Reading multiple choice

When Malcolm Pennock retired from his job as a surveyor, his wife bought him a pair of walking boots and, he suspects, hoped they would keep him out of the house. They did, though not quite in the way she intended. Over the following twelve years, Pennock walked, measured and mapped more than three hundred forgotten public footpaths in his county: routes that had once been in daily use but had disappeared from modern maps, from local memory and, in many cases, from the ground itself.

The scale of the loss surprised him. Many paths were never formally recorded when official maps of rights of way were drawn up in the middle of the last century, often because the people responsible for listing them were overworked or uninterested or, in a few cases, landowners themselves. A path that is not on the official map is not necessarily lost in law, but it is vulnerable: within a generation nobody walks it, within two it is ploughed over or fenced off, and the evidence that it ever existed retreats into archives that very few people have the patience to visit.

Pennock has the patience. His method, as he describes it, is ‘half detective work and half trespassing, legally speaking’. He starts in the county record office, comparing old estate maps, enclosure documents and parish records for signs of a route: a dotted line here, a reference to ‘the church way’ there. Only when he has built up a convincing paper trail does he go out to look. Often there is nothing to see. Sometimes there is a gap in a hedge exactly where the documents say it should be, or a stile half buried in brambles, and he describes these moments with a delight that seems slightly out of proportion to a few rotten planks of wood. ‘It’s like hearing a voice,’ he says. ‘Someone made that, because people needed to get from one place to another. It deserves not to vanish.’

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm. Some farmers regard the reopening of paths across their land with deep suspicion, and Pennock has received his share of angry letters and, on one occasion, the close attention of a large dog. Yet he is notably even-handed on the subject. Most landowners, he insists, are reasonable once they understand what is being proposed, and a few have become enthusiastic allies, pointing him towards old routes he would never have found. The difficulty, as he sees it, is less hostility than inertia: reopening a path through the legal process can take years, and many applications simply stall.

There is a deadline, too. Under current legislation, historic routes that have not been officially recorded by a certain date may lose their protection permanently. Campaigners have argued that the date is unrealistic given the volume of research still to be done, and Pennock, characteristically, refuses to be drawn into the politics. ‘I’m not interested in fighting anyone,’ he says. ‘I’m interested in getting the evidence right. If the evidence is good, the argument tends to make itself.’

It would be easy to see all this as a harmless eccentricity, the sort of retirement project that fills a garage with box files. Pennock is cheerfully aware of that view and does little to discourage it. But spend an afternoon walking with him and a more serious purpose becomes apparent. The paths he restores are, for the most part, unremarkable: they link one village to the next, run alongside streams, and cut corners off roads that have become too dangerous to walk along. They are, in other words, the ordinary connective tissue of rural life, and their disappearance has made the countryside both less accessible and less coherent.

As we walk, he stops at the edge of a field where, according to an eighteenth-century map, a path once crossed to a mill that no longer exists. There is nothing there now but grass. He stands for a minute, then makes a note in a small, battered book. ‘Not this one, probably,’ he says. ‘But someone should know it was here.’