‘But that’s crazy. No one has used that path for years. There’s a whole estate of houses built across it now.’

Sally gave a hollow laugh. ‘Apparently he’s been on to the parish council and is demanding they run a path behind the whole line of houses, cutting them off from their gardens. Either that or pull the houses down because the builder hadn’t checked properly about rights of way.’

Julie was stunned into silence for a moment. ‘He can’t do that!’

‘He can apparently. It only takes one person to insist on the letter of the law.’

‘What is the matter with the man? Why would anyone want to walk up there anyway? It doesn’t go anywhere.’

‘I don’t think that’s the point.’ Julie sighed. ‘These people have no idea. No idea at all.’

It was Colonel Wright who opened the Sunday Times first in the village, exactly two weeks later. ‘Village torn apart by footpath row,’ he saw as the page two headline. ‘Lone local hero fights to re-open rights of way against a barrage of local resentment. Entrenched landowners determined to break the law…’ And there was a photo of Joe Middleton standing by… The colonel squinted at the photo in astonishment and fury. It was his own decimated laurel hedge! He felt his blood pressure mounting dangerously high as he reached for his coffee cup and then put it down again untouched. His hands were shaking violently. That was his own beautiful hedge and it had been blocking nothing! Nothing.

Doreen surveyed the pile of timber that had been her fence. A man from the council had come over with a measuring tape and fussed and measured and tutted and told her that it encroached fifteen centimetres onto the public right of way – the footpath. So the whole thing had to come down. As did the remains of the rose. She stared at her once beautiful little garden miserably. Completely open down its entire length it was unprotected from children and dogs and litter. All had done their worst. How was she ever going to replace the fence? She couldn’t even afford a new rose. Bewildered and unhappy she stood and watched as Marjory Cockpen’s Jack Russell skipped in off the path and proceeded to squat almost at her feet. Marjory, walking along the now broad and ugly path, eyes front, ignored the dog’s indiscretion. Doreen wasn’t to know that the old woman was as unhappy and embarrassed as her neighbour. It had never occurred to Marjory to take a bag for her dog’s do-dos – hitherto deposited out of harm’s way in the hedge, and even if it had with her arthritis she could never have stooped to pick it up.

Crying silently Doreen turned back into her cottage and closed the door behind her. As far as she was concerned she had just lost a friend.

Maureen was standing at her kitchen window staring out at the road. Two reporters were there from the local paper talking to Joe by their front gate. The whole world knew by now that this was the local HQ of the war.

‘This is the third footpath I have campaigned about.’ Joe’s words would appear on page three the following morning. ‘The other two were in neighbouring villages and are now fully open and accessible. They are tidy and neat and though I say it myself would do credit to a proper garden!’ What he didn’t expect when he proudly read the piece the next day was the sharp little editorial two pages further on.

‘Joe Middleton is a representative of an increasing phenomenon in the countryside these days; a retired townie determined to turn the country into a mirror image of the town he has forsaken. He appears to have no real concern for the accessibility or the beauties of the landscape, obsessed instead, in an all too familiar way, with small detail rather than the greater picture. Interviews in the villages whose footpaths he has so proudly fought to clear all tell the same story. Neighbours once friends, now enemies, beautiful countryside fractured, hedges and trees trimmed neatly back to conform to some notional norm, while flowers and berries die. Fields are blighted by the now familiar ugly poisoned scars which dissect them with the precision of a ruler rather than gently following ancient contours and byways. All to provide access for armies of seemingly angry walkers who it is rumoured actually measure the length of grass blades to ensure that they comply with footpath regulations, rather than raise their eyes to enjoy the God-given glory of the countryside they are traversing. Communities do exist where members of different countryside groups have managed to get together to settle such matters as the rerouting of old rights of way amicably and sensibly. Would that this could happen everywhere. Alas, as long as people like Joe Middleton see it as their duty to regard common sense as a dirty word and live by a Pooterish insistence on the value of small print for its own sake, this country will continue to slide into a morass of red tape and mediocrity, turning its back on the spirit of independence combined with neighbourly compromise which once made this country great.’

