by Mike Parker
Robin Turton, the Tory squire who had inherited both his country pile and parliamentary seat of Thirsk and Malton from his uncle, boomed in agreement: ‘Like the honourable member for Durham, we do not always like the man in the Rolls-Royce who wants to transport home most of the countryside, whether poaching for grouse or taking wild plants . . . The honourable member for Durham talked about new landlords, but there are also new people coming to the countryside, who would not come there but for the motors, who do not behave as the people who walked to the countryside behaved in the old days. We must deal with the man who comes in his Rolls-Royce and thinks he owns the countryside. People in the country want protection from that type of man.’
In the Lords debate on the same bill, the point was spelled out with even greater disdain. Viscount Swinton: ‘The man who really does the damage is a much fatter and more prosperous kind of person, who comes in a closed motor car, who takes what he is pleased to call, and what we used to call, carriage exercise, and then, having sat with the windows tight shut smoking a very fat cigar, he emerges with an equally fat partner and probably sets alight to your moor, having first picked anything which is within range.’
To some eyes, there are the noble poor, those grateful saints who, in Ritson’s words, ‘never get a breath of fresh air’ but ‘always behave themselves’ (really?). They’re fine, but it’s the others, you see, who are the problem. Came from the gutter, but instead of having the good grace to stay there, they’ve gone and got themselves some cash, and the airs and graces to go with it. Fur coat and no knickers, don’t you know. It’s John Betjeman’s residents of Slough who ‘talk of sport and makes of cars / In various bogus-Tudor bars / And daren’t look up and see the stars’. And according to Alfred Wainwright, their offspring are even more hideous: ‘The worst offenders [at trashing paths] are parties of school children, often too many in number to keep under control, who treat the paths as playgrounds, kicking and throwing stones, romping over the verges and generally having fun.’ Playgrounds? Fun? In the hallowed cathedral of the countryside? How dare they.
So much the worse, therefore, when these parvenu hooligans start to look at the countryside not just as somewhere to go and ruin on a Sunday afternoon, but as a place in which they’d quite like to live. Then the collective shudder passes through not just the old landowners, but the liberal ramblers as well. Many of them – us, sorry – have also relocated to the country, but of course, we did it for all the right reasons. We are sympathetic, have bought a few books on local history, and even read some of them, have chuckled delightedly at the picaresque habits of our new neighbours and hardly ever grumbled out loud that Ocado doesn’t yet deliver to our postcode district. We respect old country ways, although we are a mite choosy as to which ones we like to uphold. Not so keen on the caged dogs, prying eyes and earthy racism that we pretend not to hear in the pub. But we do adore the sense of community, the fields and fresh air and, most of all, the ancient right to wander down people’s drives and through their gardens or fields, just because the postman used to do it a hundred years ago.
The idea of the immutability and immovability of a footpath is the holy grail for many, and it underpinned the Hoogstraten case and many others. Generations have gone that way, then so must we. There’s great romantic appeal in the notion, of course, for the most beautiful paths are usually those that are as ancient and integral a part of the landscape as the trees and streams. But it presupposes that we, indulging ourselves at our considerable leisure, are the rightful, natural successors to those who had no alternative but to trudge this way through the hail, mud and rain every sodding day of their entire lives, and I’m not sure that we really are. Surely too the biggest threat to rural Britain is the gallop towards turning it into one huge museum, clapped in the aspic of our national insecurities. If the paths and tracks, the veins and arteries of the countryside, are frozen for ever, how can we expect the body that they feed to maintain a pulse?
There’s the same judgemental selectivity about farmers. We like the ones that come and sell their cheeses and lamb shanks at the farmers’ market, with their rosy cheeks, salty language and eye-watering prices. We admire the enterprise of those who let out charming barn conversions as eco-friendly holiday lets or who turn their farm yards into petting zoos come lambing time (even if we mutter about yet more eye-watering prices on the way home). Most of the rest of them terrify us, though, with their monobrows and monosyllables, shit-spattered pick-ups and sheepdogs that go mad at the sound of a twig snapping two fields away. Yet it’s from them that you’ll learn more about the land, and all that is woven into it, than from any number of interpretation boards, downloadable leaflets or rambling club leaders.
