The Long Walk Back to the Coast
An old pilgrim route, closed for two generations, has been reopened by volunteers. Walking it reveals a landscape reorganised around its absence.
The path is older than every road it crosses and it shows, mostly in the form of arguments. Over two hundred kilometres it meets a motorway twice, a rail line four times and a very large distribution facility once, and in each case the resolution is a compromise that would have been unnecessary had anyone been consulted in 1961.
It was closed, in the way these things are closed, without ever being closed. A landowner blocked one section. A bridge failed and was not replaced. A council removed a waymark during a signage rationalisation. Within about fifteen years the route existed only on old maps and in the memory of people who had walked it as children.
The reopening
The restoration took nineteen years and was accomplished almost entirely through correspondence. The volunteer group behind it describes the work as ninety per cent archival: establishing, from tithe maps, parish records and a remarkable quantity of Victorian litigation, that a public right of way had existed and had never been formally extinguished.
We did not win a single argument about access. We won arguments about paperwork, and the access followed.
A route through a country that moved on
Walking it now is an exercise in reading a landscape against its grain. The path connects places that were connected — market towns, a river crossing, a monastery site, a harbour — in an order that made complete sense when the connections were economic. Almost none of those relationships survive. The market town buys nothing from the harbour. The river crossing is bypassed by a bridge four kilometres upstream.
The effect is not melancholy, or not only. It is closer to seeing an old wiring diagram overlaid on a rebuilt house. The logic is legible, and entirely obsolete, and the walking is very good.
On the last day the path drops through gorse onto a beach that has no facilities, no car park and no sign indicating what has just been completed. The volunteers debated a marker and voted against one. A person who has walked two hundred kilometres, the minutes record, does not need to be told they have arrived.