Thank you, John, for sharing this delightful piece. It brought back fond memories for me of the summers my wife and I spent in Bath, back in the late 90s, teaching literature classes at the Advanced Studies in England (ASE) program—a small, privately run, collaboration with faculty at University College, Oxford for US students from a variety of colleges along the East Coast, including my own (Hampton University in Virginia). Anyway, your article reminded me of the blissful days we spent walking along the canals and bike trails in the area, including the one you mentioned. We had no car, but I clearly recall how easy it was to walk from downtown Bath—a sizeable city—to open farmland and small stone villages out in the countryside, with lots of National Trust trails winding through pastures, over stiles, along hedgerows, through hills, and along canals.
Here in the US, and particularly on the East Coast, one has to drive through miles and miles of soul-numbing suburban sprawl, strip malls, industrial wastelands, before we can get anywhere near anything called “Nature,” and because of our neurotic obsession with “private property,” we have nothing like the National Trust trails meandering across farmland or privately owned meadows! Rather, we must only stop at designated county or state parks; otherwise we risk getting shot at by paranoid farmers or woodlot owners!
We still have lots of beautiful land, but a toxic, Trumpified rural culture…