-13-14/97/enacted (accessed 23 March 2021).

12 House of Commons Debates, vol. 463, cols. 1461-568, Debate on the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Bill, 31 March 1949.

59 2. Delineating the Landscape

English and Welsh local government had, however, nowhere near the capac- ity or organisation to conduct this work even as their other duties grew very quickly between the late 1940s and the later 1960s, and indeed the Labour government of 1945-51 had been riven with debate over how to reform it.’ Both countries were divided into a patchwork quilt of hundreds of overlapping jurisdictions: in the 1960s, England for instance was divided into 79 county boroughs, 49 counties and 1,086 county districts.'* Parish councils numbered 11,175 in 1951, before a wave of mergers saw parish councils’ number fall to under 10,000 in 1960.%

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the attempt to draw up a definitive map of English and Welsh rights of way did therefore make the relationship between historic use and present rights of access more evident. The Ramblers Association, then as now a powerful organisation with a large membership and strong contacts in organised politics, mobilised the concept of historical use in their argument for what constituted a right of way in relation to the legal process of mapping. This was quickly embedded in advice devel- oped by them and their allies.’* As the Ramblers put it at the time, stressing minor and routine paths in a way strikingly similar to the recent literature on this question:

Paths which were originally used only by farm or estate workers, and were known as

accommodation paths, are said to have been wrongly included on the county council

maps. The truth is that a track which originated as an accommodation path may, with lapse of time, have become a legal right of way. Thus, a path could have started, perhaps two hundred years ago, as leading from a farm to a village; later a second path from the same farm might be trodden to another village. Both paths were originally accom- modation paths, but farmers were not likely to object to people using them as a link between the two villages. Eventually, the path could have been used by the public for a sufficiently long time without interruption for it to have been established as a public

right of way. In that event, irrespective of the origin of the path, it was the duty of the county council to record it on their map."”

‘The most important element determining inclusion of routes on the map was their actual use. Therefore, if a right of way needed to be defended, the debate

13 Chandler, Local Government, e.g., pp. 170-78.

14 Cmnd. 4040, Royal Commission, p. 2, ft.1, Local Government Information Unit, ‘Local Government Facts and Figures: England’, https://lgiu.org/local-government-facts-and-figures-england/ (accessed 6 March 2021).

15 Poole and Keith-Lucas, Parish Government, p. 189. We are grateful to Justin Grigg, of the National Association of Local Councils, for this information.

16 ‘Notes of Guidance for Honorary Path Advocates’ as sent out from CROW in 1952/3, Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, Berkshire (hereafter MERL), SRC CROWC/B.

17 Ramblers Association, Footpaths, MERL, SR CPRE C/1/131/1.

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centred on who was currently using it, as well as on who might be using it in the future — with witnesses defending paths on both grounds in local cases.

‘The work of the Central Rights of Way Committee set up in 1950 (in part to monitor the 1949 legislation) shows how a renewed emphasis on historical use meant that different forms of imagining the past — historically-informed ways of making meaning — came to the fore. In this analysis, we adopt a three-fold typology: history in the law, embodied in the making and the practice of the 1932 and 1949 Acts; history as constant negotiation and grassroots controversy under those Acts, most obviously in terms of local footpaths and bridleways used for such supposedly prosaic activities as dog walking, horse-riding or going to the shops; and, third and last, a ‘constructed history’ of large-scale narratives which attempted to boost tourism, ideas of amenity and the use of access as leisure.

History and the law

In the period before the 1949 Act, cases and redress in the courts were the main method of making decisions about access to the land. In this respect, the construction of English and Welsh rights of way resembled Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to pollution, whether of the air or of rivers and estuaries: so-called ‘riparian rights’, to receive but also not to interfere with clean air or water, could be built up and tested on a case-by-case basis."* Similarly, although landowners could not simply treat rights of way as they pleased, their legal responsibility was to the local users of paths or byways — not to a general ‘tight’ of access. What is notable, and perhaps surprising, is the initially small role longer-term history played in conflicts over rights of way. The law at this time understood ‘historic’ access as describing access in the previous twenty to forty years, not the deep past. It is an interesting reflection on an era during which Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s emphasis was on the deep-seated nature of ‘Englishness’ rooted in long occupation of the land.”

‘The use of a set length of time that paths had been commonly traversed in order to create rights to general use —such as the twenty to forty years stipulation of the 1932 Act — went back to nineteenth century legislation. Sir Lawrence Chubb, Secretary of the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society, appealed directly to the precedent of the 1832 Prescription Act in order to justify the Rights of Way Act in the early 1930s. Chubb made clear that types of oral history had to play a role here:

18 See e.g. Rosenthal, River Pollution, pp. 35-38. 19 Daunton, Wealth, p. 66.

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2. Delineating the Landscape

Hitherto there has existed no simple rule on this point for the guidance of local authorities or landowners, and litigation with regard to disputed rights of way tended to become ever more complicated and expensive as well as more uncertain in its results. It was essential, for instance, to bring to Court the oldest men and women of the district, regardless of the fact that the ordeal of a long and trying examination might prove detrimental to their health. That will not be necessary in the future, because in normal circumstances the evidence need not go back further than about 20 or 40 years.”

