Looking at that diagonal path – more multispecies A-road than badger byway – was instructive. It was a reminder that most of the paths in the British countryside were not planned by people in suits with clipboards and agendas; they were made organically, by silent, casual committee: a mixture of animals and humans deciding on the best route to suit their needs and forging defiantly ahead. Desire lines is what they call them in the transportation planning industry. I recently spoke to a woman from Maryland, on the east coast of the United States, who’d never visited rural Britain and was astounded to learn that I could walk in the countryside and get up close to cows and sheep that did not belong to me. Coming from a place where most of the greenery and all of the arable land is sectioned off from walkers, she found it an entirely alien concept. It’s conversations like this that make you realise how privileged we are in the UK to have the green lanes, bridleways and footpaths that we do, allowing us to clamber over stiles nibbled by horses into farmyards filled with inquisitive guineafowl or wild meadows where we might surprise a pheasant and it might surprise us back with a loud ch-kooick as it explodes from the grass. Later during the morning on which my conversation with Ian the plumber had taken place I set off on foot down to the river and in what seemed like no time at all was cuddling a large, docile ewe, a sheep I’d taken for a troublemaker the first time I’d seen her, waiting for me on the path above the Dart, but who it turned out just wanted to say hello and find out whether I needed anything. I told the sheep that she was the best sheep I’d ever met, then immediately felt bad because it was something I’d told lots of other sheep, even though this time I genuinely meant it.
I believe it is my duty to get to know my immediate natural world thoroughly, to not be complacent about it, as it’s the least I can do as a gesture of thanks to it for being kind enough to allow me to live within it. My need to explore my home county on foot – sometimes as much as sixty miles a week of it – also comes as a natural by-product of being one of those odd people who are excited by the design of an old kissing gate, a small pool in a depression at the top of a tor or the blotched patterns lichen makes on a boulder in a spinney. Not everyone will impulsively go ‘Ooh’ upon seeing moss and navelwort laying siege to an old wall – they will need some sort of violent modern stimulus to be prompted to lose control in an equivalently undignified way, and I accept that totally – but I am someone who does. I think my time on local footpaths, and in various places just off them, is also a reaction to something I’m told repeatedly about the way I should live, almost every time I turn on any electronic device with a screen. The whole world is there on the screen, for the taking, and a hive of demanding voices encourages us to absorb as much of it as possible, and keep up with it frantically, as it moves on, and it is always moving on, more swiftly and forgetfully than ever. If you’re someone with a thirst for knowledge, you can very easily get sucked into the excitement of this, before you realise it’s a flawed, impossible pursuit, and it’s not making people, en masse, any more knowledgeable. What it instead often leads to is a brand of knowledge that’s thousands of miles wide and half a centimetre deep: a pond-skating mentality of misleading screenshots and thinly gleaned opinions and out-of-context sound bites and people reading hastily between the lines while forgetting the vital thing you also need to do when practising that skill is to read the lines themselves. The idea of getting to know an area of limited size extremely well works as an antidote to this, and even in a very small area there is always more to know. You can reduce your space right down – to one hedgerow or wall or flooded out-of-use tin mine – and there will never be enough time to know it all.
It could be argued that I have a particularly fertile area in which to do my local investigations, but I’ve done it in another very different place too: Norfolk. And when revisiting the places in the East Midlands where I grew up – rural areas, but localities defined not by hills and rivers and water lanes and creeks but by parks and chip shops and factories and railway cuttings – I’ve been drawn to do the same, to start looking behind the obvious in a way that never would have occurred to me in the distant past: at the thirty-mile view from the hill above your aunt’s old semi and the haunting tower at its hazy edge, at the lovingly designed pattress plates on an abandoned brewery or the stag beetles beneath some bark on an eerie broken oak in a copse behind a litter-strewn lay-by not far from the motorway junction people take if they want to go to IKEA.
This part of Devon isn’t perfect either. Just like other parts of the British countryside it has litter and barbed wire and and
