The Right to Roam, Enclosures Acts, and the issues of accessing the countryside.
Rain was still falling hard a week later when I cycled past a garden with two life-size sculptures of giraffes, towards a modern red-brick Catholic church. On the church wall was a statue of a bored-looking Saint George stabbing down at the dragon with about as much enthu- siasm as a community service litter picker. Old George up there took quite the journey to sainthood in rainy England from his beginnings as a soldier in the Roman army. He is the patron saint of not only England but also Georgia, Ethiopia, Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, and Corinthians FC in São Paulo.

I turned right at the church into a maze of terraced streets. In one house I saw a dozen trophies shining in an upstairs window. A child’s bedroom, I guessed, proud of their efforts and achievement. An enor- mous railway embankment towered above the houses and overshad- owed the streets. It led onto a viaduct whose ten arches were visible from grid squares for miles around. I was understanding the lie of the land better now, getting a clearer idea of how all these places fitted

together.