The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker Page A

still plenty of reactionary councils today, largely composed of the descendants of men who originally enclosed beauty spots for their own convenience . . . Frankly, I do not trust them.’
    She had a point. Under this legislation, it was up to the county councils to draw up definitive maps of the rights of way under their jurisdiction. As most of the cities operated as county boroughs of their own, the elected representatives of Manchester or Liverpool, for instance, had no say in the definitive maps of Lancashire; this was a job solely for the rural authority, despite the fact that the majority of walkers likely to benefit from the legislation would be people from the nearby big towns and cities. With the rural councils heavily weighted towards the landowning squire, both politically and in terms of actual membership, it was inevitable that the definitive maps, when they finally came, would significantly under-represent just how many well-used paths there were on their patch. The rights of way that still shudder to an inexplicable halt at old county or parish boundaries demonstrate the point.
    Another new female Labour MP, whose victory in Blackburn had also not been widely predicted, made a huge mark on the debate. Unlike Mrs Ayrton Gould, past retirement age and shortly to lose her seat and die soon after, Barbara Castle was one of the brightest young things of the new Parliament and went on to become the foremost Labour matriarch of the twentieth century. Even into her nineties, she was vocal in needling Tony Blair’s government into remembering its heritage; Gordon Brown called her ‘my mentor and my tormentor’. To her, the bill was a major factor ‘in the social revolution that is now taking place’, for it ‘marks the end of the disinheritance of the people of this country from enjoyment of the countryside’.
    Mrs Castle was particularly excited about the new Long Distance Paths (LDPs) that would arise from the legislation. The previous year, she had been one of a group of Labour MPs (Hugh Dalton, the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, was another) to walk sections of the proposed Pennine Way, in the company of its creator, Tom Stephenson. They became a regular walking group under Stephenson’s tutelage, and explored many of his putative new paths, in Pembrokeshire, the Lake District, the Cheviots and the Brecon Beacons. ‘I should like to think that some of the foot-slogging the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster [Dalton] and some of my honourable friends and I did last May has blazed the trail in that regard,’ she announced triumphantly.
    Good-natured references to Tom Stephenson’s walking group cropped up repeatedly throughout the debate. Fred Willey, another of their number, said that he’d found it rather less ‘blazing the trail’, as Barbara Castle had put it, but that ‘personally I found it more like a forced route march, and I understand that we are still remembered in the locality as members of “Dalton’s Circus”.’ The patrician Westmorland Tory William Fletcher-Vane laconically described it as ‘that deplorable event . . . when the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, waving, I believe, a red silk handkerchief, and followed by about half a dozen admirers, trooped all along the Pennines . . . what my constituents said, particularly about the troop of photographers who followed them, is nobody’s business.’
    Reading the debate made me think how much we could do with a few more politicians pulling on their walking boots today. In the past 20 years, we’ve heard of very few, or at least any that have continued walking once the press photographers have left. On the Labour benches there have been former leader John Smith, ex-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Chris Smith and Dennis Canavan, a salutary roll call when you remember that half of that group died of massive heart attacks in their fifties (Cook while walking in the Scottish mountains). On the Conservative side, there’s former