Footpath 71 is on the definitive map, which is a legal document. It runs three quarters of a mile across a field to a hedge, and stops. I reported it as obstructed. The council came out and told me it was clear.
I report obstructed footpaths. That is the least interesting sentence I have ever written and I need it up front.
I am in a walking group, and the group has an officer for rights of way, and about eleven years ago the officer was leaving and nobody else put their hand up. So it is me. It means I get emails about barbed wire and I fill in a form on the county council's website with a grid reference and a photograph and a description, and about a third of the time something happens.
A right of way is not a suggestion.
It is on a document called the definitive map, which is a legal record held by the county, and if a path is on it then that path legally exists, and it goes on existing if a farmer ploughs it or a fence goes across it or a housing estate gets built on top of it. Once recorded, always a highway. That is the actual phrase.
Footpath 71 is on the definitive map.
I want to give you the geography properly because it matters.
It leaves a lane at a stile, crosses one field on the diagonal, and goes three quarters of a mile roughly north east to a boundary hedge between that field and the next. On the map the line reaches the hedge and stops.
That is not unusual by itself. Paths get truncated by boundary changes and by the map being drawn up in the fifties from parish evidence that was already patchy. There are hundreds of stubs like it.
What is unusual is that the path is walked.
There is a beaten line across that field. In wheat it is a clear track and in stubble it is a compacted strip and in spring the grass in it is a different colour. It is not a tractor line and it is not a deer run. It is the shape a path takes when people put their feet in it.
It goes across the field and into the hedge.
The hedge is a proper old boundary hedge, hawthorn and blackthorn with a couple of ash in it, and it is about eight feet through. There is no gap. There is no gate, no stile, no plank, no waymarker, no worn place. On the far side of it is another field and there is nothing on the far side either. No path, no track, no continuation.
The line stops at the hedge on the near side and the ground on the far side is undisturbed.
I reported it in 2017.
I filled the form in the way I always do. Grid reference, photograph, description: right of way terminates at boundary hedge with no gap or furniture, appears obstructed, please inspect.
The council came out. They do, eventually, and to be fair to them they are three people covering a county.
The response came back on the standard template and it said: officer attended, path found to be clear and in good order, no further action.
I assumed somebody had gone to the wrong field. That happens.
So I sent a follow up with a photograph of the hedge, taken standing on the path, facing the way the path goes, and you can see the beaten line running away from the camera and into the hawthorn, and you can see that there is no way through.
They replied that the officer had walked the full length of Footpath 71 on foot and found no obstruction.
I did not do anything about it for four years. Not out of fear. It went onto a list, the way things do, and stayed on it. There were fences down and a bull in a field on a path near the school and those were real. Footpath 71 was an administrative oddity.
What brought it back was Elaine.
Elaine is in the group and she is seventy one and she has walked every path in the county, and she means every path, she has a spreadsheet. She came up to me at the end of a Sunday walk and asked me, in a slightly odd way, whether I had ever done 71.
I said I had been to it. I said I had never got through it, because you cannot.
She said: I got through it.
She told me this standing in a car park with her boots in her hand and she told it flatly, and Elaine is not a person who embroiders. She is a retired radiographer and her entire manner is that of somebody reading you a result.
She said she walked it in the October of the year before. She said she came to the hedge and there was a gap, and it was an ordinary gap, the sort you get where a hedge has been laid badly or a gate has rotted away, and she stepped through it.
I asked what was on the other side.
She said: the field.
I said which field, because there is only one field on the other side of that hedge and there is nothing in it.
She said, no, the field. The one you have just walked across. She came out of the hedge and she was at the far side of the same field she had just crossed, looking at the beaten line going away from her towards the hedge she had just come through, and she had to walk it again to get back to the stile.
She said it in a way that made it clear she had decided what to think about it a long time ago and had put it somewhere and was not going to get it back out.
She has not walked it since. It is the only path in the county that is on her spreadsheet without a date.
I reported it again last year, properly, with a formal application to modify the record.
You can do that. If evidence shows a path is wrongly recorded you can apply for a definitive map modification order, and it is a serious process with a serious form, and I did it because I wanted somebody to have to go and look and write down what they found.
An officer attended in the June.
The report is two pages and I have it. It gives the date and the weather and the officer's initials. It says the path was walked from the stile at the lane end to the terminus at the field boundary, a distance of approximately 1.2 kilometres, and that the surface was in good order and the route was clear and unobstructed throughout.
And then there is a sentence at the end that is not on the template, that somebody typed themselves, and it says:
Applicant is advised that the recorded terminus is correct and no modification is required.
The recorded terminus is correct.
I went out there in the August with a tape measure, because I had decided I was going to be a nuisance about this in the most boring way available.
I measured the beaten line from the stile. I did it in twenty metre runs with a fibreglass tape and I wrote it down.
One thousand two hundred and thirty metres to the hedge.
The field is four hundred and ten metres across on the diagonal. I measured that too, twice, on the two sides, and I have looked at it on the aerial photography and it is four hundred and ten.
The path across it is twelve hundred and thirty.
I walked it in a straight line. I never turned. I could see the stile behind me the whole way and I looked back at it, and it got smaller for the first four hundred metres and then it stopped getting smaller.
I have not been back.
I have taken 71 off the group's list of paths we walk, which I am allowed to do and did not have to explain, and Elaine and I have never spoken about it again.
The path is still on the definitive map. It will always be on the definitive map. Once recorded, always a highway.
And there is one thing I keep coming back to, which is that a beaten line across a field is made by feet. It does not maintain itself. If nobody walks a path, in three seasons it is gone.
That line was clearer this spring than it was in 2017.