‘There was however an obvious potential tension between what individuals might say about a path and its designation on any extant maps, or what we might call a distinction between history ‘in use’ and in documentation. It was these contradictions that the 1932 Act was designed to some extent to simplify, though it was obviously not thought to be enormously successful, given the passing of the 1939 Access to Mountains Act — though the latter never came into force, superseded in its turn by the 1949 Act. As Chubb also made clear, in guidance prepared for members of his Society at the time of the 1932 Act and reissued in 1938, anyone seeking access to a path on a map that had been created by custom had, if challenged, to prove that a path had at some point been ‘dedicated’ as a public right of way. This remained the case even if ‘their antiquity and utility are often testified to by references in the Court Rolls of a Manor or by the Tithe map or by even earlier maps and records’.”!

‘The role of maps was also altered by mid-century legislation, as were the types of map acceptable as historical evidence. As Chubb discussed when he advised his members about ‘Maps as Evidence’, ‘very strict rules’ had previously applied to such documentation: ‘Maps or records (such as Inclosure Awards) prepared under express statutory authority have always been admissible’, while in legal decisions such as the 1914 Folkestone vs Brockman case before the House of Lords, tithe maps and awards were also permissible.” But none of the best modern maps, such as the work of Ordnance Survey, were allowed: a situation that the 1932 Act rectified.”* Even so, these reforms did not make the problems of delineating paths from either oral or cartographic evidence go away. Such issues were still a problem according to the Ramblers in the 1960s, and

20 From Chubb, ‘History’, p. 3. Available at https://www.ramblers.org.uk/-/media/Resources/Public%20 resources/Blue%20Book%20Extra/BB R05%20Definitive%20maps%20historical%20at%2020130731. ashx (accessed 29 July 2021).

21 Chubb, ‘History’, p.5; Geo. 5 Ch. 45, ‘Rights of Way Act 1932’ (3) https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1932/45/pdfs/ukpga_19320045_en.pdf (Accessed 8 March 2021).

22 For a case study on the use of both enclosure awards and tithe records, see Breen, ‘Public or private?’,

56-8.

23 Chubb, ‘History’, p.22; Geo.5 Ch. 45, ‘Rights of Way Act 1932’ (3), https://wwwzlegislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1932/45/pdfs/ukpga_19320045_en.pdf (Accessed 8 March 2021).

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they discussed these difficulties at the time in the context of evidence needed for footpath claims not on any of the draft maps — of which 5,000 had been submitted. Some claims were accepted without question, but many had to go to hearings held by persons appointed by county councils: ‘local people, who would declare in private that there was a right of way, could seldom be persuaded to appear as witnesses. Inclosure awards, tithe maps and old guidebooks had to be combed for supporting evidence.”

In their published reaction to the Government’s 1966 White Paper, Leisure in the Countryside, the Ramblers invoked one judgement which ignored histori- cal evidence even though the landowner had not contested the existence of a path on their land: Caernarvon Council, for instance, refused to add a right of way over the Carneddau mountains. The Welsh Office also dismissed the claim, even though there was evidence in favour from The Gossiping Guide to Wales published in 1882, as well as Aber Parish council’s claim that the path had been in uninterrupted use for fifty years. Even historical evidence used commonly by the Ramblers was in many cases not given weight. Rather, be- cause the landowner might have objected had they known about this access, the Minister felt obliged to uphold Caernarvon Council’s decision.** Maps, paths and access were all in flux, and were still slanted towards landowners’ property rights in the present rather than historical rights, regardless of whether those rights were contained in maps or oral testimony.

‘The passing of the 1949 Act, and in reaction the creation of the CROW Committee by the Open Spaces Society and the Ramblers, was supposed to change this piecemeal ‘system (or lack of it) fundamentally. As CROW’s 1957 Report put it:

The Central Rights of Way Committee was set up in 1950 to keep a watch on the

progress of the Survey of Public Rights of Way ... to advise local authorities and socie-

ties on the value of evidence in support of claims of public rights of way; to assist in

the presentation of claims; and to negotiate with County Councils and the Ministry

of Housing and Local Government on general points of importance arising from the operation of the Survey Provisions of the Act.”

The Committee’s importance and perceived utility grew as attempts to settle the survey proved more difficult than the Government had imagined.

