Two Paths Ran in Parallel in a Yellow Wood

[steepholm]

For "yellow wood" read Romsey, the small market town where I was born and where my mother still lives.

There are two ways to walk from her house to the town centre. One involves going straight down Cherville Street, a distance of some 300 yards. There is also a path of the same distance that runs more or less parallel to Cherville Street, between the back of the Cherville Street gardens and the school fields where I "played" some forty years ago. There's nothing special about the path, but it does have some brambles growing along it, and in early autumn I've been known to raid them for blackberries. At the far end of the path (about fifty yards from the far end of Cherville Street) there is also a rather picturesque thatched cottage.

Now here's the strange thing. If I meet a stranger coming the other way along Cherville Street, we will pass each other wordlessly, as is customary with town dwellers. However, if I meet a stranger coming the other way down the path, we are apparently obliged - by what law I don't know - to say "Hello" or "Good morning!", rather as we might if passing each other in some isolated spot on Dartmoor. In other words, the path has somehow been designated as the countryside, despite being in the middle of the town.

Admittedly it's a small town, there's grass or garden either side of the path, and occasionally there are songbirds to eke out the crows and gulls that stalk the football fields. Beyond those fields the River Test flows somewhat bucolically, I suppose, but still.... With Cherville Street just fifty yards away, how did this custom get established?

Anyway, this is just a note for me to ponder, but I'd be interested to hear of any similarly inexplicable designations of community space as country, town, or something else, especially if they seem to have popped up without anyone apparently taking a decision about it.

Comments

[cmcmck]

A huge difference we have noticed here is that this is rural Shropshire and people are chatty like to talk and greet.

I like this! :o)

[thistleingrey]

That is cool.

I do have a comparable example, but I don't know its former regular use because I was a visitor (though not a tourist--I think it matters: each time I was in company with someone who dressed as and had the body language of a longtime (naturalized) local). There used to be a path along brambles from the garden gate below my grandmother's small condo building (six or eight units) down, then across, and stretching as far as a Baroque-era minor palace. (There was a cafe by the minor palace, to which my grandmother liked my father to take her when we visited.) Though the equivalent of a ring road let cars and trucks whiz by meters away, on the path it was country manners--to each their own. If you walked on the road's sidewalk, however, as we did once when it rained, you were in town. All of this was within city limits of what I guess is an equivalent of an English market town: the local city of some size = Landkreis, district head, though not exactly large then or now. Not a metropolis.

The last time I visited that city (a decade ago and a further near-decade after my grandmother's death), the path was not to be found: a couple of new developments had interrupted it.

[steepholm]

That sounds very much the same! It's strange how these social micro-climates evolve, isn't it?

[thistleingrey]

I was a bit startled to read your post, and glad that the Romsey byway you describe still exists!

[lilliburlero]

There's a straight stretch of road, about a mile long, between the village where my mother lives and the next one, with a narrow footpath/cycleway running the length of it. Though people don't greet strangers in either village, it is generally understood that you greet everyone on the mile-long stretch (this used to be immutable etiquette, though in recent years I have startled people by saying the requisite terse 'Hullo'). The greeting zone is marked by a bridge with a lock below it at one end, and a bench and signpost at the other.

[reposted as a reply to the original post]

[steepholm]

I feel we may have stumbled on a neglected area of sociological research!

[larryhammer]

I need to tease out examples to be sure, but I think there's something of a similar effect in walking/biking trails in my local city parks. The signal for different protocols seems to be whether the walkway is paved: paving means less likelihood of being greeted, even by a fellow pedestrian.

[steepholm]

Yes, that's a good point about surfacing. How much more likely one is to say hello on gravel than on paving - or on grass than on either!