The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths Read Online Free PDF Page A

bulging bank balance, Wright fully expected to be welcomed into their drawing rooms, but it was not to be. Old money, as ever, peered imperiously down on new money, and Wright grew increasingly bellicose as their doors continued to remain shut to him. Every Sunday, the big house families would sweep past him stuck in his pew at the back of Flixton’s twelfth-century parish church, as they made their stately progress up to their ancient family boxes at the front. ‘Vegetable’ Wright sat and stewed in the cheap seats, dreaming up ways of getting his revenge.
    The parish church, in whose graveyard Wright lies buried within the most massive mausoleum of all, had already acted as the cauldron for Flixton’s petit bourgeois tensions. In 1804, a public appeal was launched to recast the church’s four bells, but such was the urge amongst the local gentry to outdo – and, more importantly, to be seen to outdo – each other, the appeal raised way more than was needed, and it was decided to have eight brand new bells cast for the church instead, at a cost of over £750 (around £60,000 at today’s prices). ‘Vegetable’ Wright ostentatiously paid for the biggest bell of the lot, setting him back £101 12/6. No-one had thought to check that the fabric of the church could take such weighty munificence and, seven years later, the walls fell in. Less than a decade after they were rebuilt, the tower threatened to collapse. It was partially rebuilt, and then declared unsafe again in 1863. This time, it was obvious that the overly heavy bells were the culprit, and they were silenced until 1888, by which time a new and reinforced tower had been built from scratch.
    After the first rebuilding of 1814, a row erupted about a stove that had been placed in the church’s chancel for ‘the accommodation of the congregation generally, and the scholars attending Sunday school in particular’. One prominent parishioner, a Mr Norris, objected, but nothing was done, so he persuaded a friend, Conyers Bale, to attempt to prove legal ownership of the chancel by dint of the fact that he was a parish lay rector. This was ignored, so Norris and Bale employed a gang to rip the stove out. The churchwardens sued at the Police Court for trespass and ‘wilful spoil’, and won. Norris and Bale appealed to the Sessions, who overturned the decision, which was then subject to an appeal by the other side and finally settled, nine expensive years later, at the Lancaster Assizes, Bale having turned the charge of trespass back on to the churchwarden for installing the stove in the first place. The great Church Stove Battle, chased through every court and getting a lot of people in a fierce palaver about – quite literally – a lot of hot air, was a prescient pointer to the footpath struggle ahead, for it was evidently the Flixton way of doing things. Looking at the place today, I suspect that little has changed.
    When Flixton House was finished in 1806, ‘Vegetable’ Wright acquired, in various parcels, some 15 or 16 acres to go with it. Flushed with the notion that he needed to hone it into a parkland befitting his newly acquired status of gentleman, he sealed his land piece by piece, despite the fact that it was crisscrossed by a network of old paths. Some were little missed, but one in particular, known as the Bottoms, was the only dry path to church for people of all classes on the regular occasions that the nearby River Mersey flooded. The Highways Act of 1815 ruled that a path could only be extinguished by the signed order of two magistrates, but this proved no problem for Wright, who was also on the bench. The odd dinner for fellow JPs (church-stove battler and inveterate litigant Mr Norris being a regular) was held in Flixton House’s gaudy dining room, before some fine port and a footpath closure order slipped in to follow. Oftentimes, he barely even bothered with that perfunctory process, shutting up the paths, even ploughing and planting them