The View
INTERVIEW
From overgrown lanes to forgotten pilgrimage routes, author Jack Cornish is on a mission to lead us down The Lost Paths.
EARLY ON IN The Lost Paths, Jack Cornish says something that sounds obvious when you think about it, yet also feels like the most eye-opening fact I’ve read all year.
The first footpaths were created by animals.
They were simple desire lines, trodden or bashed out by aurochs, deer or even mammoths, to connect one food or water source or breeding ground with another. We just followed.
It’s the first of many remarkable reveals and ruminations in Jack’s book. Subtitled A History of How We Walk from Here to There, it’s the story of the footpaths of England and Wales, conjuring aeons of human history into a riveting story illustrated by on-the-ground walks in places where the tale comes richly to life.
As Head of Paths for the Ramblers, Jack was the perfect person to write it.
“Every footpath is a story,” says Jack.
“On a national level, it’s the story of drove roads and pilgrimage routes and trading superhighways. But on the local level there are a million stories too; about how we move from place to place and why.”
His journey leads from drove roads in Dorset to quarrymen’s paths in Eryri/Snowdonia; from link paths in Crawley to salt paths in Droitwich. He explores the trespass movement and the ‘mystery hike’ craze of the 30s; reveals why Laurie Lee and George Orwell went ‘tramping’; discovers the hidden secrets of our New Towns and follows a pilgrimage path to the beautifully named Devon village of Chittlehampton.
“I want to celebrate the ordinariness of the network; that it’s everywhere, not just in national parks and other famously beautiful places,” he explains. “So I wanted to go to places like Crawley and Northampton and the densest parts of London because they all have these extraordinary stories of hidden, forgotten or lost paths.”
Perhaps the most important part of the title is the word ‘lost’. Jack is the architect of the Ramblers’ flagship Don’t Lose Your Way project, dedicated to discovering and claiming footpaths which have been used from antiquity but have dropped off the official register of rights of way. Since the project began, tens of thousands of Ramblers volunteers have been scouting for these lost lines, uncovering and claiming some 49,000 miles of forgotten tracks, twittens and trods.
The book explores why they got lost in the first place (the reasons incl