Joseph Ritson’s quaking horror about the behaviour of ‘boisterous’ (read flash and uncultured) Americans provides another of the most dependable leitmotifs in our much-cherished hauteur. However much we can look down on our home-grown nouveau riche, we can always find a bit extra for our Stateside cousins. It gave the nineteenth-century story of the ‘Pet Lamb Case’ in the Highlands its necessary dynamite, and it surfaced again rather more recently, in the most controversial access battle since Hoogstraten: Madonna versus the Ramblers.
The Queen of Pop’s brief embrace of the English Dream seems like just that now: did it really happen? Or did we all collectively hallucinate that the world’s biggest music icon attempted, as one of her regular makeovers, to pass muster as a Wiltshire gentlewoman? The story unfolded in much the same way as ever: loud-mouthed Yank comes to our shores, throws on the tweed, has a crack at hunting and shooting, but doesn’t really understand how we do things here and thinks it can all be solved by throwing money at it. Once we’ve got over preening and flattering ourselves with their presence (‘Gosh, you want to come and live with little old us?’), the knives come out and we lacerate them.
With her then new (and now ex) husband, Guy Ritchie, Madonna bought the Ashcombe Estate, on the Wiltshire–Dorset border a few miles east of Shaftesbury, in 2001. She plunged enthusiastically into English country life, being snapped quaffing bitter in local pubs, wearing caps and going on the odd game shoot. The newspapers could hardly get enough of it, but before long, they were bored with happy and needed a new angle, preferably one that would enable them to start sticking the boot in. It first came in the shape of some new gates erected at Ashcombe in 2002. Not realising that they needed planning permission, it wasn’t initially obtained (although retrospective permission was soon granted), and the papers gratefully fell on the story, bloating it out of all recognition. A pair of stone columns with two wrought-iron gates became ‘twelve-foot security barriers’, if you believed the endless stories in the Mail or the Telegraph, neither of whom could leave the story alone.
It was the same two papers that cranked the tale up another level, by filling their pages with speculation that the new CROW Act could see some of the Ashcombe estate downland classified as ‘open access’, and scaremongering that this could result in ramblers picnicking on Her Madge’s front lawn. Most of the stories were handfed to journalists by campaigners against the right to roam, who correctly thought that the best way to do that was by dangling the juicy carrot of celebrity under the snouts of the press. Madonna was, according to the same two papers, incandescent. In the Mail, she was quoted as describing ramblers as ‘Satan’s children’ and ‘those fuckers’, and that ‘she has even written to Tony Blair to complain about the forthcoming “right to roam” legislation, which she sees as a stalker’s charter.’
Except, it seemed, she hadn’t. No letter was received in Downing Street, and Madonna herself, in an interview with Q magazine, laughed off the words placed in her mouth by an over-eager journalist. ‘I haven’t got anything bad to say about the ramblers,’ she declared. The only truth in the report was that once the maps were published showing all the proposed open-access areas, there were seventeen parcels of the Ashcombe estate marked as such, which the Ritchies decided to appeal against. But then so did
3,173 other landowners, though they’d not gone on stage in a conical bra, so they barely scraped a mention. The hearing was held in the spring of 2004, and concluded that fifteen of the seventeen pockets of land should remain private, while the remaining two – those furthest from the house – would become open access. To The Times, the Independent and the Daily Mail, Madonna won. She lost, according to the Guardian, while the BBC and the Telegraph called it a ‘partial victory’ for the superstar. The press coverage was dreadful. Celeb-sniping swept away the facts, and the few that did make it through were often contradicted within the same article. Did the job, though. The mud stuck.