Much of CROW’s work involved attempts to codify how and when rights of way should be defended, and the legal use of both oral and documentary

24 RA, Footpaths, MERL, SR CPRE C/1/131/1. 25 Ibid.

26 Central Rights of Way Committee, ‘Report on the Committee’s Work in 1957’, MERL, SR CPRE C/1/131/1.

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2. Delineating the Landscape

evidence. For example, in the 1950s they called for people to act as ‘Honorary Path Advocates’. They envisaged that the ideal person for this role was ‘someone with either some local knowledge or experience of rights of way, and presumably retired or with sufficient leisure to undertake such investigations’. By 1953 they had received 83 offers from people willing to take up the role and those who showed interest were sent notes of guidance on what the position entailed. From these we can see how witnesses would be used to challenge legal arguments for the exclusion of select rights of way, as well as check over the draft maps for accuracy. One of the key elements, as well as visiting the right of way itself and understanding the history of the path, was the collection of oral testimonies. As the guidance stated: ‘investigation will almost certainly involve visiting the locality and questioning some of the oldest inhabitants, agricultural workers, the Clerk of the Parish Council, possibly the vicar, and in some cases, landowners. ..”””

This idea of witness testimony became further codified and developed when in 1965 CROW considered draft notes for non-expert representatives at public enquiries. This guidance was aimed at resisting the extinguishment and diversion of public paths instituted under the 1959 Highways Act (containing a 28-day period for objections, after which the Minister might call a public enquiry). If this did happen, path advocates were advised to walk the path and note its features, but also select witnesses for the hearing with care. The notes recommended calling on six or seven witnesses and stated that ‘the very best type of witness is someone who uses the path regularly to go to work or take children to school’. They went on to say: ‘do not forget that if a school is near, children who go by themselves can often be very good witnesses and if, as is sometimes the case these days, part of the alternative route involves walking along a busy vehicular road, this can be strong evidence in favour of keeping the path’. Elsewhere, the strong influence of agriculture was still evident. The notes stated that local authorities were likely to call farm owners and farmworkers: ‘jt would be useful to ask a farm labourer who has testified that he’s only seen

four people on the path in five years, what hours he works’.”*

History as local negotiation

Despite CROW’s work, and the efforts of its constituent parts, the three years that Silkin had imagined would be enough for the definitive map had, by 1957,

27 Letter from R.V. Vernede, Honorary Secretary of CROW to A.J. Drake, Hon Sec of the R.A. North Gloucestershire Committee, 24 Feb. 1953, MERL, SR 2CROWC/B.

28 CROW minutes, 6 Jan. 1965, Appendix B on Extinguishment and Diversion of Public Paths, MERL, SR CPRE C/1/49/130.

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proved hugely inadequate. As that year’s CROW report continues:

It was thought, at the time when the Committee was set up, that the Survey would take three years; it will be seen from ... this report how far the estimate has fallen short of the time actually taken. The practical problems arising throughout the country have been so unexpected and so varied that the work undertaken by the Committee in 1957 has reached proportions which could never have been expected in 1950, bearing in mind the fact that it is now five years since the estimated date for the completion of the Survey.”

Those ‘practical problems’ were manifold and demonstrated how the reality of a system now based more squarely on national legislation still relied — perhaps necessarily — on the historicity of paths. One difficulty was the amount of time spent conducting hearings, which might again reduce the historical usefulness of any evidence by the sheer passage of time. By this stage in the mapping process, Kent had only conducted half of its hearings, so there was a fear expressed by CROW that ‘when published, Kent’s Definitive Map will be at least ten years out of date: the Committee therefore feels that many paths shown on the map are likely to be closed or diverted’. The use and status of maps also continued to be deeply contested. In Somerset, delays were also used by some unscrupulous farmers and other landowners physically to block such rights of way.*°

‘There was also the issue of change of use over time, both in terms of where the path itself now ran on the ground and as regards what access was pos- sible in any year or season. In 1953, the Clerk to Cheltenham Rural District Council wrote to CROW to complain that ‘the maps have been marked to show footpaths which, though probably in use as public rights of way for a long time ... in fact are not now physically in existence’. The example he gave was of a footpath marked on the map which took its route across the lawn and vegetable garden belonging to a house built fifty years before. Cheltenham’s clerk therefore argued that ‘the path across this route has not been usable for about 50 years, because when the house was erected and the grounds laid out, fences, walls and the cultivated garden created obstructions of which appar- ently no notice has ever been taken’. He continued by pointing out that people had been using a diverted route without any issues, and then asked CROW to take account of these cases.**

Overall, less had changed under the 1949 Act than its advocates and makers had intended. ‘History’ was still constantly evoked, but still remained simply

