When Macaulay’s New Zealander has finished his meditations on London Bridge, and comes to sum up the history of this country, he will, if he is a wise man, have something to say on the subject of names. In Book VII. Chapter iv. Section 48 on Individualism, he will point out how we always tried to ascribe events to single individuals, and to stamp them with a great name; how we worshipped our national heroes when they were dead, and ascribed all our glories to them; how we hung their statues with garlands on appointed days, or wore flowers which were somebody else’s favourites. But he will add that this tendency did not stop there: that a great many things which were really public and national institutions, having originated in individual effort, remained to the end marked with the individual name. Bradshaw, Whitaker, Crockford, Hazell, Haydn, Kelly—in another country we should have had long official and descriptive titles, but in England all these great works—the very props of our domestic life—still bear the names of their creators, though these have in some cases passed from us. We cling passionately, with something of an anthropomorphic instinct, to the idea of a single man in each case, of one colossal brain issuing annually or at intervals in these magnificent aggregations of indispensable fact.

In this list there is a name lacking, and it is one which, far more truly than the rest, stands for unaided effort and individual enterprise. I mean Walker Miles, the author of Field Path Rambles and other guide-books for walking in the home counties. Less wide in his scope than Whitaker, less exuberant in detail than Bradshaw, he yet stands, in virtue of his subject, on a far higher plane than either. Bradshaw can lay before us, with masterly lucidity and conciseness and a wealth of symbolic resource, a picture of our country’s passenger transport system; Whitaker articulates for us the whole skeleton of its official being. But our country is something more than a complex of railways or a structure of offices and salaries; and the true Englishman, or at least the true Londoner, when he has expended a proper veneration on the other masters of actuality, should at any rate have a thought to spare for Walker Miles.

Walker Miles was not, it may be inferred, his real name. There are colleagues of his, co-heirs of his renown, who deal with other parts of the country: and one of them bears the name of Alf Holliday. Both names were clearly pleasantries, adopted possibly from modesty, possibly from a feeling that their task was too sacred to be associated with the name of an actual man. But it is as Walker Miles that we know him: as Walker Miles he influences our lives, guides our steps, and points us to the inner secrets of our native land. And, among his colleagues, he was clearly the leader and the pioneer. Alf Holliday and Noah Weston have great moments: Hertfordshire is theirs and the Northern Heights are theirs: theirs are Chipperfield Common and St. Albans and the valley of the Chess. But Walker Miles has Kent and the whole of Surrey; the Oxted hills and the Epsom Downs, and that wonderful triangle whose apices are Guildford and Leatherhead and Leith Hill; all these, to his eternal honour, are marked with his name.

The task which he undertook may be indicated by the words with which he himself begins his immortal work on the Surrey hills. ‘It has been remarked, and with much truth, that to any one with a good knowledge of our field paths and bridle roads, England may be said to be one vast open space for the enjoyment and recreation of its people. This knowledge, however, is somewhat difficult of attainment, owing mainly to the frequent absence of any distinctive mark or indication by which a public right-of-way may be known. Even the ordnance maps afford no assistance in this direction.’ It was to the spreading of this ‘good knowledge’ that he addressed himself. With consummate care and precision, he set himself to select from the vast complex of footpaths the best and most interesting, to weave them into continuous walks bearing a practical relation to the facilities for railway travel and food supply, and then, by instructions which even the most careless could hardly mistake, to lay them open to his followers. We can picture him with his note-book and compass, piecing together the stray and apparently purposeless fragments of path which abound in our country, harking back, altering, revising, adding touches of detail for the guidance of the inexperienced, suppressing all superfluity, sparing no pains in his effort to spread the good knowledge, to reveal the vast open space for enjoyment and recreation, and, in a very real sense, to restore England to the English.

It was a work necessarily incomplete and necessarily open to criticism. An exhaustive treatment of the footpaths of any district, however concise and summary, would run into quartos: it was the essence of Walker Miles’s books that they must be small and portable. The most, therefore, that he could hope to do was to adumbrate certain main routes and to leave others to work out in detail all the countless variations and combinations. And since every man has his own predilections in footpaths as much as in poetry, Walker Miles labours under all the limitations and all the vulnerability of the anthologist. There is no one of us but could pick out here and there points in which the Walker Miles route could (as we think) be improved upon; there are few who do not habitually abandon his guidance at times and take a favourite line of their own. But such variations neither undo his work nor disestablish his primacy among home-county walkers: it was only through following his way that we were able to improve upon it; and we may be sure that he himself would never have wished the good knowledge to be limited within the necessarily narrow confines of his own work, but would rather have welcomed any subsequent variations which amplified without superseding it.

