The Lost Paths

REVIEW BY JIM LEARY Jack Cornish is Head of Paths at the British walking charity Ramblers and, like me, an advocate of old and lost paths, the overgrown and the abandoned. The Lost Paths charts some of Cornish’s journeys along English and Welsh roads, ways, and lanes, reflecting as he goes on their history and the people who used them. Through this, we are able to follow droveways, turnpikes, and railways, and we can walk on religious paths, rebellious paths, highways, and byways with workers, soldiers, leisure walkers, and the destitute. This is a history of routes – prised from books and records – rather than a fresh-from-the-ground archaeology of them. Still, it is told in