"A Countryman Remembers — Where Once I Walked"

One in the series "A Countryman Remembers."

Bates describes a typical five-mile walk from his home in Kent forty years previous, "unmolested by traffic" and following a variety of "footpaths, carriage tracks, green lanes and little roads utterly deserted." In contrast, he now finds that hedgerows have given way to wire and concrete, footpaths are gone, as are thousands of trees, and that "the frenzy of certain motorists careering down narrow lanes as if they were tracks at Silverstone is truly frightening. Thus is walking now dead; or you are dead walking."

Three decades earlier, in "The English Countryside", Bates wrote about a country walk in quieter though less peaceful times.

In Living (London, November 1973, iii, 11, p. 132, attached).