Madonna responded with an interview in Vogue designed to show that she was as much a part of the Wessex landscape as Stonehenge or discarded bottles of White Lightning. The pictures of her sporting jodhpurs and feeding chickens didn’t quite persuade us, and neither did her zealous protestations of how much she now loved England, and felt that it was truly her natural home. Her fate was sealed, perhaps, with her enthusiastic account of a recent weekend at Ashcombe. Cecil Beaton had been a previous inhabitant of the estate, and to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary, the Ritchies had set out to re-create a Beatonesque weekend of folly and frolics, culminating in a show where all their A-list friends were obliged to do a turn. Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin and Stella McCartney sang a spoof version of Madonna’s hit ‘American Life’, which they rebranded ‘American Wife’. Artist Tracey Emin and former model Zoe Manzi wrote and recited a poem. Interior designer David Collins spoofed Noël Coward’s famous song with a rendition of ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Ritchie’ (accompanied by Madonna’s eldest, Lourdes), while the Ritchies themselves performed a raunchy pastiche of a Restoration comedy that had first appeared at one of Beaton’s Ashcombe fêtes champêtres in the 1930s. As if all that wasn’t enough, ‘Sting played the lute, and Trudie read some sonnets.’
Although, of course, Madonna herself has long gone from Ashcombe (the Vogue interview alone must have ensured that), I had to go and see what all the fuss had been about. I stayed the night in a nearby village pub, where the landlady airily told me over breakfast, ‘Oh yes, Madonna came in here once. No-one was much impressed.’ I can believe it. I felt like a cosmopolitan ponce there, amongst the red faces and Wurzel accents; quite how Madonna thought she might fit in is anyone’s guess.
The press coverage during the battle made it sound as though the Ritchies were holed up in their compound, having landmined the footpaths. In fact, the public rights of way across the estate – including a decent stretch of the Wessex Ridgeway – were never closed, or even slightly threatened: the whole episode had only been about the access land brought in by the CROW Act. If anything, the paths are in far better nick than most others, and they were a joy to walk.
This is Cranborne Chase, a lofty chalk ridge that looks down towards Salisbury Plain. For an all-too-brief few years at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the view would have included the three hundred-foot-high tower of William Beckford’s Gothic extravaganza, Fonthill Abbey, until it collapsed for the third, and final, time in 1825. The Ashcombe estate is down in a smooth valley that looks as if it has been gouged out of the chalk by a giant ice-cream scoop. I took the path down into it from Win Green, the highest point on Cranborne Chase. Nothing was left to chance: the estate signposting of its paths was efficient, unfailingly polite and tastefully retro in its uniform shade of British racing green. It was a warm summer’s day, with bees humming, cuckoos singing, and perfect little cotton-wool clouds tripping lazily across a cornflower sky. ‘We just fell in love with it,’ said Madonna about their first visit to Ashcombe. ‘In the summertime it’s the most beautiful place in the world. It just stayed with us, haunted us for a really long time.’ Me too: this was possibly the single most idyllic walk that I had all year, and writing about it months later brings it all back and makes me smile wistfully. For the first, and quite probably the last, time in my life, I suddenly felt sorry for Madonna, for what she’d had and then lost – and not even the image of Sting plucking his lute could make me hate her.
Many of the access or footpath battles you hear about these days involve celebrities, for the tales fit so well with our need to trash the upstarts and, in particular, the always reliable narrative of building ’em up to dash ’em back down again. Jeremy Clarkson, Keith Richards, Ashley and Cheryl Cole, Claudia Schiffer, John le Carré, Eric Clapton, Gary Barlow, David Puttnam, Peter Gabriel and Andrew Lloyd Webber have all had their skirmishes. With the proposals for universal coastal access still being hotly argued over, it is likely that there will be many more. Sometimes the threat of stalkers and paparazzi is deployed, usually to a chorus of scoffing from the very papers that pay top dollar for shaky telephoto lens shots through the same people’s herbaceous borders. Sometimes it’s their human rights, which only brings on a burlesque crescendo of ‘poor diddums’. And, touching another nerve of the moment, sometimes it’s health and safety, things such as the possibility of lawsuits from injury on their land. That goes down worst of all: two obsessions of the tabloid tubthumpers in one fell swoop, and they almost knock themselves out with their own sarcasm and sanctimony. Turn over a few more pages, though, and there’ll be the ads: ‘Tripped Over a Paving Stone? MAKE THAT CLAIM!’. The only other grouping that regularly makes it into the papers over footpath battles on their land are bankers, and they get even less sympathy.
