The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths Read Online Free Page B

fought and even harder won, their status growing with every re-telling. Each story has the full roster of Victorian melodrama heroes and villains: moustache-twirling landowners cackling with evil glee as they clout a couple of peasants round the ear and shoot a few more defenceless grouse, pitted against salt-of-the-earth workers who just want five minutes gasping fresh air on’t moors before they drop dead from a lifetime of eating and breathing nobbut soot.
    Being bolshie buggers is hardwired into north-westerners, and they take enormous pride in the fact. They also take momentous pride in their landscape, the tussocky moors and rain-lashed hills that loom large as the backdrop to almost all of the region’s towns and cities. Put the two together, and you get a swank that threatens to burst, it’s that bloated with decades of padding. How did anyone ever think that they were going to keep these people off their hills? You might as well try and stop them shouting, or shitting.
    To understand the place of the path in our national make-up, a visit to the north-west is essential. It is not just a casual visit, however, some light Sunday afternoon stroll, topped off with a cup of tea you could trot a mouse across. To go to the northwest seeking answers to the many questions about our relationship with paths and landscape is to embark upon nothing short of a pilgrimage, a search for some kind of holy grail that can only possibly be found here. This is where paths become no less than stairways to heaven, and I was genuinely excited by the prospect of seeing the paths soaked in the blood and sweat of those who’d fought for the right to walk them.
    The starting point of my north-west pilgrimage had to be the very right of way that’s generally accepted as the birthplace of the modern footpath preservation movement. I’d like to report that, as would befit its historical stature, it’s a glorious hilltop track clambering up to a panorama of eight counties, or, failing that, at least a stony path inching its way up through the mist alongside a peaty burn. It’s neither. In fact, it’s a gentle trot across a golf course, sandwiched between two other golf courses, in one of those outer parts of Greater Manchester that would far prefer to call itself Cheshire. The story, as is the case with nearly all tales of footpath derring-do in this part of the world, is indeed a tale of class war, but not the brawny, horny-handed version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – it’s much more Keeping Up Appearances .
    For this is Flixton, in the true-blue borough of Trafford, a gin’n’Jag suburb of smart semis, Tudorbethan piles, tanning salons and the languid air of somewhere that doesn’t have to fret itself overly much, except perhaps about a broken nail extension. Slap in the heart of this leafiest of suburbs are the 218 acres of Flixton Park, once common land threaded by numerous well-walked paths and tracks. Today it’s a golf course and public park, its primroses and pansies mathematically spaced and much enjoyed by strolling families and smiling couples. Even the gangs of hoodies are polite and quiet. Yet between these two incarnations as public property, Flixton Park closed in on itself, shut itself away and inadvertently created the hydra-headed monster of the rights of way protest movement.
    The Flixton Footpath Battle hissed and spat for three years, from 1824 to 1827. Ralph ‘Vegetable’ Wright provoked it, after making big money in agriculture and ploughing it into the creation of a small stately home, Flixton House, in the first few years of the nineteenth century. This flat, fertile plain southwest of Manchester, a world away from the mills and smokestacks, was already dotted with medieval mansions: Flixton House, and Wright himself, were the Johnny-come-lately neighbours to Shaw Hall (dating from 1305), Davyhulme Hall (c.1150), Newcroft Hall (c.1270) and Urmston Hall (c.1350). Flush with his fine new house and