29 Central Rights of Way Committee, ‘Report on the Committee’s Work in 1957’, MERL SR CPRE C/1/131/1.

30 Appendix A: Report (for CROW meeting, 6 Jan. 1965?), MERL SR CPRE C/1/49/130.

31 Letter from W.A.G. Acocks, Clerk, Cheltenham Rural District Council to CROW, 10 Jan. 1953, MERL, SR 2 CROWC/B.

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2. Delineating the Landscape

one element deployed among many in a series of local debates and conflicts. At the 1975 Annual General Meeting of the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpath Preservation Society, one motion for debate (though covering roads, and not paths) still ran thus: ‘that this Society do encourage all those who are concerned with Reclassification of RUPPs [“Roads Used as Public Paths”] to consider the long term objective of conserving the character of the countryside and protecting age-old carriageways, cart tracks and green lanes from plough and bulldozer, by seeking in such cases byway status...’ ‘History’ was being evoked here in a preservationist frame, to defend and protect those charac- teristics of the landscape which were thought to contain or embody the past.

Many paths had been preserved by appeal to longstanding use or physical existence, but many had not. This was to some extent due to the very differ- ent situations reflected in battles over, and ideas about, each right of way in turn. Here there was very little administrative infrastructure to guide local decision-makers, and strategic planning remained virtually impossible. ‘The highly localised governance of whole swathes of the country involved not just parish councils, but fissiparous and powerful land management organisations such as the armed forces, the highways authorities and River or Drainage Boards.* Most footpaths always felt ‘owned’, not by large-scale representa- tive groups, but by local people and their memories.** In this sense, the rise and ubiquity of maintained, formal trails can be exaggerated. Paths were still usually workaday links between determinedly ‘normal’ activities, rather than sites of leisure and commemoration — but they usually (and organically) still generated historical meanings.

Constructed history and long-distance trails

‘The idea of long-distance trails was included in the 1949 Act, which argued that ‘the public should be enabled to make extensive journeys on foot or on horseback along a particular route’. The National Parks Commission was granted very wide powers of discretion not only to advise on the condition and upgrading of existing routes so as to make something longer by joining them together, but to create new routes, and even to advise about ferries, ac- commodation and food along the way. The first category of recommendations listed was the ‘maintenance and improvement of existing paths’— foreshadowing

32 Commons, Open Spaces and Footpath Preservation Society AGM Minutes, 14 June 1975, MERL SR2CROWC/A/2.

33 O’?Hara, Water, e.g. pp. 66-67, 89. 34 On ‘ordinary’ walking, see e.g. Lorimer, ‘Walking’, 20-21.

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Clare Hickman and Glen O'Hara

many years of joining together sequential rights of way so that they made up a single route with one identity.*° From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, as they became established, those conscious ‘ways’ often became planned and man- aged sites of leisure, heavily signposted and interpreted heritage trails which saw walkers strongly governed and directed. The sense of place involved was often flattened and homogenised — in terms of the Pennine Way, for instance (completed in 1965), or the South West Coast Path (finished in 1978), both of which passed through areas with their own very distinct identities not captured by the phrases ‘the Pennines’ or ‘the South West’.*°

As such, many of these long-distance routes are part of the highly com- modified tourist culture of the post-Fordist economy: an entire industry exists to attract walkers to these routes, and to assist them while they are there. Nu- merous glossy guidebooks tell consumers about exactly that handful of ‘great walks’ they should take before they die.*” A whole industry of trail guides has hugely expanded the colour, coverage and detail of the National Trails that have been constructed since the 1960s (though walking guides themselves can be dated well back into the nineteenth century). These are termed “The Great Walking Trails’ in the publicity material covering England and Wales, or ‘Scotland’s Great Trails’ for that country.** Other states have their own ver- sions, for instance New Zealand’s ten ‘Great Walks’.*?

‘The idea of what eventually became fifteen ‘Ways’ or ‘Paths’ across England and Wales came, more often than not, to mean important paths, trails that might be long in terms of distance, historically ‘important’ or revealing of a key moment of change or historical note — of local or regional import, perhaps, as well as national. This was in contrast to many formal and official arguments for the creation of long-distance trails. When in 1967 the Ministry of Housing consulted on proposed routes for The Ridgeway Walk that included a novel footpath along the Chiltern escarpment, the proposed new route was declined on the basis that the Icknield Way was preferred. This, the CROW minutes reveal, was thought to offer a ‘broad unmetalled track of historic interest and

35 Geo. 6 Ch. 49, National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (51) (1)-(5), https://www. legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/12-13-14/97/enacted (Accessed 23 March 2021).

