Will a new national trail provide better access to nature?

Before sitting down to write this I went for a brisk walk along a public footpath at the edge of my village and felt much better for it.

- John Craven

We all know walking is good for both body and mind but, apart from in Scotland where you can roam freely but responsibly, you must stick to the rights of way. Which can be hard because, in law, many footpaths just don't exist.

"There could be 49,000 miles of lost footpaths that are unrecorded and unprotected, which people can't currently enjoy but should be able to," Jack Cornish, head of paths at the Ramblers, tells me. "Many of these will have been missed off the Definitive Map [the legal record of public rights of way in England and Wales] and there are 8,000 applications pending, with the hope of getting them added to it. Some of them date back to the 1980s and are still to be reviewed - many local authorities don't have enough resources to clear the backlog."

The vast, rolling countryside of eastern England is a joy for anyone with walking boots and a rucksack. Yet a new report by the think tank Onward, titled Walk on the Wild Side, says in many areas people have barely anywhere they're allowed to walk because of the amount of high-grade farmland and large number of unrecorded rights of way.