Footpaths as Legacy: Have We Lost Our Way? #15 #cong24 #legacy
Synopsis:
Footpaths are the oldest and most readily tangible form of human legacy – and thus one of our most compelling sources of metaphor (we talk of “trailblazers” and of “pathways out of crisis”). The act of walking onto a piece of land for the first time creates an instant legacy: a 1:1 map of your own journey, and a simple but compelling form of infrastructure for the next person to – literally – follow in your footsteps. Footpaths are, by some reckonings, “the oldest part of our collective heritage still in use for their original purpose” (Cornish, 2024: 8).
This paper explores the idea of path as legacy in a broad historical and philosophical sense, and then homes in on the peculiar situation of 21st-century Ireland. Old maps record a vast network of footpaths across the Irish landscape, and the Brehon Laws ensured legal protections for walkers crossing the land of others. But without a modern legal framework for countryside access, over the last half-century this ancient legacy has been lost behind barbed wire and “no trespassing” signs. How did this happen? And is there anything we can do to reclaim this legacy?
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Key Takeaways:
- Footpaths are arguably the most ancient form of humanmade infrastructure.
- Footpaths exist as a perfect feedback-loop of legacy and renewal: they only exist because people use them, and people only use them because they exist.
- The idea of “the path” is deeply trodden into our language and sense of metaphor.
- Ireland had a vast historical network of public footpaths; but this labyrinth of countryside access was lost behind “no trespassing” signs in the 20th century.
About Tim Hannigan:
I am an author, academic and dedicated walker, originally from the far west of Cornwall, but now living with my partner and daughter in the west of Ireland. I write nonfiction books – usually exploring themes of travel, place, history and identity. These include A Brief History of Indonesia (2015), The Travel Writing Tribe (2021) and The Granite Kingdom (2023). I used to be a professional chef.
Earlier this year I completed a 670-kilometre walk from Dunmore Head in Dingle to Burr Point on the Ards Peninsula – an attempt to find a way on foot across Ireland’s pathless land. In my day job, I teach Writing and Literature at the Atlantic Technological University Sligo.
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By Tim Hannigan
The first human to set foot upon a piece of land creates a legacy. As they move inland through the undergrowth from beachhead or riverbank, they will tread a record of their passage into the land: bent branches, broken stems, compacted earth. And should another human later arrive at the same spot, they will surely make use of this legacy, following its insistent direction into the hinterland. This is a familiar experience to anyone who has ever wandered away from the trail and found themselves lost on a mountainside: the relief that comes as a faint path materialises at your feet and the instinctive urge to follow it, knowing that it will lead you somewhere. This essential human experience is trodden into our language: of “trailblazers” and “way-makers”, of “pathways” out of tricky situations. Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges and Jean Baudrillard (in that order, each following the path of their predecessor) played with the absurdist motif of a map made on a scale of 1:1, a map as big as the land it charted. But the land is a map, of every journey on foot ever made across it.
According to author and footpath enthusiast Jack Cornish, paths are “the oldest part of our collective heritage still in use for their original purpose” (2024: 8). The pilgrimage trails of Spain and India may be many thousands of years old – but so too may be shorter local pathways. The seemingly irrational meanderings of a hillside path may, in fact, be a record of the difficult passage through the undergrowth of the very first walker there. Structures along a path – stiles, gates, bridges – come and go; but the core infrastructure – a narrow band of beaten earth – may date back to prehistory. Footpaths, then, exist in a perfect feedback loop of legacy and renewal: they exist only if people continue to use them; and people continue to use them only if they exist.
But in Ireland we have lost our paths.
Ireland has probably the worst provisions for countryside access in Europe. Access and ownership have not been disaggregated: the only places where a semblance of freedom to walk offroad exists are state-owned national parks and forestry lands – and even here, that access is without legal guarantee. There is no right to roam on Irish mountains, as there is in Scandinavia and Scotland. And, more importantly, there is no network of public rights of way across the lowlands, as exists in France, Spain, England and Wales.
But this was not always the case. Examine the old 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland, and you’ll find that they record a vast web of footpaths across the fields, linking towns, villages, homesteads. The ancient Brehon Laws, which governed life in Ireland before the arrival of the Normans, are chock-full of interdictions against trespass by cattle, sheep, pigs and even honey bees; but they never once suggest that simply walking across another person’s land is an offence (Kelly, 2000: 431). Through all the troubled centuries that followed, through all the struggles and counter-struggles to gain control of the Irish land, people continued to follow footpaths, en route to mass and to market and everywhere in between. It was only in the middle decades of the 20th century, as the countryside depopulated and motor transport came to dominate, that these paths fell out of customary use. Unlike in other countries, no new right-of-way legislation replaced customary rights, and so the paths vanished behind barbed wire and “no trespassing” signs.
But listen: the paths are still there! Along the lines of the footways recorded on the old maps are stiles and step-throughs, hidden behind briars, unused for fifty years; a legacy of countless footfalls, a country-sized deep-map of a million journeys.
There has always been a path through the wood, says the poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie; “there has been since the dawn of time” (2019: 243) – and through the fields too, the ancient time-depth of its compacted layers hidden beneath the new silage grass. The question is: how do we recover this legacy?
References
Cornish, Jack. The Lost Paths. 2024.
Jamie, Kathleen. Surfacing. 2019.
Kelly, Fergus. Early Irish Farming. 2000.