Perhaps one general criticism of his work may be allowed which rests on something more than a personal predilection. He seems hardly to have realised the fascination of the straight line. Of course he had to cater for all types—the six-miler, the twelve-miler, the eighteen-miler, and the twenty-four-miler—the four great classes of walkers which are separated by more than a numerical distinction; and stations and inns had to be provided at suitable points to meet all these tastes. Even so, the routes seem often unnecessarily tortuous; and although the tortuosities are never objectless, and often lead to exceptionally fascinating pieces of scenery, yet there is lacking that grandeur of conception about the walk as a whole, that sense of a sustained purpose, which attaches to a straight-line walk of twenty miles or more. There is a certain sublimity, such as the Roman road-makers must have felt, in holding a general direction across country regardless of the rise and fall of the ground: most of all when the direction is southward, and the sun swings slowly round from the left cheek to the nose and on to the right cheek and the right ear. So man goes straight to his goal while the constellations swing round him. Still, if we wish to improve on Walker Miles in this way, the remedy is in our own hands; and more, we shall often find that some of the greatest moments of our line are his. Of the two big lines in the central Surrey district, that from Epsom to Guildford (it is not quite straight) is made up of three Walker Miles fragments (Epsom—Burford Bridge—Ranmore—Guildford); while that from Esher to Leith Hill, perhaps the greatest of all, reaches its climax in Walker Miles’s track through the Rookeries and up the Tillingbourne valley, or the even nobler route through Deerleap Wood and Wotton.

The mention of straight lines suggests one of the most difficult of walking questions, namely the functions and limitations of trespassing. There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked ‘Private,’ in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and impotent. There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the history of English commons and rights-of-way, of the organised piracy upon the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one little pebble on our own account, if only for old sake’s sake, at the forehead of Goliath. But like other unregenerate impulses, this carries its punishment with it. To indulge the love of trespassing involves ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this—like the twin passion for short-cuts as ends in themselves—is disastrous to walking. It may rest on a mere natural love for law-breaking: it may—and often does—rest on higher and deeply considered motives; but in either case it is an alien element in the commonwealth of walking.

Trespassing on high moral grounds has the further disadvantage that it leads to meticulous hair-splitting. I know walkers who think it right to trespass on the grounds of a large landowner, but not on those of a small landowner. They consequently draw a line at five acres or so, and have to consider, whenever trespassing is proposed, on which side of the line the field of action lies. Under conditions of urgency—the only conditions which unquestionably justify trespassing—there is little time for such refinements of casuistry, and as a matter of fact moral considerations usually go by the board in any real crisis. I have myself seen one of the most fervent upholders of the five-acre doctrine open the gate of a blameless householder at Caterham, walk down his ten-foot garden path, climb his back-fence, and so issue on to a private golf-links.

There are practical disadvantages, too, in the way of the hardened trespasser. Sooner or later, at the end of his trespassing, waits Nemesis for him—the keeper, flanked by dogs and fortified by a gun, purple-faced in hate of a wrong not his, ingeminating the awkward question, ‘Did you see the notice-boards or did you not?’ And there follows the mean and abject retreat to the nearest road, with the vision of the landed aristocracy calm and triumphant.

And there are deeper reasons which make trespassing for its own sake a passion unworthy of a walker. The desire to affront the landed aristocracy is just one of those disconnected and abstract impulses which walking should mould and settle into the structure of larger thought. He who walks over English country in a proper and receptive frame of mind must catch something of its spirit, of the age-long order of possession. It is not only the voice of the keeper and landowner that is lifted against the casual trespasser: it is the voice of a long tradition, a settled convention, the voice, in a sense, of the country itself. The force which settled the forms of wood and field and hedgerow, which fixed the very conditions of our walking, is the same force which (dimly comprehended) pulsates in the breast of the indignant keeper and hardens the faces of the ‘Private’ notice-boards against us. In the concrete imagination of the practised walker such a force must have its due place; and, beside it, the vague and abstract love of trespassing is but a shadowy phantom of to-day.

But if we can respect the rights of others, we can also respect our own; and it is here that Walker Miles is at once our prophet and our guide. As ancient as the fields themselves, as securely based upon the ages and sanctified by the use of our fathers, the footpaths and field-tracks stand as the living embodiment of popular rights. Beside the way which the feet of generations have worn to church or inn, the loftiest dwellings and widest parks are mere parvenus. If the trespasser wishes to commit an act of symbolic defiance against the landed aristocracy, he need not climb their fences or jump through their flower-beds: he can tread the right-of-way which existed before they were thought of, which conditioned the laying out of their estates, which often cuts clean through their property with all the contempt of an oak for a mushroom. Some rights-of-way may have been lost to us, in the manner mentioned above; but many yet remain which the Romans trod, and the Saxons trod, and our later ancestors trod; and all the forces of darkness have not prevailed against them.