36 See the radical views of Peter Howard and David Pinder, focusing on ideas of social class encoded in ‘heritage’, as well as tourist car use and access: Howard and Pinder, ‘Cultural Heritage’, esp. 63-66.

37 For instance Watkins and Jones, Unforgettable Walks.

38 ‘National Trails — The Great Walking Trails’, https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/en_GB/trails/ (Ac-

cessed 20 Jan. 2021); ‘Scotland’s Great Trails’, https://www.scotlandsgreattrails.com/ (Accessed 20 Jan. 2021).

39 ‘Great Walks of New Zealand’, https://www.newzealand.com/uk/feature/great-walks-of-new-zealand/ (Accessed 20 Jan. 2021).

67 2. Delineating the Landscape

giving good and unobstructed views all along the way over the Oxfordshire Plain’. Here a preservationist rather than historicist ideology was to the fore. Although the minutes suggest that only part of the Icknield Way was on the Definitive Map at that point, it was the influence of views taking in the historic countryside that took priority.

Here there were clearly debates around historical importance, but those in the end prioritised amenity and beauty, related to — but not necessarily always part of — the historical character of these trails themselves. The vistas offered, presumably for the benefit of the leisure walker, were given as much weight as the historical importance of the footpath. On many occasions, too, different meanings of ‘history’ and ‘heritage’ are attached to trails of different length. Many shorter local paths possessed heritage value, but it was only to the longer ‘national’ routes that the highest heritage status was attached and historical interest could trump access to wide open rural spaces. Personal, national or political events and monuments, for instance, often boosted longer walks that could be very strongly defined as ‘historical’ — in the case, for instance, of the Hadrian’s Wall Path, Offa's Dyke, or Glyndwr’s Way.*!

Many of the more formal long-distance trails popular with planners and tourist authorities since the Second World War can — perhaps in part for these reasons — seem actually like an imposition rather than a more imaginative or creative experience. Many of Britain's long-distance trails have been experienced as an old-new experience akin to those artefacts the tourism writer David Brown calls ‘genuine fakes’: Cusack’s work on St Cuthbert’s Way, through Scotland and the North-East of England, is a good example of writings that interrogate the meaning of such simulacra of the past. On St Cuthbert’s Way, for instance, the walker is directed via a diversion to Dryburgh Abbey, a mid- twelfth-century foundation seemingly unconnected to the seventh-century St Cuthbert.” The actual experience of such trails can feel quite synthetic. When in the early 2000s Iain Sinclair began his walk out of London to follow John Clare’s famous nineteenth-century path ‘home’ to North Cambridgeshire, he found the managed trail out to the Great North Road worryingly one- dimensional: ‘our route is dispiriting: too much has been invested by outside

parties. Noticeboards offer bubblegum cartoons of local history’.**

40 Central Committee on Rights of Way Committee Meeting Minutes, Appendix E, 5 July 1967, MERL SR CPRE C/1/49/130.

41 Victoria Bell has interestingly contrasted the formal ‘heritage’ of Hadrian’s Wall with very complex personal travels to, around and by the side of it: Bell, ‘Heritage’, esp. 175-84.

42 Cusack, ‘Saint Cuthbert’s Way’, 12. 43 Sinclair, Edge, p. 141.

68

Clare Hickman and Glen O'Hara

Figure 1.

Signpost including directions for The Saints Way as well as a Cornwall County Council rights of way arrow showing the interlinked typographies of rights of way and trails. Photograph by Clare Hickman, 2019.

69

2. Delineating the Landscape

Another example of these created historic narratives to tie a series of smaller footpaths together with one overarching historic narrative is the Saints Way in Cornwall (Figure 1).

Running for 27 miles from Padstow to Fowey, this Way is signalled as having historic significance through its distinctive Celtic cross way marking signs. Despite many claims, including the idea on the British Pilgrimage Trust’s website that it ‘follows the probable route of early Christian travellers making their way from Ireland and Wales to Brittany and the European mainland’, even the Trust admits that the Way itself was really constructed as a coher- ent trail only in the 1980s. The local men involved were Cliff Townes and Alf Fookes from Luxulyan, who, in 1984, ‘uncovered a number of elaborate granite stiles near the village and interested the Co-operative Retail Services Community Project in carrying out clearance work in the parish’.” The role of the local council with an eye on tourism, and the use of community project funds for leisure-based projects, are all evident in the foreword to the booklet describing the Way published in 1991. In this the Chairman of the Transport Services Sub-committee, W.R. Husking, stated that:

Long-distance paths, such as this, are never complete. They continue to develop over the years as they are ‘discovered’ by more and more people and their routes are improved and altered with changing circumstances and opportunities. The County Council is com- mitted to a policy of providing an expanding network of recreational paths throughout the county ... The path is now there to be enjoyed by one and all.“

