The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (2 page)

Then the snows came, and stayed. This perked up the experience even more, for I was clearly able to see from the footprints just how many other creatures, human and otherwise, were sharing the paths. All kinds of birds, rabbits galore, a few hares, dogs, foxes, cats and some that were intriguingly difficult to pin down. Ever since I’ve lived here, there have been occasional rumoured sightings of big cats. A few years back, the mutters swelled to a climax one spring, and whispered second- and third-hand sightings were a regular topic of almost every conversation. One day during that time, a friend and I were walking in the forest when a black shape shot across the path, paused and then vanished into the undergrowth some hundred yards ahead. We both inhaled sharply and squealed, ‘What was
that
?’ It hadn’t much looked like a puma or panther to me, rather a wild boar, and I said so. ‘Oh thank God,’ my friend said. ‘That’s exactly what I thought, but I thought it sounded mad to say so.’ Scrutinising the snowy paw- and hoof-prints, I’ve not been able to make any out that are distinctly porcine, but there were plenty that looked thrillingly mysterious.

This being rural Wales, the cloven footprints of sheep were to be seen everywhere. Sheep paths are always a useful way of traversing rough ground, for the animals follow each other with such dependability that a groove is soon worn into a hillside or through a wood, enough to take a careful walker. In the snow, the phenomenon was even more pronounced. Little indented paths, eight or nine inches wide, were scoured deep into the white stuff, as regular and as ordered as if they’d been carved out by tyres. In fact, at first I mistook them for tyre-tracks, the remnant of some mysterious single-wheeled farm vehicle that had been paraded drunkenly through every field. I might have lived the
Escape to the Country
dream for a decade, but that’s how much of a thick townie I still am. Only after a few days of walking through countless sheep fields, and noticing many such tracks and how they were made up of hundreds of cloven-hoof indentations, did the truth dawn. Presumably, one started walking in a particular direction (the Alpha Ewe, as we’ll call her), and the others all fell in behind her, excitedly wondering where they were going. And still they follow.

As I pounded the paths and hills around, the mystery of the new signs and gates only deepened. They were everywhere, on seemingly every right of way, even those that are barely ever walked. And on those that
can’t
be walked: gates – even bridges – to nowhere. The oddest example was a sparkling new pine footbridge, straight off the shelf, gracefully spanning a small river between a dirt-track lane on the one bank and a tight thicket of brambles and pines on the other. There is an old right of way here, which, as part of my audit, I attempted to walk from the other end. It’s a soggy old holloway, but it soon vanishes altogether in the conifer plantations. On the late nineteenth-century large-scale OS maps, it was the main track along the valley, but no-one has walked or ridden it in decades, and no-one could now, however hard they tried. But they would have a lovely new bridge to not take them there.

There was a pretty clear hierarchy at work in the correlation between gates and signs as well. Evidently, the local Rights of Way officer had trotted around the local farms with a mixed bag of news. ‘On the up side,’ I could imagine him saying, spreading his fingers across an old oak table or stone wall, ‘I’ll refit every gate on every path on the farm – all free, all brand new, straight out the factory.’ Farmers like free, but they would know that there’s a catch. There always is. The down side was that they would also have to have new signs pointing out paths and bridleways that have been unsignposted – and largely unused – for generations. You get yourself shiny new fences and gates, but you also get an increase in the footfall of passing ramblers, eager to pound their newly recognised rights of way. Or not, as it seems. Although every path in the vicinity seemed to have new gates and fences, far from every one was now signed.

There was the inevitable rural hierarchy at work. The longer your family had been in the area, or the further up the local greasy pole you had shinned, the fewer signs were deemed necessary on your land. Any farm or estate owned by incomers or the recently arrived (and by recent, I mean at least second generation) was subject to the full range of signs. The older local families just got the free gates and fences. If you’re wondering how I knew whether it was locals or incomers living in every remote property I passed, there is plenty of tell-tale evidence. You don’t usually have to look further than the farm’s nameplate sign at the top of the track. Incomers have some lavish wood affair, usually embellished with a few flowers or butterflies, and hand-carved by a nice boy called Oliver. Locals generally use a vehicle number plate.

