When Macaulay’s New Zealander has finished his meditations on London Bridge, and comes to sum up the history of this country, he will, if he is a wise man, have something to say on the subject of names. In Book VII. Chapter iv. Section 48 on Individualism, he will point out how we always tried to ascribe events to single individuals, and to stamp them with a great name; how we worshipped our national heroes when they were dead, and ascribed all our glories to them; how we hung their statues with garlands on appointed days, or wore flowers which were somebody else’s favourites. But he will add that this tendency did not stop there: that a great many things which were really public and national institutions, having originated in individual effort, remained to the end marked with the individual name. Bradshaw, Whitaker, Crockford, Hazell, Haydn, Kelly—in another country we should have had long official and descriptive titles, but in England all these great works—the very props of our domestic life—still bear the names of their creators, though these have in some cases passed from us. We cling passionately, with something of an anthropomorphic instinct, to the idea of a single man in each case, of one colossal brain issuing annually or at intervals in these magnificent aggregations of indispensable fact.
In this list there is a name lacking, and it is one which, far more truly than the rest, stands for unaided effort and individual enterprise. I mean Walker Miles, the author of Field Path Rambles and other guide-books for walking in the home counties. Less wide in his scope than Whitaker, less exuberant in detail than Bradshaw, he yet stands, in virtue of his subject, on a far higher plane than either. Bradshaw can lay before us, with masterly lucidity and conciseness and a wealth of symbolic resource, a picture of our country’s passenger transport system; Whitaker articulates for us the whole skeleton of its official being. But our country is something more than a complex of railways or a structure of offices and salaries; and the true Englishman, or at least the true Londoner, when he has expended a proper veneration on the other masters of actuality, should at any rate have a thought to spare for Walker Miles.
Walker Miles was not, it may be inferred, his real name. There are colleagues of his, co-heirs of his renown, who deal with other parts of the country: and one of them bears the name of Alf Holliday. Both names were clearly pleasantries, adopted possibly from modesty, possibly from a feeling that their task was too sacred to be associated with the name of an actual man. But it is as Walker Miles that we know him: as Walker Miles he influences our lives, guides our steps, and points us to the inner secrets of our native land. And, among his colleagues, he was clearly the leader and the pioneer. Alf Holliday and Noah Weston have great moments: Hertfordshire is theirs and the Northern Heights are theirs: theirs are Chipperfield Common and St. Albans and the valley of the Chess. But Walker Miles has Kent and the whole of Surrey; the Oxted hills and the Epsom Downs, and that wonderful triangle whose apices are Guildford and Leatherhead and Leith Hill; all these, to his eternal honour, are marked with his name.
The task which he undertook may be indicated by the words with which he himself begins his immortal work on the Surrey hills. ‘It has been remarked, and with much truth, that to any one with a good knowledge of our field paths and bridle roads, England may be said to be one vast open space for the enjoyment and recreation of its people. This knowledge, however, is somewhat difficult of attainment, owing mainly to the frequent absence of any distinctive mark or indication by which a public right-of-way may be known. Even the ordnance maps afford no assistance in this direction.’ It was to the spreading of this ‘good knowledge’ that he addressed himself. With consummate care and precision, he set himself to select from the vast complex of footpaths the best and most interesting, to weave them into continuous walks bearing a practical relation to the facilities for railway travel and food supply, and then, by instructions which even the most careless could hardly mistake, to lay them open to his followers. We can picture him with his note-book and compass, piecing together the stray and apparently purposeless fragments of path which abound in our country, harking back, altering, revising, adding touches of detail for the guidance of the inexperienced, suppressing all superfluity, sparing no pains in his effort to spread the good knowledge, to reveal the vast open space for enjoyment and recreation, and, in a very real sense, to restore England to the English.
It was a work necessarily incomplete and necessarily open to criticism. An exhaustive treatment of the footpaths of any district, however concise and summary, would run into quartos: it was the essence of Walker Miles’s books that they must be small and portable. The most, therefore, that he could hope to do was to adumbrate certain main routes and to leave others to work out in detail all the countless variations and combinations. And since every man has his own predilections in footpaths as much as in poetry, Walker Miles labours under all the limitations and all the vulnerability of the anthologist. There is no one of us but could pick out here and there points in which the Walker Miles route could (as we think) be improved upon; there are few who do not habitually abandon his guidance at times and take a favourite line of their own. But such variations neither undo his work nor disestablish his primacy among home-county walkers: it was only through following his way that we were able to improve upon it; and we may be sure that he himself would never have wished the good knowledge to be limited within the necessarily narrow confines of his own work, but would rather have welcomed any subsequent variations which amplified without superseding it.
