THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING

I have another way of exploring new places. It’s very simple, though it does involve roping in an accomplice. I get myself dropped off in a remote spot, with an agreed pick-up point a few miles away, on the far side of an appealing tract of countryside.

These walks are a somewhat less rigorous version of the ‘trespasser’s walk’, pioneered in Edwardian times by traveller and journalist Stephen Graham. He took a compass, and having arbitrarily picked a direction, north say, he followed it ‘resolutely to the guidance of the magnetic needle’. The title of his book The Gentle Art of Tramping hints at his reason for doing this. He goes on to explain: ‘It takes you the most extraordinary way, and shows what an enormous amount of the face of the earth is kept from the feet of ordinary humanity by the fact of private property.’ That is still very much true today: access rights in England and Wales cover only a tiny proportion of the land.

Walking across private land runs the risk of unwanted confron­tation, though no doubt less so than in Stephen Graham’s day when small armies of gamekeepers patrolled the ground. I don’t take my mobile - a phone would make it too easy to bail out and change the plan should I run into difficulties. Without one, the only option is to keep going and make the meeting point on time, come hell, high-water or irascible landowners. The nineteenth-century rural poet John Clare was an enthusiastic explorer of his local countryside in east Northamptonshire, and was intimately familiar with it. Yet he too was wary of local landowners when he strayed from public rights of way:

I dreaded walking where there was no path

And pressed with cautious tread the meadow swath

And always turned to look with wary eye

And always feared the owner coming by;

Yet everything about where I had gone

Appeared so beautiful I ventured on

My one concession to minimising the chance of unpleasantness is to pick an area with plenty of woodland.

Today is Monday 21 December, the shortest day of the year, and I’m marking it by trying out a new route. A walk on this day has become a personal tradition and, as with all traditions, it gains a little more traction and power with each repetition. I have just over six miles of crow-flight to cover, but it will be longer in terms of distance travelled on foot. I’ll have to cross one small lane at about halfway, but much of the route can be covered using sinuous strips of woodland that hug the valley bottom. There are no footpaths; this is not a problem within woodland, but will make it more difficult to traverse the one section that has exposed, open fields. From the map these fields appear be overlooked by farmhouses, but I’m hoping the typical high Devon hedge-banks will facilitate safe passage.

Hazel has dropped me at the edge of a wood near South Molton, an unprepossessing market town that sits just outside the National Park, with signs offering it up hopefully as the ‘gateway to Exmoor’. I have five hours to make the rendezvous, and already things have started to go wrong. It’s raining, of course, and I’ve forgotten my glasses. Anything closer than four feet away is fuzzy. My 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map is a meaningless mass of blurred lines and shapes. Thankfully, I have a workaround: inverted binoculars allow me to peer down and resolve the lanes, woods and field boundaries, albeit only about one square kilometre at a time. This is far from ideal for route planning.

I dive into the trees and instantly feel more relaxed under cover. It’s a deciduous wood with Ash, oaks, birches and a few huge Beeches towering above an understorey of Hazel and Holly. The trees are bare; most of last year’s leaves are already on the ground, beginning their slow transition to soil. And it’s very quiet. There is no birdsong. I find I’m more conscious of my progress than I would be in spring or summer.

Today, darkness will descend more quickly than on any other day of the year. Thiere is a strange sense of time passing that is at its most powerful in a midwinter wood. Here are trees that have been rooted to the same spot for perhaps a century or more; some will have been here for decades before I even existed. While this year’s leaves are disintegrating around me, those for next year have already been made. They are there above my head in their millions, coiled tightly within buds, patiently waiting for their one and only chance in the sun. If I return in spring they will be present, visibly, as new leaves. Six month later and they too will be lying on the ground, slowly turning to soil. For now, all they can offer is potential - the coming spring in waiting, but not yet fully realised. On a day when nothing much is happening, these woods stand for change, and for the passage of time; they reveal the way that the years, and then the decades, rush past us almost unnoticed.

I walk on, passing through a group of old, twisted Holly trees, the view ahead now blocked by evergreen leaves, dotted with red berries. As I round the final tree, I startle a Woodcock just a few feet ahead of me. And in the same instant, it startles me, lifting sharply with an audible clatter of wings. It’s loud enough that I mistake it for a Pheasant for a split second, until the shape becomes clear. The Woodcock is a plump, almost dumpy, brown bird, with short, rounded wings, and yet its escape flights have both speed and agility, making the species highly prised as a sporting bird.

Further on I flush two more singles, and then two together. These individuals rise at a distance, in apparent silence. The birds think, wrongly as usual, that their cover has been blown and away they go to find another hiding place; dark shapes weaving through an obstacle course of trunks and branches - a string of inevitable collisions each, somehow, avoided at the last moment, as they seek a new spot in which to see out the day. As always when I flush a few in quick succession I begin to search for them on the ground ahead. And, as always, I’m unsuccessful. The Woodcock seems almost not to exist as a terrestrial bird. It spends virtually its entire life on the ground but it wears a cloak of leaf-litter; its intricately patterned brown, grey and black feathers are a perfect match for the woodland floor. So, for us, this is a bird of the air, glimpsed for a few seconds on the rare occasions when we stray too close and force a reveal. Only as the light fades at the end of each day will this bird launch into the air voluntarily, making for its night-time feeding sites, often transitioning from the cover of woodland out to the open fields beyond. For obvious reasons, Woodcock tend to shun busy places when hiding out during the day. Sticking to well-used paths and places busy with people is not the way to catch up with this most enigmatic and mysterious of birds.

Despite the lack of a path, it’s not too difficult to pick a way through these woods, though there are no straight lines. There are fallen trunks to work around, the odd stream (heavy with recent rain) to jump, and both steep ground and waterlogged, boggy areas to negotiate.