The preservation of commons and footpaths has now passed into the hands of a great and beneficent society; Pompeius has set sail on the Mediterranean, and the pirates have been subdued. But there is no surer guard for our rights than a steady and regular patrolling of our possessions; and in this Walker Miles is a safe guide. He is a master of all the tricks by which the public is at present cheated, all the last desperate devices of defeated piracy. The locked gate of the farmyard, the ‘Trespassers’ board planted by the stile within a foot of the path, the track which appears to lead up to the doors of a private house—all these figure in his stately prelude, and are exemplified again and again in the course of his works. Following in his steps we need fear no keeper: and if ever a bar or board stand in our way we can disregard it. Beside one of the Oxted paths there lie (or lay) the shattered remains of a notice-board which some usurper had planted in the very centre of the way. I can claim no credit for its destruction, for by the time I came there was in truth very little destroying left to be done; but I like to think of that unknown devotee of Walker Miles, pursuing his placid way, faced suddenly by the intruder, and with one splendid motion laying it low and (as far as could be judged) jumping on it afterwards.

The style of Walker Miles is perhaps an acquired taste. He wrote under peculiar conditions: he had to be at once clear and compendious, that the careless walker might not miss his way nor the weakling stagger under the weight of a large volume. He had thus little use for rhetorical tropes and flourishes; his words had to be cut down to the bare minimum necessary to express his meaning. But, to the initiated, this rigorous conciseness lends his style a peculiar value: every word has its appointed function: we feel that we could not sacrifice a single line; nay, those who have unintentionally done so by skipping a few lines in the middle of the page have regretted it when the subsequent directions became unintelligible. And the fact—also necessitated by his conditions—that most of the verbs are in the imperative mood exercises a singular charm; we feel that the author is in an intimate relation with us, addressing us personally and not merely discoursing from afar.

As a sample of his style, I take a section of the walk from Leith Hill to Felday.

Within the compass of six sentences we have traversed perhaps the most wonderful mile in all the author’s works. The uninformed may regard the passage as dull, but to those who know their Walker Miles, and above all to those who know the Highashes Farm bridle-path, there is more meaning in these simple words than in all the laboured enthusiasms of a guide-book or a local-colour novelist. In the whole passage there are but two descriptive epithets, and these of the most temperate kind; but both their rarity and their temperance give to the epithets of Walker Miles a special value: he only uses them when there is something which deserves epithet. As the short and businesslike sentences pass before us in ordered succession, we may fairly recall another author who knew how to gain vividness by sacrificing ornament; we catch again something of the quick, uplifting stringendo of Thucydides.

Works of reference are traditionally the butts for small wit; and it is possible that as Walker Miles becomes more widely known a legend will spring up that his directions are obscure, like the sister legend, fostered by dying or dead humourists, that Bradshaw is unintelligible. The Bradshaw myth has by now got some footing, and it will take a few generations of increasing good sense to kill it; but it may be hoped that all walkers will combine to strangle any embryo Walker Miles legend at birth. If a man knows the four points of the compass, can distinguish between his right hand and his left, and (occasionally) can recognise a holly or an oak, he has all the equipment necessary for understanding Walker Miles. I have followed his directions now for some years, and have only come to grief from my own carelessness, or from actual changes in the country which have made his directions out of date. Now and then the course of a footpath has been altered: for example, the Highashes Farm track now debouches not into the Felday road, but into the cross-road to Abinger, so that one turns to the left instead of the right. Here and there, too, a stile has been removed or a gate has become a gap. But the great bulk of Walker Miles is still accurate, and none but a fool need go astray.

Under which term I include, with the deepest respect, betrothed couples: in the honourable and Shakesperean sense they are fools, being too much occupied with supramundane things to be able to attend properly to the business in hand. It was my good fortune one Whit-Monday to overtake two such couples on a Walker Miles track, both with the master’s work in hand and both somewhat puzzled as to his meaning; but I was able to set both right by precept and example, and I trust that there are now two happy homes where Walker Miles stands in the place of honour in the front-parlour, ousting East Lynne and the other customary household gods. There is also a story about a minister of state, but that has nothing to do with Walker Miles.

Useful, accurate, concise, intelligible—it is no light thing to be able to predicate these qualities without reservation of a man’s work: and I doubt if he himself would have desired further praise. There is no trace of trumpet-blowing in his writings: indeed, he leaves the reader in doubt whether he himself realised the full measure of his achievements. ‘Though the main roads to Leith Hill,’ he says, ‘are perhaps some of the most charming in the country, it is, nevertheless, strange how few except thorough-going ramblers know of any other routes. The five following rambles will, therefore, it is to be hoped, find favour with those who like to get off the “beaten track.” They are all different, both going and returning, and are of varying lengths, as will be seen by reference to page 65.’ In this masterpiece of understatement it is difficult to know whether a smile of Socratic irony is not lurking on the master’s lips, waiting the answering smile of the disciple who understands. Where another would have let loose the big trumpet of the ‘Exegi monumentum’ timbre, he merely states the fact. ‘They are all different, both going and returning.’

He himself has gone to return no more, and only his works remain. But I like to think that somewhere on the Elysian plain, where prophet and hero and poet tread together down the well-worn paths, a single figure quests somewhat aside, writing words of gold upon an ivory tablet as he goes. ‘Continuing on past the Happy Groves take the well-marked track to the right, but at the third clump of asphodel, note a grassy track diverging to the left, and follow this until it leads into an open space covered with amaranth and moly.’