Flindt on Friday: ‘Lost’ rights of way may lead up garden path

Listen to Charlie Flindt read his column, or see the text below.

Surrounding this farm are half a dozen or so big and frightfully grand houses with non-farming occupiers.

(Curiously, many of these houses used to be small working farms, but they’ve vanished over the past 40 CAP years – which is odd.)

My relationship with these neighbours is never going to be described as “heartwarming”; our mantelpiece remains decidedly uncluttered with dinner party invitations from them.

It hasn’t helped, of course, that they and I have clashed repeatedly about access to my fields.

See also: How to protect farmland against new public rights of way

The recent campaign to stop farmers saying “get orf moi laand” could have been written specially for me – although it missed out the vital preamble: “I don’t care if you do live in ‘The Manor’, so…”

“I’m sure you are a knight, but…”

“Yes, this is National Trust land, but so is my bedroom, and you’re not allowed there, so…” (All these are genuine exchanges I’ve had, by the way.)

My ostentatious eye-rolling at their attempts to find reverse in their Audi SUVs when we meet in a sunken lane probably hasn’t helped.

The other reason you won’t find us sharing a canapé and a Chateau Belgrave 2005 over a mahogany dining table, or even propping up the bar at the Flowerpots, is that we have nothing in common.

As tenant farmers, we’ve never done house prices, or been interested in London tittle-tattle. Meanwhile, falling Hagberg numbers and entitlement decoupling would mean nothing to them.

Mutual understanding

But now, at last, we have something in common: the footpath hunters are on the march. They are on a quest to rediscover all the rights of way “lost” when the definitive maps of the countryside were drawn all those years ago.

They don’t accept that what’s on the “official” maps now is right and fair; there are thousands of miles of paths that they feel are everyone’s birthright.

Now, as someone who loves footpaths (and those who stick to them), I can hardly moan if more of them are found and reinstated, but I confess that when I went onto the Ramblers’ excellent website and found their “Don’t Lose Your Way” page, there was an outbreak of “What? A path? There? Really?”

But they’ve done their homework, and got it all there in black and white; all those paths from the end of the 19th century, marked clear as day: “footpath”.

Back then, they had a purpose, of course; people used them for work, travel, getting to and from church. Not much of it was recreational.

But that’s all irrelevant these days, as Agenda 2030 peels back the concept of privacy in the countryside.

Housing crisis

I scrolled left and right and found that some of the lost paths go through housing estates – and even through houses themselves – in Winchester, which should cause a lively debate.

Then I returned a bit closer to home, and couldn’t help having a quiet chuckle. Some of my neighbours, having adjourned expensively from London for a bit of rural peace and quiet, have got “lost” paths right through their pony paddocks.

Finally, we have some common ground, as their acres, too, are considered by some to be “common ground”.

Welcome, good neighbour, to the world of starting a conversation with “Can I help? You look lost.”

I will invite my new chums to join me and neighbour Robert in the Flowerpots for some lessons on how to steer the more militant trespasser folk back to the footpaths once they’ve strayed.

It can take hours to master “moi” instead of “my”. You need several pints of Perridge to get the enunciation just right – or just one pint of Chateau Belgrave. Not on my tab, though.