That said, almost all of the paths across the old farms were eminently walkable, and, with the help of the map and asking for the odd bit of guidance, easy to follow. They just don’t particularly want to advertise them, and I can understand that. No-one gave me any grief; quite the opposite. I had numerous illuminating, sometimes hilarious, conversations with gnarled old farmers and their pink-cheeked wives in some of the outlying valleys and up in the hills, and learned plenty of new angles on the history of the area and its fiercely self-sufficient inhabitants. Had all the paths been smooth and signposted, I could perhaps have steamed on through, imperious and impervious to the land and the people on it. As it was, and as it should be in remote rural areas like this one, I had to engage with them, and the walks were all the richer and more enjoyable for it.

In fact, outside of the forests, the only paths that were absolutely blocked were on the land not of the old farming families, but of a particular breed of incomer. Most of us rat-race refugees in an area like this fall into one of two camps: vaguely hippyish or vaguely Ukippyish, sometimes a bizarre hybrid of both. The hippies want organic veg, chickens in the yard and Enid Blyton adventures. The Ukippies want to escape the brown and black faces of their home town and hole themselves into their compound. There are strange similarities between them, for the impetus driving both groups is often the same misplaced search for a fantasy version of their own childhoods, a prospect condemned to remain for ever out of reach. They differ hugely in their approach to paths, however: the hippies embrace (sometimes, all too literally) anyone wandering across their land, the Ukippies retreat behind barbed wire and stern, monolingual English signs telling you to keep out. The fact that they have become the immigrants that they so despise at home is an irony that never seems to trouble them.

From my audit, the dubious accolade of biggest path-blockers of all went to the Forestry Commission, whose wholesale re-ordering of the local map has been little less than Stalinist in its scope and execution. Dozens of paths on the map failed to appear in reality and, often, there was no trace whatsoever of their former selves. Of course, the need for timber was desperate, especially when the Forestry Commission was created in the aftermath of the First World War. And areas like this one, with mile upon mile of thinly populated, marginal land of no great potential for crops or livestock, were obvious candidates for afforestation. As a major local industry, it swept in on the back of the slate quarries and mines just as they were juddering to the end of their working lives. Forestry was much-needed work, and real work at that too: sweaty, bloody, outdoor and bursting with the kind of manly camaraderie that makes my generation, most of whom click a mouse for a living, go a bit weak at the knees.

In the village where I live, the Forestry Commission took over an old prisoner-of-war camp and filled it with workers, their families, a kids’ playground, a village hall and community centre, a snooker club, a sports field, a library and the inevitable tin tabernacle. Events were plentiful and enthusiastic. Whist drives, am dram, jumble sales, WI meetings, eisteddfodau, parties and concerts whirled by in a cloud of gossip and giggles. In the winter, the Christmas concert was a must for all, but the big annual event was the summer gala, where folk donned fancy dress (dragging up and blacking up were especially popular) and schoolgirls were crowned as Forest Queens and paraded around on the back of logging trucks. Newspaper reports of the day make it sound like something straight out of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The lorries were decorated with ‘evergreens and flowers of the forest’, while the young Queen herself was clad in a white satin gown and a ‘fur-collared mantle of dark green – symbolic of the forests’.

The first Forest Queen was crowned in 1954, the year that the Forestry Commission took over the camp and created the village-within-a-village. Queen Blodwen was her name, a 15-year-old from a big local family. ‘This is a happy village,’ gushed the area’s lady of the manor to the county newspaper, but she was largely right, and so it remains. The local vicar went even further, thanking the Forestry Commission for stemming the exodus of locals: ‘It was true to say,’ he went on, ‘that the neighbourhood was one of the few in North Wales which was not seriously suffering from the modern rural malady of depopulation.’ Other Welsh towns and villages watching their slate industries slowly die were going the same way, but until the Commission’s money began to run out in the 1970s, our village blossomed.