As ever, I attempt to light on somewhere to eat lunch where there are no visible signs of humanity. Is this becoming a minor obsession? Walking further inside the wood I find a place that seems to fit the bill. I’m surrounded by mature trees and even with the paucity of leaves, the fields beyond are no longer visible.

All I can see are the trees and shrubs that make up a native English woodland - one that must have existed here, on this very spot, before humans first arrived in the area. If there are any distant anthropogenic sounds that might otherwise be heard, they are masked by the light breeze through the branches above.

I’ve already poured out a coffee when I see the problem. A single pixel of the scene has been misplaced. Hugging the trunk of an old Ash tree a few metres away is a thick stem of Ivy. It’s a full five inches in diameter, one of the oldest I’ve seen. And there, about three feet from the ground, is a small gap where a section has been cut out by chainsaw. I can see it lying in the leaf-litter below. This is a sight that is all too familiar along the local lanes and footpaths.

Twenty minutes later and I’m almost standing on the lane before I realise it’s there. It is sunken well beneath its flanking hedge-banks, hidden from view, with no traffic noise to give the game away. Surprisingly, Devon has more miles of road than any other county in England - it’s just that most of them are tiny lanes that see very little use. The entire valley at this point is hidden from the rest of the landscape, with just a couple of old farmhouses on the upslope a few hundred metres away. I’m reminded of the thoughts of Ted Hughes when he first moved to Devon (just a few miles from where I am now) in the early 1970s:

Buried in their deep valleys, in undatable cob-walled farms hidden not only from the rest of England but even from each other, connected by the inexplicable, Devonshire, high-banked, deep-cut lanes that are more like a defence-maze of burrows, these old Devonians lived in a time of their own.

This quiet, concealed valley still feels timeless and somehow disconnected from the rest of the world. Alone here, and reliant on nothing but foot-power to find my way out, the effect is all the more powerful. There are no sounds, no people, and even the livestock are missing - no doubt holed up in a large shed somewhere to spare the saturated ground. In three hours of walking I’ve yet to encounter another human, and discounting the odd passenger jet high overhead, there has been no sound of human activity.

Nonetheless, this landscape is now very different from the one that Hughes would have known. The sense of timelessness is mere illusion, as it was in his day. In fact, he was all too aware of the pace of change as he lived and farmed here in the 1970s. He lamented the passing of the old ways in his writing, with progress driven on by ‘the regular sales blast of the Farmer’s Weekly, with its dazing propaganda for new chemicals, new methods, different chemicals, new gimmicks, new shortcuts, every possible way of wringing that critical extra per cent out of the acreage and the animals’. Fifty years on and the fields have been improved, fertilised, ploughed and reseeded beyond recognition. Apart from a few forgotten damp corners, they have lost their wild flowers and their birds, being grazed hard in summer or subject to multiple cuts of silage. The old hedges and woods still hold life, and probably look much as they did five decades ago, but few creatures can now scratch a living in the pastures that dominate the scene around me.

To reach the next section of woodland I skirt the field edges, hidden from old Devonians in their farms above by the high, thick hedges. I find a well-worn animal run in the bank and scramble up inside the hedge. Now I can work my way along the top of the wide bank, old tree stems on each side, last cut many years ago. Red Deer hooves have pushed sharp slots into the earth, showing that they too use this place to pass unseen through the landscape.

In one of the larger fields, I can just make out the lines where lost hedges once divided the land. They show as slight depressions in the ground, left from the old ditches - ghosts of an ancient landscape. What would have been four or five small fields is now a single vast expanse of grass, dominated by one or two species; there is more space for livestock and machinery but less for the wildlife that tries to cling on around the fringes.

It’s a relief when I reach the next wood and slip inside, knowing that the rest of the walk will be under cover, provided I can find my way to the far end. A lone (planted?) Wych Elm near the stream still has a few luminous yellow leaves, the others lying on the ground beneath. They are by far the brightest things on view on a day that has remained stoically dull and grey. As I learn later, when I look it up, they are the largest leaves of any native tree in Britain, and I can’t help wondering if they turn a brighter yellow than any other tree too. The stream carves a route through the wood. It provides an easy course to follow and will take me near my meeting point if I can stick with it for the next two miles or so.

At the edge of the wood, close to the agreed pick-up point, I have a little spare time to reflect before my lift arrives. It’s been almost five hours, and apart from crossing a lane, I’ve been away from legitimate rights of way all this time. Does the pleasure of doing this come simply from stubbornness and the desire to break rules for the sake of it? It’s more than that, I’m sure, but I find it hard to pin down.

Later that evening I re-read some sections of Nick Hayes’s powerful book on trespass and the battle between private land ownership and public access. Here, he is describing his feelings after an unexpected close encounter with Red Deer in the heart of a Suffolk wood:

This kind of moment is only available off the path. It is an accident, unwilled and unplanned, but it comes dressed as poetry. It is prosaic, but it feels like a miracle, it feels meaningful, and it leaves me with my heart thumping in my throat. The deer were so close they felt dangerous; not aggressive, but wild-eyed and unpredictable. I would swap a hundred nice walks along a pretty Right of Way for this one moment of magic.

That’s it. The perfect encapsulation of the joy of properly exploring a place on your own terms rather than following a route that has been predetermined. We spend most of our lives moving along paths, streets and walkways that have been laid out for us and which constrain the routes we take. We follow lines that bind us to the will of others, surrendering any sense of freedom. Take the path and you might see deer (though it’s less likely) but that’s not the point. An encounter won’t leave your heart thumping in your chest as you stumble unexpectedly into them, or they into you. Only off the path, much as with the Woodcock from earlier today, will the meeting come dressed as poetry.