Fancy-Free Walks has become the local go-to website for ramblers. But its founder likes to keep out of view. Richard Nye tracks down the unknown walker...
Let’s get this straight from the start: John Piggott is emphatically not a hiker. He may be the hidden hand behind the most informative, imaginative and comprehensive website for walkers in South-East England, but the Wainwright of Wimbledon he isn’t.
Walking, he insists, is purely propulsion; the formal, not the final cause of enjoyment.
“My website is for adventurers; people who aren’t necessarily habitual walkers, but who want to find a good day out for the family,” he tells me on the telephone. “Legs are simply the means of getting from one interesting place to another.”
And at fancyfreewalks.org the interest rate is high.
It’s a cornucopia of ambulatory pleasures: nearly 500 minutely detailed routes from across the Home Counties, ranging in length from a mile or two to plenty, encompassing everything from field and forest to half-timbered towns, medieval castles and old Saxon churches creaking with centuries of prayer. For the travel writer John Hillaby, the New York Times once remarked, walking was “like making love to the landscape and letting it love him back”.
For Piggott, it’s more like a series of stolen kisses, each one a shaft of serendipity imparting its own signature delight.
“I like to start early, wander around the village, observe the people,” says the seasoned stroller, aged “between Biden and Trump” and now retired from a career in computers. “I’m always walking alone, which means that I can experiment a bit; find out if there’s a better alternative to the official path. Do you play chess? Well, there is an old saying: ‘If you see a good move, find a better one.’ I’m like that with paths.”
It was not ever thus.
Only in his 30s, inspired by the walking books of Raymond Hugh, did John eschew the sedentary lifestyle and resolve to put his best foot forward.
And not until 2009, in his mid-60s, did he start work on the project which would evolve into Fancy Free Walks.
“I was trying to get my son into walking, and he liked very detailed directions, so I started writing it all down. That developed into a blog, and then a rudimentary website, until gradually I started getting emails saying: ‘You’ve got fans!’ Now people write in all the time with updates and amendments to the walks. Mostly they’re helpful, though occasionally not, but it’s a lot of work to keep up with all the changes. I can’t relax.”
Like the animals on Orwell’s farm, all the walks at Fancy Free are equal, but some are more equal than others. While each has been meticulously mapped out – complete with directions for getting to the start and tips on parking, canine compatibility and refreshments – some are especially close to their creator’s heart.
The first walk, 11 years ago, was a quick and simple affair: a 1.5-mile amble through the wooded heart of Surrey, centred on the tranquil, stream-fed hamlet of Friday Street, five miles south-west of Dorking.
But the slopes of Leith Hill, on which Friday Street stands, have since yielded a leafy quiver of routes that flag up John’s passion for the area around the Greensand Way – the hoppy, hundred-mile trail through Surrey and Kent via the escarpment of the Greensand Ridge.
“Anywhere on the Greensand or the North Downs, or indeed the South Downs, is wonderful,” he reflects. “But I’m also in love with the Chilterns, as well as the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex.
Ashdown, in fact, has become a kind of obsession. People know it from Winnie-the-Pooh, but the atmosphere at any time of year is extraordinary. That’s important because timing counts for so much. When it comes to a walk, mood matters.”
Even with John’s enthusiasm, however, covering every cranny of the South-East is beyond the range of one man.
Delegation is all – and Fancy Free is blessed with a crack team of exotically sourced contributors to write and research the walks.
There’s Hautboy, a semi-retired airline pilot and talented amateur oboist, who plods the paths of Sussex; Schwebefuss, a German mental health practitioner who has most of Surrey covered; and Malinovka, the Kentish man whose name means ‘Robin Redbreast’ in Russian.
And then there’s Phegophilos, who sounds like a Pre-Socratic philosopher of the monistic sort, but is actually a mathematical wizard and forest fanatic whose name, by lyrical happenstance, translates as ‘lover of beech trees’.
All, however, is not as it seems. Like one who has walked ”not wisely, but too well”, and is now slogging up the final hill to be met by the mirage of a pub offering free lemonade and beer, you have been fooled. The contributors to fancyfreewalks.org are one, not just in spirit, but in flesh. They are, in point of fact, all John.
“Yes,” he admits, “there are about 10 walks that have genuinely been submitted by others, but all the rest is me. Not that anyone will believe it – people often comment about the different writers. But using aliases enables me to remain anonymous, like a kind of puppet master in the background. I want to ensure that the landscape is the star.”
As indeed it is. And never more so than now, in this protracted season of confinement. For Robert Burns, few things surpassed the joy of “walking in the sheltered side of a wood on a cloudy winter day”, with the stormy wind “howling among the trees”. And while the storms of 2020 have shaken every oak and ash, and the way through the wood has frequently been hard to discern, for some the site has proved a lifeline; a welcome clearing amid the forest of doubts.
“The word ‘lockdown’ appears in about a quarter of my correspondence now,” reflects John. “I’ve had touching emails from people saying they’d reached the end of their tether, but that discovering walking through my website changed their life. One man said that it had helped his family physically, mentally and spiritually.”
And so the good work continues. John has recently finished a Surrey walk called Thames and Wey Bridges, which takes his remarkable innings to 499 not out. The location for his 500th offering – after which, he says, he may start to ease up – has yet to be revealed.
So, wherever you are this winter, keep an eye out for a solitary walker, perhaps with a notebook in hand, fastidiously checking every gate and stile. You just might have bumped into Señor Botafuego, the best South American history writer in boots.
See more at www.fancyfreewalks.org
