He was leaning on the open door of a pickup with a roll of wire netting in the back, and I came up the track and said, more or less, “This is a right of way, isn’t it?” I meant it as a check. What came out was a challenge, and I watched his face do the thing faces do when somebody has decided you are going to be a problem.
He said it was, in the flat voice of a man who has said it before, and that people had been leaving the gate at the bottom open all spring. Then he got in the truck. The whole exchange took maybe twenty seconds and I walked the rest of that route feeling like I had failed a test I had set myself.
The opening line does all the work
What I did wrong was lead with my entitlement. Even if I was right, and I was, opening with a claim puts the other person in the position of either agreeing or arguing, and neither of those is a conversation.
What works, and I have used it a hundred times since, is to lead with a question that has nothing at stake. Something like: am I heading the right way for the top lane? Or: I came through the field with the young stock in it, are they all right with people? Or simply, is now a bad time to be coming through here?
Every one of those hands the other person the useful role. They know the answer, I do not, and answering costs them ten seconds. Three quarters of my best route knowledge came out of exactly that question, asked at a gate.
Read whether they have thirty seconds
The next thing I got wrong was timing. Farmers are usually in the middle of something, and the middle of something is not the same as being unfriendly.
Now I look before I open my mouth. Engine running, animals being moved, somebody up a ladder or halfway through a repair with both hands full: that is a nod and a wave and carry on. Leaning on a gate, walking back to the yard, standing looking at a field with a mug: that is a person who might quite like to talk to somebody.
Moving stock is the big one. If sheep or cattle are being pushed down a lane, I get off the lane entirely, stand still in a gateway on the far side, and do not try to help. I helped once, unasked, by standing where I thought I was blocking a gap. I was standing exactly where the dog needed to work and I split the bunch in two. Standing still is help. Moving is not.
What they actually care about
After enough gate conversations you notice the same short list comes up. Gates left open, every time, top of the list. Dogs off leads. Dog mess in grazing fields, which they mind more than most walkers realise because of what it does to stock. People walking through the middle of a crop instead of round it. Litter, especially anything that can end up in silage or in an animal.
What almost never comes up is the fact of people walking there. That surprised me. I expected a general grumble about access and I have very rarely heard it. What I hear is specific and practical: this gate, that dog, that field this month. It is a maintenance list, not a grievance.
Which means most of what makes a farmer’s opinion of walkers is a handful of ten second behaviours, all of them free.
When you are told to go a different way
This is where I have seen people get stubborn, and I understand why, because being redirected off a public path feels like losing something.
My approach is to comply first and ask afterwards, because the gate is not the place to litigate anything. Usually there is a plain reason: a bull in with the cows, a field shut for silage, lambing, a bridge out, a bad tempered dog loose in the yard. I say thanks, I take the alternative, and if I genuinely think a right of way has been blocked long term rather than for a few weeks, that is a matter for the council or the rights of way officer, calmly, later, in writing. Not for a shouting match with a man who has a job to finish.
I have been redirected maybe eight or nine times. Seven or eight of those had an obvious reason within the following week. The general principle I work to is simple: rights of way are real and they matter, and standing on them at the exact moment somebody is trying to run their business gets nobody anywhere.
The small deposits that add up
A few things I do now that cost nothing and seem to matter more than any of them should.
I report things. A gate hanging off a hinge, a fallen tree across the lane, a ewe on her back, a sheep caught in wire, a broken stile. I mention it at the next yard or the next person I see. Twice that has turned into a proper conversation and once into a mug of tea in a barn doorway while it rained.
I say what I am doing there. Walking the lane up to the ridge and back down the green road. It takes four words and it turns me from an unknown figure in a field into somebody with a route.
And I go the same way often enough to be recognised. Being a regular is worth more than being polite once. The same faces stop being wary at about the fourth or fifth time.
The one I still think about
I went back to the man with the wire netting about a month later, on purpose, and told him I had been the one asking about the right of way and that I had thought about it since and it had come out wrong. He looked at me like I had grown a second head. Then he said the gate was still being left open.
We talked for about ten minutes, mostly about the gate, which had a bent catch that meant it needed lifting to shut properly. Nobody had told any walker that, ever. Now I lift it, and I know why. That is what those conversations get you, and none of it was available from the other side of a claim about access.