‘There is of course the argument that the route goes past many ancient and religious sites in the county and the Bishop of Truro in a preface to the same booklet was happy to expand on this to create his own religious meaning for the route: ‘pilgrimaging, as the Celtic Saints who came here from Wales, Brittany and Ireland knew, was the experience of and for a lifetime ... hidden behind it all is the mystery of St Petroc and his followers down the ages who beckon us to tread in their footsteps, and see the things that they saw.’*” Again we can see the creation of a historical narrative which argues for a deep spiritual idea

44 British Pilgrimage Trust, ‘Cornish Saints’Way’, https://britishpilgrimage.org/portfolio/cornish-saints- way/?gclid=CjwKCAiA4rG CBhAQEiwAelVtilJ8rCO6txMVNeci3aF'pCfHst4ZcoG9_BmGmqce- qKdldp364jxzITGWhoCKPAQAvD_BwE (accessed 23 March 2021).

45 Also published in ‘Saints Way’, Magazine of the Cornwall Wildlife Trust 73 (Summer 1997): 25, available at https://www.chycor.co.uk/wild-cornwall/sum97/page3.htm (accessed 23 March 2021).

46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

70 Clare Hickman and Glen O'Hara

of following in the footsteps of others and the development of a story that connects together a series of disparate paths running across the land.

Many people find deep meaning in the so-called ‘constructed’ historic trail. ‘The emphasis we place here on their deliberate creation is not intended to specify their nature too closely, still less to engage in pejorative rhetoric about such trails when compared to others. Ursula Martin has written about her contemplation of life with a cancer diagnosis, very slowly traversing the 224-mile-long Severn Way from Shrewsbury to Bristol. The Severn Way is an unassuming, low-key path along canals and rivers, across fields and hills, and through small towns. It does not involve dramatic sweeps through the landscape, or a very strong atmosphere that can be attached to a particular history. ‘Constructed’ histories can blend together these cadences, while walkers themselves add others.** Perhaps the best example of this trend in pathway writing is the bestselling work of Raynor Winn, who reacted to being made homeless by walking England’s South West Coast Path. For Winn, as for Martin, the point of the walk was not the ‘historic’ nature or infrastructure on or around the National Trail, but the effect of being immersed in process: ‘our feet instinctively followed the path, drawn west on the dusty

umbilical cord that was allowing us to grow, unseen, in our strip of wilderness’.”

Conclusions

Experiencing English and Welsh rights of way in the middle years of the twentieth century certainly did not emphasise pathmaking as historical cura- tion, still less make it part of the more recent and commodified heritage boom. Instead, the practical, the local, the voluntary and the collective were to the fore — creating a number of fascinating crosscurrents that help us to understand what rights of way were supposed to mean at that time. These delineations once more point backwards in time, as well as forwards. There had been collective, ‘national’ markers of intentional government policy since at least the nine- teenth century, when the propaganda of the Commons Preservation Society and individual Parliamentarians all called for the emblematic River Thames — which The Times called ‘a national pleasure-ground’— to be bordered by a free towpath along its entire length. The National Footpaths Preservation Society (later one of CROW’s founders) had in 1888 already called on civic society, in the words of the social reformer and co-founder of the National Trust Octavia Hill, ‘to preserve for our countrymen and women and their children one of the great common inheritances to which they as English citizens are born — the

48 Martin, One Woman, pp. 27, 31, 33. 49 Winn, Salt Path, pp. 119,125.

71 2. Delineating the Landscape

footpaths of their native country’.’

In this chapter, we have explored the manifold, overlapping and unstable ideas that informed this pluralistic effort at planning both old and new path- ways. Legal forms, precedent, historical use (including oral and cartographic evidence), formal heritage and ideas about ‘history’ ranging from constant use to national and regional ‘identity’ all played a role — but just as much as the practical problems of drawing up a formal definitive map, they also demon- strated the persisting, confusing dilemmas involved in situating rights of way. This was another reason why CROW’s efforts were frustrated, though they allow us a precious insight into how rights of way were perceived. The catego- ries we have chosen here are hardly definitive, and could be joined by many others that overlap and intermix: one might for instance distinguish between analyses issuing out of physical planning, pluralist negotiation, amenity or consumerism. There are likely many more ways to investigate both personal and organisational memories and archives.

Many rights of way may have become ordered, guided and in some places marketised. But as the debates illuminated in this chapter demonstrate, their meanings are always contested and in flux. They can draw their meaning from the very recent legal past; emerge from contest and argument, sometimes involving fierce debate; or (more recently) can be constructed by planners as part of the leisure economy. That still allows a space for the embodied and embedded body in movement, allowing users to become more reflective and reflexive — just as pilgrims on the Santiago de Compostela can closely approach some of the teachings of St Augustine as they toil along their way, imagining past, present and future together.*! These histories are plural, rooted not only in the legal and political but in individuals’ use and experience as they interact with any path, as Martin’s and Winn’s works demonstrate.

