These days, very few people take a country walk to get from A to B. Nor do people walk to reach a landmark or a view. These goals are just excuses.

People walk in the country because it is not the town, because it is more wild and more ancient than most of civilised life.

The other day, I found a bunch of people putting shale on to a bank, to make the going easier, to make the place more accessible. To make it less wild, to make the experience less worth having.

It was a marsh, for God’s sake. It’s supposed to be a little damp underfoot.

So now there are plans to do away with kissing gates and stiles, obstacles that are part of the ancient shape of the land, the ancient rhythm of its walks.

Of course, of course: no one wants to deprive the disabled of great experiences. All the same, the taming of the countryside makes me deeply uneasy. It seems that we need interpretation boards and special walkways and cycle tracks to make the countryside an easy option. But it’s not easy: and the sense of leaving civilisation behind is at least part of the point of going out there in the first place.

These ancient barriers, and the tales that go with them – a pregnant woman is supposed to be in danger of strangling her unborn infant if she crosses a stile – are part of the countryside, one I am reluctant to lose.

“All over the country, stiles of innumerable variations were and are still being devised,” said that wonderful celebration of national life, England in Particular.

At the beginning of the 19th century, John Clare wrote of a stile that had been taken away: “It hurts me to see it was gone for my affections claim a friendship with such things.”

So say we all, I think. If changes must be made, we need tact and discretion and good sense – along with a certain generosity from stile-lovers.

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