The politics of the footpath and access movements has always been a strange mix of old Right and firebrand Left. I’ve not made it into the former category quite yet, but I have spent most of my adult life in the latter – at least by my own definition; many of my friends and family would probably disagree, once they’d stopped laughing. In truth, I’ve been a shameless political slap-per, having voted, at one time or another, for six different parties: Liberal, Labour, Communist, Green, Lib Dem and Plaid Cymru. No Tory or UKIP, though; not yet, anyway. On any conventional scale, my views have definitely slidden rightwards, and it’s in this area of land ownership and custodianship that I can see it most glaringly.
Growing up in 1970s Worcestershire, by far my favourite outing was to Witley Court, a few miles south-west of Stourport. Originally a medieval manor, it had been added to by successive owners, eventually becoming one of England’s most extravagant stately homes by the late Victorian age, when it was owned by the Ward family, the Earls of Dudley. Witley was famous for lavish living, for parties where royalty, aristocracy, politicians and celebrities mixed in the orangery, the parterre gardens or draped themselves over the sides of the massive ornamental fountains. Two hundred staff oiled its wheels, and it took 50 tons of coal a day to keep the monster warm.
Even more than with most stately homes, Witley’s progress mirrors that of the country at large. The Wards’ fortune was eaten by its opulence, and after the Great War, the much-battered family put the estate up for sale. It was bought by the epitome of new money, Kidderminster carpet baron Sir Herbert Smith. From humble beginnings, he’d risen to become the most powerful man in the town, where he was known as ‘Piggy’, thanks to his portly stature and shaved head. Though he loved life as lord of the manor, he was ill-prepared for the costs, and ran the house and estate into the ground, skimping on maintenance and keeping only a skeleton staff. Like an earlier Hoogstraten, he caused fury by blockading all the footpaths that ran across the estate.
On 7 September 1937, a fire broke out in the basement of the court, quickly spreading to the ballroom above. Thanks to Sir Herbert’s economies, the fountains lay unused, and the reservoir that fed them was almost empty. Not that it would have helped had they been full, for the water-pumping equipment had rusted up. The staff battled valiantly to save furniture and pictures, but it was too late. In 1939, with the country on the brink of war, Smith sold the house to a demolition contractor, who stripped it of all its finery, leaving it as a roofless shell.
It was in this state that I first encountered Witley Court, with a few further
decades of plundering and weather-beaten decay etched into its gaunt frame. It excited me like nowhere else, from the moment you passed one of the lodge houses on the main road and bumped your way up the rutted track, the skeletal ruin growing ever larger on the skyline. Back then, you just nipped over the fence and had free run of the place, up crumbling staircases into the bedrooms, down into the dark, mouldy cellars, galloping along the broken balustrade of the grand terrace steps, even jumping into the vast, wrecked fountains. And there always seemed to be crows.
One day, at the age of about 12, I had persuaded my dad to take me there, ostensibly to walk the dog. Standing in the ruins was an elderly lady, muffled up against the cold. We got chatting to her, and it transpired that she had grown up in Great Witley, the nearby village where most of the house’s army of staff had lived. On the night of the fire, she said, villagers – few of whom would still have been employed at the Court, thanks to Sir Herbert Smith’s swingeing economies – came out into the street to watch the flames dancing in the sky. They cracked open bottles of beer, and chanted ‘Burn, you bastard, burn!’
She said it in such a deadpan way, a look of resigned indifference on her face, but the shock electrified me. It was partly hearing a little old granny swear, but there was more to it than that. To the 12-year-old me, history was dates and kings and battles and the invention of the spinning jenny. It was cause and effect, question and answer, a smooth, smug progress through the ages to the zenith of civilisation that was late 1970s Britain. For the first time, I got a glimpse of the real story behind the textbook, and it both confused and thrilled me.
‘Burn, you bastard, burn!’ soon became my aggregate philosophy towards the landed gentry, and when I brought friends home from university and beyond, I’d always take them to Witley Court, to demonstrate my firm belief that the best stately homes are those that lie roofless and abandoned. To my junior socialist self, everything the ruling classes had done was evil, while the working classes could do no wrong. Being stuck in the middle, I was taking the traditional route of trying to slum it downwards, massive over-compensation springing from the bottomless well of middle-class guilt. ‘The land is ours!’, I hollered to anyone who would listen, which was mainly other self-lacerating folk from comfortable backgrounds.