Academics’ recent attention has therefore rightly been focused on the ways in which these three meanings are blended. Morag Rose’s practical work unpackaging experiences of the ‘everyday’ urban landscape, critically match- ing perhaps its multifaceted post-capitalist nature, is but one example.” As Christopher Tilley has commented, introducing the work of Mark Edmonds on movement in and across the Lake District:

The temporalities of landscape are multiple and scaled. They reside in mountains and hills, rivers and forests, roads and paths, people and activities and events, monuments and

50 Readman, Storied Ground, pp. 282-84, 125. 51 See Slavin, ‘Santiago de Compostela’, esp. 5-6. 52 Rose, ‘Pedestrian Practices’, pp. 211-29.

72 Clare Hickman and Glen O'Hara

memorials, interpretations and reinterpretations ... Landscape histories are entangled, messy, contested and directly implicated in contemporary struggles for access and rights to use and enjoy the land.’

It is clear that, similarly, there is much more to say about the historical meaning of English and Welsh rights of way in the modern era — using their creation and management to open up questions of legal, political and individual understandings of national, regional and personal history.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Re- search Council [grant reference AH/V00509X/1].

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Chandler, J.A., Explaining Local Government: Local Government in Britain since 1800 (Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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Colla, M., “The Spectre of the Present: Time, Presentism and the Writing of Contemporary History’, Contemporary European History 30 (1) (2021): 124-35.

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GregoryJ.andS. Spooner, ‘Public Rights of Way and Countryside Access in Norfolk 1880-1960’, Journal of Historical Geography 74 (2021), 10-27.

Hodson, Y., ‘Ordnance Survey and the Definitive Map of Public Rights of Way of England and Wales’, The Cartographic Journal 39 (2) (2002): 101-24.

Howard, P. and D. Pinder. ‘Cultural Heritage and Sustainability in the Coastal Zone: Experi- ences in South-West England’, Journal of Cultural Heritage 4 (1) (2003): 57-68.

Lorimer, H., ‘Walking: New Forms and Spaces for Studies of Pedestrianism’, in T: Cresswell and P. Merriman (eds), Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 31-46.

Martin, U., One Woman Walks Wales: A 3,700 Mile Journey Round, Through and Across Wales (Dinas Powys: Honno Press, 2018).

Moran, J., On Roads: A Hidden History (London: Profile Books, 2009).

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O’Hara, G., The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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CHAPTER 3.

APPROPRIATED HERITAGE? ACCESS CAMPAIGNS, TRESPASS, AND LOCAL RIGHTS IN EARLY-TWENTIETH CENTURY UPLAND ENGLAND AND AUSTRIA.

Ben Anderson

Introduction

In 1908, recreational access to rural space came before no less than three European Parliaments. In Britain, Liberal MP Charles Trevelyan (1870-1958) revived James Bryce’s Access to Mountains Bill, broadening it to England and Wales. In the newly-democratised Austrian House of Deputies, Social Democrats called to end path closures in Alpine territories; and in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies, representatives of the conservative Deutsche und Oesterreichische Alpenverein and socialist Touristenverein ‘Die Naturfreunde’ (Naturfreunde) demanded that State Forest Officials prioritise tourists and paths over hunters and quarry.’ All three bids to upend the land-use of Europe’s uplands failed, but the British and Central- European movements were strikingly similar in other ways too. They were both formed of predominantly male walkers, climbers and trespassers, from relatively diverse social backgrounds, led by organised outdoor leisure movements. Both built on existing traditions of rural transgression and protest, but argued for a relatively new right of recreation located in the urban and national. Both faced entrenched hunting interests with significant con- nections to political processes and inherited landed interests, opposed through acts of both individual and organised trespass.” Both offered — in the Scottish/ British Access to Mountains Bills since James Bryce’s 1884 original, the 1924 Law of Property Act, and Arthur Lowy/Lenhoft’s Der Verbotene Weg |The Forbidden Path] — carefully constructed legal methods to solving the access

1 Hansard: HC Deb 15.05.1908 vol. 188 cc1439-523; ‘Der Verbotene Weg [The Forbidden Path], Der Naturfreund: Mitteilungen des Touristen-Vereins “Die Naturfreunde’ in Wien |The Friend of Nature: Newsletter of the Rambling-Club “The Friends of Nature’ in Vienna] 12 (4) (1908): 83-84; ‘Der Alpenverein in der bayrischen Kammer der Abgeordneten [The Alpine Club in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies]’, Mitteilungen des Deutschen und Oesterreichischen Alpenvereins [Newsletter of the German and Austrian Alpine Club] 34 (11) (1908): 153-54.

