Ten years ago, a golf course developer in Oxfordshire, England, built a new clubhouse smack in the middle of a countryside public path. Had he been of English walking stock himself, he would have known better.

As soon as it heard, the Ramblers Association, a walkers’ lobby group, complained to the local council. The council rebuked the developer for failing to apply for a diversion of the public right of way and told walkers not to be deterred.

For the next several weeks, as the hammering went on, country walkers stoically tramped through the front door of the half-finished clubhouse, picking up a hard hat on the way in and dropping it off as they went out the back. The frazzled developer applied to have the path moved and soon had a new route marked to bypass the clubhouse.

The incident was only one of many that English walkers have endured over the 150 years since romantic writers such as William Wordsworth and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill made walking a fashionable recreation for the middle classes. Over the years, landowners have been known to threaten walkers with shotguns or deter them with barbed wire or ranging bulls.

But the British love to walk, and landowners’ intransigence has only led to the formation of groups such as Ramblers, a registered charity with 137,000 members. Walking is the nation’s most popular outdoor activity, with 15 million people, or one-quarter of the population, walking for pleasure at least once every month.

For the past 68 years, the London-based Ramblers Association has lobbied to protect the public rights of way that were established over centuries by farmers trekking to market or church. This common-law right was confirmed by statute during the last 200 years. But restrictions remained, spurring Ramblers to fight for more leg-room for country visitors.

At the end of 2000, a major victory was won with the passage of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. This toughened the policy on country pathways, but extended walkers’ right to roam in open countryside. Both historic pathways and lands newly approved for roaming must now be officially designated.

The new law requires that every historic pathway be individually investigated and mapped by the end of 2025, said Janet Davis, Ramblers’ head of Footpath Policy. Any path left out will cease to exist. The first 140,000 miles are already mapped due to work ordered by Parliament back in 1949. Another 10,000 miles remain.

Ramblers therefore has enlisted about 1,000 volunteers—including many retired people and homemakers—to help the local councils draft the required maps. The volunteers scour parish church records, interview horse riders on country trails, put ads in local newspapers, and pore over 200-year-old estate maps to find evidence that the public either has an historic right of way or has used the path unhindered for the past 20 years.

“It’s a big job,” says Davis. “And if anybody objects, that puts a spanner in the works.”

Local councils are to publish each draft map. If someone objects, a public inquiry is held, and suits may be filed. A legal fight can be bitter—and expensive. Ramblers, with an annual budget of £3 million ($5 million), counts on money from membership fees, donations, and a trust fund.

Meanwhile, the second job required by the Act is half done. Before walkers can roam over more open land, the government’s Countryside Agency must map the designated sites, which include “mountain, moor, heath, down, and common land.” The Agency aims to finish by 2005. But again, Ramblers is snapping at the government’s heels.

To country dwellers, whose growth in numbers has tripled that of city-siders since 1981, this mapping effort has meant the occasional treat of seeing an enthusiast rambler, in strange country garb, standing on the roof of a car or clambering up a barn, binoculars in hand.

Kate Conto, Ramblers’ campaign officer for the Right to Roam, says several hundred of these volunteers have been trained to identify the features of the new open land. They take the Countryside Agency’s draft maps—often drawn from records decades old—to the sites and check the boundaries.

Again, some landowners are proving wily in their resistance. Because cultivated land does not qualify for roaming, newly plowed fields are springing up as estate owners develop a curious new interest in farming. To see a better example set, Ramblers has appealed to the Church of England and the Crown Estate to volunteer their land.

“Maybe the Queen can help us out,” Conto quips.

Buckingham Palace agreed it was a “lovely idea” to participate, says Conto, as a way of marking the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002. But so far, the royal household has done zilch. Other twitchy landowners are waiting to see regulations that might give them money in compensation for their largesse. However, Conto is resigned that, at some fences, walkers may just have to accept defeat and take their sorrow to the nearest pub.

“I don’t think landowners will be lining up to dedicate land,” she sighs.

With the hard work of winning government legislation behind it, Ramblers is confident enthusiasts will soon have greater freedom to roam the British Isles. But the watchdog still has 20 years of hard sweat ahead to ensure it wrings the most out of the new pathways law. Davis is cautiously optimistic.

“It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the job will be done,” she says.

Shirley Skeel is a freelance radio and print journalist based in San Francisco, who worked for twelve years in London writing business news for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Bloomberg Newswire, and other publications.