Before its brief hiatus housing captured German officers, the camp had been built in the 1930s as an instructional centre for the unemployed of Birkenhead and Liverpool. They were bussed out of Merseyside and made to work for three months in the hills, blasting the new forestry roads through whatever got in their way: farms, walls, houses, woods and mile upon mile of ancient path. It goes on still today, albeit without the jobless Scousers.

For most local people, then, the Forestry Commission is seen as a benevolent force, for it gave work, self-respect, homes, high days and holidays. Arriving here long after the party ended, however, has given me a far sourer view of the Commission and its effects locally, for the blanket destruction and alteration of the landscape – the power to play at tin gods – created some serious arrogance in its protagonists. It always does.

On my bookshelves are numerous old guides to Wales. Some, when talking about this area, mention something that sounds quite dazzling, a cave called the Siambr Wmffre Goch (the Chamber of Red Humphrey). This had given its name to an obscure local stream, only a mile or so long, and it’s by that name that it appears even today on the OS map. A Ward Lock guide from the 1970s records the
siambr
as ‘a cave behind a waterfall which long served as a highwayman’s hide’ – Red Humphrey being that highwayman.
The Shell Guide to Wales
, from 1969, is a little more effusive, calling it ‘an extraordinary place’, and going into some more detail: after passing through a cluster of ash trees, you come to ‘apparently a simple, caved entrance into the hillside, but on passing through the arch you find yourself under the open sky, with a pool and a fall of water and a further cave-like formation ahead of you’.

The siambr sounded magical, like something out of a fairy story, and I’ve searched for it on a number of occasions. The valley of the little stream named after it has since been heavily forested, and it is a difficult search, necessitating either numerous scrambles and slides down sheer banks, or an attempt to walk along the stream and hop from slippery rocks to fallen timber. And all to no avail. How on earth can you lose a cave and a waterfall in a small Welsh valley?

I was keen to feature Siambr Wmffre Goch in one of my TV programmes and, having exhausted enquiries around the village, I wrote a piece asking for help for the local freesheet, delivered to all the nearby villages. Our most celebrated local naturalist got in touch to suggest we go and search for it together, as he too has always been intrigued by the siambr’s reputation. Whereas before, when I’d been searching alone, I’d wussed out at the really scary bits, with Jack it was different. The man is fearless. When I met him at the bottom of the little valley, he took one look at how ill equipped I was for a proper search, wandered over to a stout young hazel tree, lopped off a straightish branch with his knife, swiftly pruned it of all twigs and presented it to me as the ideal tool to hack our way through the thick under-growth. From tree part to bespoke walking-cum-scything stick in about 45 seconds.

Over the next few hours, we hacked, slashed and hopped our way up every last inch of that stream. Branches and brambles snapped across me, slashing my arms like a teenage goth. As Jack (a man nearly 30 years my senior) nimbly galloped between rock and tree trunk, I crashed along in his wake like a hippo chasing a gazelle. We found nothing. I was prepared for the guidebooks to have exaggerated the elfin appeal of the cave and waterfall, but to have conjured it out of thin air seemed bizarre, impossible. Jack was as mystified as I was, and we finished our day with a handshake and a solemn promise to share any information that might yet bubble to the surface.

Months later, I was walking through the next village up the valley, when an elderly man waved at me. ‘You’re the fella wanting to know about that highwayman’s cave, aren’t you?’ he wheezed in an accent as thick as Welsh rain. I nodded eagerly. ‘We blew it up,’ he said, with an air of triumph in his voice. It transpired he had been part of a team planting the trees in that valley in the early 1970s. A supply of explosives, to blast out occasional rock faces, was part of the kit, and one day they’d egged each other on to blow poor old Wmffre Goch’s hideout into the skies. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. ‘Because we could,’ he said, and shuffled off down the street.

My footpath audit had been a revelation. Within three miles of my front door, I walked nearly 70 miles of rights of way, from gloomy squelches through dank forestry to hawthorn-trimmed holloways high over the hills. I found lakes, woods, views and neighbours that I never knew existed. And I don’t think that the experience was unique simply because I live deep in the countryside. Have a look at the map of your own back yard and, unless you live in the middle of a big city (or the more agro-industrial parts of East Anglia), there will be dozens of rights of way too within your own three-mile radius.