For all that it’s popular, at least among some, to suppose that we are locked out of the British countryside by farmers and landowners, the reality is different. This is a land with over 140,000 miles of footpaths. If you joined all of these paths up end to end and started walking, the distance you’d eventually cover would circle the globe six times. That said, a number of these paths exist only on maps, and many are now overgrown and out of use.

How and why do we have so many paths and what can their evolution tell us about the history of British people? These questions are at the heart of Nicholas Crane’s fascinating new book, The Path More Travelled. As the author puts it: ‘Routeways are the capillaries of prehistory, the imperceptible conduits that dispersed human life.’ Crane is the author of more than ten books and is obsessed with how people get from A to B. All the elements that make him likeable on the screen, in documentary series such as Coast and Great British Journeys, are in evidence here.

Crane begins in the Mesolithic period, some 11,000 years ago, when ‘the key navigational aid was water’. Water had the ‘convenient attribute of moving downhill, towards the sea. It did so reliably. Follow water in the opposite direction and it would lead you to a watershed on the boundary of