8 January 2025

Walking is the soul’s preferred means of transport

Photo by Tove Breistein / Millennium Images, UK

Does doing something twice in two years count as a tradition? If so, we have a family tradition of going for a Boxing Day walk. It’s pre-meal, to work up an appetite, and weather-dependent, though the second stipulation hasn’t really been put to the test yet. This year we were at my sister’s house in Golcar: imagine a West Yorkshire version of a Nepalese mountain village and you’re not far wrong. Clinging to the side of a steep valley high up in the Pennines, houses that look like bungalows at the front are four or five storeys deep round the back. Being a window cleaner in Golcar requires very extendable ladders and rock-climbing qualifications.

My sister’s walking route was the Ginnels of Golcar – “ginnel” being a Yorkshire word for a snicket, “snicket” being a Yorkshire word for a ginnel. An alleyway, in other words, possibly a corruption of “channel”. Switchbacks, we call them sometimes. The trail took us down paths and tracks between gable ends and behind tall fences to the canal in the valley bottom, then up higgledy-piggledy stone steps like fossilised funicular railways or Neolithic escalators before the invention of moving parts.

In an hour we barely set foot on an actual road, the ginnels having existed long before cars, developed organically by people going about their business on foot and prior to Deliveroo and Uber causing human legs to wither and fall off. Some of the ginnels steer voyeuristically close to bathroom and bedroom windows, so even the most incurious pedestrian can’t help but cop an eyeful. At one point, passing a basement kitchen, I was only a few centimetres of glass away from a man in a tinsel necktie and Santa Claus apron attempting to repurpose a turkey carcass.

The previous year we were at our house, only about five miles away but in a much more rural setting, and meandered through cow fields, woodland and a hilltop cemetery towards Castle Hill, Huddersfield’s iconic landmark and psychic trig point. It’s a hill with a castle on top – never let it be said that the people of this region mince their words.

Returning from the Ginnels of Golcar expedition and having confirmed with my sister that no oxygen cylinders were available at her property, I flopped down on the settee and read a BBC news story reporting that the 2031 deadline for documenting some 40,000 miles of unrecorded footpaths has been scrapped. The project can now take… as long as it takes, thus taking the pressure off already overburdened local authorities. The ultimate ambition is to produce a definitive map of all such rights of way, which would be the cartographic equivalent of an epic poem – because lines in the earth made by our wandering ancestors are like lines of ancient verse, right?

The Farmers’ Union isn’t happy, of course, but I will always be on the side of the hikers and those just out for a bit of a stroll. Not so much the mountain bikers – I was one of them once and I was a nuisance. And certainly not the quad bikers or the off-roaders churning up the countryside in the latest 4×4 Bronco Machismo or whatever. But what harm did walking ever do?

The most natural, benign and beneficial means of human propulsion, walking is the soul’s preferred means of transport. Sure, I wouldn’t want the entire Ramblers’ Association traipsing through my garden, but most fields are more than capable of hosting a few footpaths without any noticeable damage or disturbance. Surely to be able to put one foot in front of the other and move ahead in a courteous manner in any chosen direction should be an inalienable universal right. So, how about an unspoken agreement, Old MacDonald? Like all the best farmers, you save some of the hedgerows for the birds and the bugs, quit fouling the soil with pesticides and herbicides, stop pouring slurry into the rivers and antibiotics down the throats of cows, and promise not to keep any more hens in prison camps – and we’ll shut the gate behind us. Deal?