CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TRESPASSERS’ WALK
YOU are going to be very ill-mannered and stray on to other people’s property. Granted that fundamental impertinence you must be as nice as possible about it; graciously lift your hat to the proprietor when you see him. You should be as careful to do as little damage as possible; mend the hedge you have broken, put back the hurdle, avert your face if a lady is swimming in her private pool. In doing the trespassers’ walk it is as well to forego the happiness of a rigid rule. You take your compass; you decide, let us say, to go west southwest, and it will take you over commons, over ploughed land, village greens, graveyards, gardens, over loosely held but large and idle estates, perhaps through thickly propertied country. It is enough to do the walk roughly. You cannot follow a ruled straight line across sown fields and flower beds and through the lord of the manor’s kitchen. You must frame exceptions to the ruling of the compass, and be guided by the dictates of the heart and of good sense. The main idea is to see just what the land of a given country is like, and to enjoy it. You have the added thrill of not knowing whom you will meet and on what terms.
Of course, I do not guarantee that you may not come to grief. You may get on to the grounds of a very peppery squire who, resenting greatly your trespass on his land, will assail you in person, or set his keepers on you, or even let loose a fierce dog, or telephone the police. My experience is that you need not fear these chances unless you behave badly. Many landowners tacitly allow the neighboring villagers to wander in their grounds if they do not do damage. The parvenu comes and tries to clear every one out, and keep his pleasaunce entirely for himself, but even he, unless he be a Seigneur of a Channel island will not fire on a stranger at sight. The fact is, that in England anyway, there is no absolute right to keep strangers off private property. Formerly, possessed land was much more free to the use of the people in general than it is now. The tradition remains. No farmer objects to your walking alongside his cornfields or across his pastures. It is the people who enclose but do not farm who have most prejudice against strangers.
No doubt bitternesses over rights of way have hardened owners’ hearts; no doubt the breakdown of feudal relationship between squire and villager has helped to make the former a recluse; no doubt the increasing vulgarity and bad manners of people in general have made them less welcome in the eyes and on the estates of the refined and well-to-do.
But unless you do damage you are not committing a serious offense by trespassing. And the trespassers’ walk is so arduous that it can only be recommended to the few. It is worth while, not merely as an adventure, but as a means of getting a true notion of your native land. You can get it hunting; but then, not every one hunts.
One is inclined to think of England as a network of motor roads interspersed with public houses, placarded by petrol advertisements, and broken by smoky industrial towns. That England is a fair country few will deny, because you see beautiful cross sections of her from trains. But when you get out at a railway station, the vision of the carriage window is seldom realized. You are guided away from Nature, by gulleys and deep-cut or hedged roads. England becomes to you a dusty road, a series of dusty roads.
There are glorious commons here and there, and free woods, but you must travel to find them. You get tired of thoroughly tamed Sussex and Surrey and go to the Welsh hills or the Cumberland lakes. But England is more in Sussex and Surrey than it is in the mountains. Only it is enclosed, shut away, and marked “private.” Rain-washed notices put up ages ago tell you that Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. And as we pray daily in old-fashioned phrase to have our trespasses forgiven we invest the idea of trespassing with some awe. So we keep to the road, even if we are out on a mere idle walk and not bent on reaching any given house or place. Even if you take a stile and leave road for footpath your pleasure is enhanced, and if you leave footpath for the “trackless” woods it is even further enhanced.
For the trespassers’ walk you should be lightly clad and shod, for you have to jump often. You can start at any point you choose, and take the guidance of the compass, or the sun, or some dominant landmark in the view. You then take a bee line and see where it leads you. As you are neither a bee nor a bird you cannot fly over hedges and walls, and you cannot go so fast. Every field presents its problem, but every field presents also its pleasure.
You will observe the different way the wild flowers look on the other side of the hedge that skirts the road; they are sheltered and fresh and more numerous and altogether more happy. Even that first field is a more pleasant place than the great highway.