WALKING
Ancient footpaths hollowed by our ancestors’ feet over thousands of years are under threat – and we only have seven years to record them on maps
I meet Jack Cornish just outside Oxleas Wood, the place where, as a teenager, he fell in love with walking. I can see why. It doesn’t look promising if you’re passing through in a car. We’re on Shooter’s Hill, the scruffy outer edge of southeast London, just off the South Circular, an area heavy with multi-lane traffic, and lorries thundering towards Dover. Inside the woods, though, is another world. You’ve got 77 hectares of forest that’s at least 8,000 years old.
The muddy footpath we follow is the one Jack used to take to school. It’s marked as a bridleway on the 1890 Ordnance Survey map, but was probably created by animals and human feet long before that. Just around the corner, surrounded by 1930s houses, there’s a Bronze Age burial mound, Shrewsbury Barrow. The A207 running through these woods was the Romans’ road, Watling Street, which took them from the ports of Kent to London and beyond. It was the route that Chaucer’s pilgrims probably took to Canterbury and has remained a key path into London for centuries.
The woods created the perfect hiding place for highwaymen – and when they were caught and executed, their bodies were hanged on Shooter’s Hill as a grisly warning. ‘This is also one of the highest points on the gateway to London from the coast,’ says Jack. ‘There are Second World War defences, spigot points and gun emplacements buried in the woods. This is a place I know well but all this history, all these layers, are on everyone’s doorsteps. This history of where we walked is like a great open-air museum of movement.’
Jack is head of paths at Britain’s walking charity, The Ramblers. Part of his job is to seek out footpaths that aren’t on modern maps and add them so that they can be protected as legal rights of way. There are 144,000 miles of bridleways and footpaths that are public rights of way in England and Wales, but it’s believed there are far more – over 49,000 miles, walked for centuries and still used but unmapped. The government has set a cut-off date of January 2031, after which any pathways unrecorded will not be protected. ‘It’s such a strange way of doing it,’ says Jack. ‘We don’t say, “Every historic building needs to be listed by x date and those that aren’t can be pulled down”.’
In his new book, The Lost Paths, a fascinating meander around Britain, he makes the case that paths should be protected not just for their practical purposes but because they transport us back in time. They’re our route through history. ‘Paths are overlooked,’ he says. ‘It’s easy to think about protection when we think about Ston
