After tea, my host, who was a farmer as well as miller, took me over his fields, and showed me his live stock, his crops of wheat, barley, oats, beans, and roots, which were all large and luxuriant, and looked a tableau vivant of plenty within the green hedges that enclosed and adorned them.
The next morning, after breakfast, my kind host set me on the way to Tiptree by a footpath through alternating fields of wheat, barley, oats, beans, and turnips, into which an English farm is generally divided.

These footpaths are among the vested interests of the walking public throughout the United Kingdom.

Most of them are centuries old.

The footsteps of a dozen generations have given them the force and sanctity of a popular right.

A farmer might as well undertake to barricade the turnpike road as to close one of these old paths across his best fields.