\n<\/p>\n
The last few years have seen a revival in campaigning for greater and deeper public access to the countryside. Thousands of people volunteer across the country to protect and improve public access \u2013 clearing vegetation, making more routes accessible for more people, and \u2018fixing the fells\u2019. A new generation of campaigners have joined the ranks of long-standing activists to seek, and to fight for, an expanded freedom to roam. Organisations like the Ramblers and the Right to Roam campaign want us to be able to explore more and have the opportunity to freely wander through woodland, along riversides, and over the grasslands of England.<\/p>\n
Roaming freely, we are invited to step off the path, but the importance of these linear routes \u2014 of the ways old and new \u2014 mustn\u2019t get lost in the noise and excitement of all these fresh possibilities. For many, if not most people, paths are the gateway to the outdoors. They provide certainty, direction, and the reassuring marks of walkers who have gone before. They facilitate access for those who are unable to clamber over gates and through uncertain ground, and they are physical guides in familiar and unfamiliar lands.<\/p>\n
In 2017, I walked from Land\u2019s End to John O\u2019Groats. On this 1,550-mile wander, I discovered corners of the country \u2014 beautiful, wonderful, and odd corners \u2014 completely new to me; experienced landscapes which soothed and others which took my breath away, and the glorious satisfaction of a challenge met. What I wasn\u2019t expecting, what took me by complete surprise, was that I would find beauty in the utility and form of the infrastructure itself \u2014 to fall in love with the hyperlocal path network, a spider\u2019s web of history laid on the land.<\/p>\n
It is this history that I journey through in my book,\u00a0The Lost Paths<\/a><\/em>. Writing\u00a0The Lost Paths<\/em>\u00a0allowed me to wander through so many parts of our island story \u2014 Saxon salt traders, the coming of the railways, the treatment of the Edwardian destitute, the eroding coast, and the preparation for Second World War invasion (to pick a few!). The paths of England and Wales \u2014 all 140,000 miles of them \u2014 hold our history. They burst with collective and individual memories.<\/p>\n But I wanted to write\u00a0The Lost Paths<\/em>\u00a0not just so that I could share my love for our paths, but as a call to arms to save our lost paths. Because there could be as many as an additional 50,000 miles of paths which are unrecorded and unprotected. At the\u00a0Ramblers<\/a>, and at organisations like the\u00a0British Horse Society<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Open Spaces Society<\/a>, thousands of volunteers are working to uncover the stories of individual paths so that they can go back on the map for future generations of walkers, cyclists, and riders.<\/p>\n So, I hope you think about buying or borrowing\u00a0The Lost Paths<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 but also getting involved in projects like\u00a0Don\u2019t Lose Your Way<\/a><\/em>\u00a0to reclaim our paths. In such a collective effort, we can be sure that, in the words of H. G. Wells:\u00a0\u2018There will be many footpaths in Utopia.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n