Imagine a walk along one of Gatshire’s bridleways. For all the changes the county has witnessed in the last two hundred years –the advent of the automobile, electricity, running water and the telephone, the intensification of farming methods (and the concomitant decline in the number of those involved in agricultural labour), increased urbanisation and the transformation from relative self-sufficiency to more or less total dependence on external organisations, to name but a few–, these often ancient tracks yet retain an aura of timelessness. The main differences are in the quantity and type of people who use them; today, though one might come across a horse rider, or a party of ramblers, one is as likely to find one has the route to oneself. Bridleways were once social venues, as were roads. As the latter have been conquered by what in many cases serve as the antithesis of social venues –motor vehicles–, so the former have also lost their status as meeting places. Not all are still passable; some have fallen into disuse, blocked off by barriers of nettles, thistles and brambles. But imagine yourself on one of the negotiable ones.

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod this path. Gail Yane wrote, in The Bridleway, a poem about it:

The Reverend Hugh Worthing sought inspiration for his sermons on it. Funeral processions used to convey their stone-stiff burdens along it from outlying dwellings to the lych gate outside Saint Luke’s, and they say that if you come here at night you can still catch the strains of their lament. And in a way the countryside echoes with not only these sounds but also those of every round and broadside sung or whistled by all who have passed along this route or tilled and toiled in the fields to either side. (To this day we keep up the tradition of beating the bounds of the parish at Rogationtide.)