Perhaps one general criticism of his work may be allowed which rests on something more than a personal predilection. He seems hardly to have realised the fascination of the straight line. Of course he had to cater for all types—the six-miler, the twelve-miler, the eighteen-miler, and the twenty-four-miler—the four great classes of walkers which are separated by more than a numerical distinction; and stations and inns had to be provided at suitable points to meet all these tastes. Even so, the routes seem often unnecessarily tortuous; and although the tortuosities are never objectless, and often lead to exceptionally fascinating pieces of scenery, yet there is lacking that grandeur of conception about the walk as a whole, that sense of a sustained purpose, which attaches to a straight-line walk of twenty miles or more. There is a certain sublimity, such as the Roman road-makers must have felt, in holding a general direction across country regardless of the rise and fall of the ground: most of all when the direction is southward, and the sun swings slowly round from the left cheek to the nose and on to the right cheek and the right ear. So man goes straight to his goal while the constellations swing round him. Still, if we wish to improve on Walker Miles in this way, the remedy is in our own hands; and more, we shall often find that some of the greatest moments of our line are his. Of the two big lines in the central Surrey district, that from Epsom to Guildford (it is not quite straight) is made up of three Walker Miles fragments (Epsom—Burford Bridge—Ranmore—Guildford); while that from Esher to Leith Hill, perhaps the greatest of all, reaches its climax in Walker Miles’s track through the Rookeries and up the Tillingbourne valley, or the even nobler route through Deerleap Wood and Wotton.
The mention of straight lines suggests one of the most difficult of walking questions, namely the functions and limitations of trespassing. There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked ‘Private,’ in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and impotent. There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the history of English commons and rights-of-way, of the organised piracy upon the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one little pebble on our own account, if only for old sake’s sake, at the forehead of Goliath. But like other unregenerate impulses, this carries its punishment with it. To indulge the love of trespassing involves ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this—like the twin passion for short-cuts as ends in themselves—is disastrous to walking. It may rest on a mere natural love for law-breaking: it may—and often does—rest on higher and deeply considered motives; but in either case it is an alien element in the commonwealth of walking.
Trespassing on high moral grounds has the further disadvantage that it leads to meticulous hair-splitting. I know walkers who think it right to trespass on the grounds of a large landowner, but not on those of a small landowner. They consequently draw a line at five acres or so, and have to consider, whenever trespassing is proposed, on which side of the line the field of action lies. Under conditions of urgency—the only conditions which unquestionably justify trespassing—there is little time for such refinements of casuistry, and as a matter of fact moral considerations usually go by the board in any real crisis. I have myself seen one of the most fervent upholders of the five-acre doctrine open the gate of a blameless householder at Caterham, walk down his ten-foot garden path, climb his back-fence, and so issue on to a private golf-links.
There are practical disadvantages, too, in the way of the hardened trespasser. Sooner or later, at the end of his trespassing, waits Nemesis for him—the keeper, flanked by dogs and fortified by a gun, purple-faced in hate of a wrong not his, ingeminating the awkward question, ‘Did you see the notice-boards or did you not?’ And there follows the mean and abject retreat to the nearest road, with the vision of the landed aristocracy calm and triumphant.
And there are deeper reasons which make trespassing for its own sake a passion unworthy of a walker. The desire to affront the landed aristocracy is just one of those disconnected and abstract impulses which walking should mould and settle into the structure of larger thought. He who walks over English country in a proper and receptive frame of mind must catch something of its spirit, of the age-long order of possession. It is not only the voice of the keeper and landowner that is lifted against the casual trespasser: it is the voice of a long tradition, a settled convention, the voice, in a sense, of the country itself. The force which settled the forms of wood and field and hedgerow, which fixed the very conditions of our walking, is the same force which (dimly comprehended) pulsates in the breast of the indignant keeper and hardens the faces of the ‘Private’ notice-boards against us. In the concrete imagination of the practised walker such a force must have its due place; and, beside it, the vague and abstract love of trespassing is but a shadowy phantom of to-day.