‘I’d give a good deal to know who wrote that!’ Ted Ames read the leader out to his wife as she dished up the potatoes for lunch. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better, that does!’

‘Well, you won’t when I tell you the latest thing this man wants.’ Julie sat down opposite him and shook her head. ‘I think it’s probably the last straw. You know where the footpath emerges from Dines Wood and crosses the heath?’

Ted nodded. He picked up his knife and fork.

‘Well, apparently the footpath has moved a few feet from its old position. The hedge has widened over the years and parts of the wood are bigger now. They’ve made the whole thing into a nature reserve. There’s a lovely old holly on the edge of the wood. This man says it has to be cut down as it’s on the footpath.’

Ted dropped his knife and fork, his food still untouched. ‘But can’t they go round it?’

Julie grimaced. ‘Oh come on, Ted. You know better than that by now. This man won’t go round anything. He knows his rights. He’s obsessed!’

Ted stared up at the ceiling. ‘What’s the council say?’

She shrugged. ‘No idea. They seem to be caving in to his every demand. He’s got the law on his side, it seems. Colonel Wright is demanding some kind of legal enquiry about some of the things that have happened, but I don’t suppose anyone will be interested in this. It’s right out in the country.’

Ted shook his head. ‘A holly, you say?’

She nodded.

‘Well, that’s going to be an interesting one.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘I’m glad it’s not on my land, that’s all I can say.’

‘You are not seriously insisting that they cut down a tree when there is a sixty-acre field out there for people to walk in to go round it!’ Maureen was watching her husband with something like awe. She had been listening to him lambasting some poor man in the council highways department over the phone.

‘It’s on the footpath, Mo.’ Joe sat back, exhausted. ‘I don’t think you understand how important this all is. I’m not doing this to upset people you know. But someone has to take a stand. These landowners think they can walk all over the rest of us just because they’ve got money and big houses. One day all land will be accessible to everyone, but until then they have to be made to toe the line.’

‘Poor old Doreen Oldfield doesn’t have a big house or any money,’ Maureen said quietly. ‘I was hearing at the post office that she hasn’t been seen outside her cottage in weeks. She just sits and cries because her garden is ruined.’

‘That’s hardly my fault.’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘She should have checked her boundaries. There’s nothing to stop her putting up a new fence.’

‘Except money. And anyway, they were saying that her fence is on the old building line that goes back hundreds of years. It’s hardly her fault.’

Shrugging he gave a testy sigh. ‘Well, that’s not my problem.’

He had pinned an Ordnance Survey map to the wall now. It was covered in highlighter and pins and flags. Each footpath was marked and where they were blocked or deviated by so much as a foot from the official line he had flagged the spot. There were dozens of flags on the map. Dozens of campaigns ready to go once this one was finished. He gave another sigh, this time of contentment. Just one tree and footpath 29 would be clear and neat and ready for inspection by the committee when they came down from London to admire his handiwork and pose – this was his idea – for press photographs to celebrate yet another victory. That unfortunate editorial had been glanced at and immediately forgotten. It had obviously been written by some romantic hayseed with no idea of the realities of country life.

Maureen however was not prepared to let that one last detail go. ‘You are not actually going to force them to cut down a tree on the edge of a wood which is a nature reserve and standing by the side of a huge field?’

He nodded briskly. ‘They can always grow another tree if they want one. It’s the principle of the thing, Mo. I would have thought you would realise how important this is by now. We can’t make any exceptions.’

‘Why not?’ She stood looking at him with something like dislike. ‘Why not, just this once, make an exception?’

‘Because it’s breaking the law.’

‘The tree is breaking the law?’

He nodded.

She took a deep breath. ‘I gather it is a very beautiful tree, Joe. And old. There will be a lot of ill feeling if you insist on this.’ As if there wasn’t already. She sighed.

‘It’s not just me. It’s the council. It’s their job to enforce the law.’

‘And judging by your conversation with them just now they thought you were overstepping the mark. This isn’t some snooty landowner, Joe.’ The hated word. Red rag to a bull. ‘This tree belongs to a nature reserve. It belongs to the birds. To us all.’