A path that nobody uses grows over in two seasons. This one has bare earth, polished stile treads and greased hinges, and it stops at a hedge with no gap in it and no gap on any map since 1843.
I am a rights of way officer for a county council. My job is the condition of about two and a half thousand kilometres of public path, and most of it is stiles and signposts and arguing with landowners about a ploughed headland.
The definitive map is the whole basis of it. It is a legal record of where public rights of way run, first drawn up after the 1949 Act, and if a path is on it, it exists in law. You cannot lose a right of way by nobody using it. Once recorded, always recorded, until a formal order changes it.
So the map has paths on it that have not been walked in seventy years, and part of my job is to go and find them.
You can always tell. A path nobody walks is not a path. Two seasons of nettles and it is gone, and you are pushing through undergrowth with a GPS in your hand trying to prove a line exists.
Footpath 118 is not like that.
It leaves a lane, crosses two fields on a headland, goes through a gap in a hedge, crosses a third field on a made line, and stops.
It stops at a hedge. A thick old hedge, laid at some point, with a ditch on the far side and then another field.
There is no stile. There is no gate. There is no gap.
The definitive map ends it there too. The line is drawn from the lane to that hedge and it terminates, and the statement, which is the written description that goes with the map, says it ends at the parish boundary.
That is not unusual on its own. A path can end at a parish boundary if the neighbouring parish never recorded its half, which happened a lot in 1952 when this was all done by volunteers with a clipboard.
What is unusual is the wear.
The two hundred metres of Footpath 118 in that last field is bare earth.
Not a tractor line. A footpath: about thirty centimetres wide, worn down two or three centimetres below the field surface, with a slight camber to it from the way feet fall.
That is not two seasons of use. That is decades of it, on a path that goes to a hedge.
The stile between the second and third field is a two step wooden stile, and the treads are polished. Wood left alone goes silver and rough. Where hands and boots take it, it goes smooth and dark.
The gate at the lane end has hinges that move. I have opened it forty or fifty times over eleven years and it has never once been stiff, and it is a farm gate on a rural lane where every other gate on my patch fights me.
What I did, in the order any officer would.
Asked the farmer. He has had that ground since 1987 and he says he sees nobody on it, ever, and that he keeps the stile in repair because he has to and because the council will write to him if he does not.
I asked whether he greases the gate. He said no, and then he said that gate has never needed it.
Checked for an unrecorded continuation. This is the interesting possibility, that the path carried on and the record is incomplete. So I went to the archives.
The tithe map of 1843 shows that hedge, in that line, with no gap.
The first edition Ordnance Survey of the 1880s shows the hedge and shows a path coming up to it and stopping.
Every edition since shows the same.
So there has never been a way through, and the path has been ending at that hedge for at least a hundred and eighty years, and something has been wearing it down for at least as long.
The counter.
In 2019 I got hold of an infrared people counter, the sort we use on popular routes to justify surfacing money. It is a box on a post that counts a body passing.
I put it on the stile between the second and third field for eleven weeks in the summer.
It counted four hundred and nineteen passes.
I want to put that number next to another one. Our busiest rural path in that district, which goes to a pub and a viewpoint, counted six hundred and eighty in the same period.
Four hundred and nineteen people walked into a field to look at a hedge, over eleven weeks, in a parish with a hundred and forty residents.
The direction.
The counter I had records direction, because a two beam unit can tell which way a body went.
Three hundred and eighty two of them were towards the hedge.
Thirty seven were back.
I did not put the counter data in the annual report.
I have written that sentence in my head for six years and it is the only part of this that is mine to answer for. The counter data justifies maintenance spending, and Footpath 118 is now in the county's records as a low use path, which is the category that gets a stile repaired when it breaks and nothing else.
If I had reported four hundred and nineteen it would have been surveyed, signposted, promoted in a leaflet, and put on the county's walking pages.
I have walked it perhaps twenty times, at all hours, and I have never met anybody on it, and it is worn down two centimetres below the field.
What I do now is the minimum the law requires. The stile is sound, the signpost at the lane is upright and legible, and the path is clear.
And on the way back I do not use the stile. I go round by the gate, which adds four minutes, and which I started doing in the second year, after I sat on that stile to change a boot lace and found that both treads were warm on a cold morning in November.