2 On Kinder Scout, see Hey, Peak District, pp. 273-309. On Austria, see G. Aigner, ‘Ein vereiteltes Wegverbot [A Thwarted Path Closure]’, Naturfreund 13 (6) (1909): 131-32 (131); ‘Der verbotene Weg’, Naturfreund 16 (1912), 246.

PATHWAYS: 74-96 doi: 10.3197/63787710662654.ch03

75 3. Appropriated Heritage?

problem, methods which prioritised recreational resources over both existing agricultural production and the rights of rural communities.’

Howaccess campaigns achieved this reinvention of locally-held, rural resource rights as nationally-held, urban recreational ones is the subject of this chapter.* It argues that trespass had a central role, as a form of protest that enabled largely urban-based communities of walkers and climbers to assert a claim to heritages of rural land use, resistance and custom that might justify public, urban access for recreation. Yet at least some trespassers also sought an understanding of local environments, politics and culture with whom they felt a close connection. They embodied the tensions of access campaigns that advocated for the recreational rights of a largely urban population, but could only be successful by working alongside rural communities and their differing priorities.

This chapter examines the ambivalent position of trespassers and access campaigners towards the local people whose rights and heritage they drew on to assert their claims.’ In England, this provides a counterpoint to histories stretching through the mid-nineteenth century and foregrounding urban politi- cal space and resources alongside recreational access.° Urban campaign groups supported locally-led popular protests with roots in older traditions of enforcing customary rights, or acted for subaltern groups whose lives on the urban periph- ery included the use of nearby land for entertainment, liaison and politics.’ As Anthony Taylor has demonstrated, rural landscape concerns intersected with largely-urban political difference — a pattern we can find repeated amongst turn- of-the-century outdoors organisations.* In this earlier period, access campaigns integrated practices, objectives and traditions that cannot be reduced to either ‘urban or ‘rural’.” Yet, by the late-nineteenth century at the latest, the city was

3 ‘A Bill to Secure to the Public Access to Mountains and Moorlands in Scotland’, Parliament: House of Commons 122 (London, 1884); L. Chubb, “The Law of Property Act, 1925. (Provisions for the Protection of Commons.)’, Journal of the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society 1 (1) (1927): 7-13 (8-9); A. Lenhoff-Lowy, ‘Der Verbotene Weg. Ein juristische Versuch [The Forbidden Path: A Legal Commentary’, Naturfreund 13 (7-8) (1909): 144-52 and 177-82. See Readman, ‘James Bryce’, pp. 287-318. Many thanks to Dr. Katrina Navickas for her help.

4 See Bradley, ‘Green Belt’, 629-701; McDonagh and Griffin, ‘Occupy!’, 1-10. For other uses of common land in the late-nineteenth century, see Howkins, ‘English Commons’, 107-32; Howkins,

Death of Rural England, pp. 104-11. 5 See also chapters by Readman and O’Hara and Hickman in this volume. 6 Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place.

Cowell, ‘Berkhamsted Common, 145-61; D. Killingray, ‘Knole Park’, 63-79; Baigent, ‘Religion, Theology and the Open Space Movement’, 31-58. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, Readman, Svoried Ground, pp. 154-94.

8 Taylor, “Commons-Stealers”, 383-407. See Anderson, Being Modern, pp. 26-30. 9 Taylor, Claim on the Countryside, p.5; Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, p. 304.

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a core element of rambling identity — it was urban work patterns, urban living standards and urban environments that walkers routinely hoped to escape; it was urban modernity that walking in the countryside was often understood as supporting, and urban forms of organisation that dominated its movements.’° A distinctly urban identity, in other words, was a core element of both organised walking and access campaigns by the late-nineteenth century and, by the early- twentieth, much of the material they produced carefully avoided rooting itself in these earlier histories of protest, even as it sought to instrumentalise heritages of commons and public rights."’ However complex and relational difference was on the ground, walkers, climbers and campaigners wove distinctions between ‘urban and ‘rural’ into the fabric of outdoors leisure culture and, for this reason, the place of rural inhabitants in that culture requires closer analysis.

In Austria, it might be expected that these relations were even more pro- nounced. The rapid growth of Vienna in the late-nineteenth century, combined with the railway connectedness of its Alpine hinterlands, meant that personal connections between Alpine villages and the capital were more likely, though this was, to be sure, true of almost every part of the Empire.” So too, Austria’s peasantry had good reason to celebrate the 1848 revolutions, whose most sig- nificant permanent social policy was the Bauernbefreiung, ending the last vestiges of feudal relations in areas such as the Alps. Yet there are few signs of anything