Unofficial trails quietly carved into the landscape by people seeking shortcuts are nothing new. But lockdown has lent them a surprising new twist…
Since the beginning of lockdown, a new path has sprung up in my local park – it snakes underneath a tree and up (and then down) a small hill, marking the way to the local Sainsbury’s. It is not an official path paved by keen construction workers in the dead of the night, but a “desire path” – a walkway made by hundreds of shuffling feet damaging the grass and eroding the ground beneath them. If “real” paths show us where we should go and how we should get there, then desire paths expose the complicated messiness of humanity. They are visible markers of our autonomy or, at the very least, our undeniable love of shortcuts.
Because the grass isn’t being cut, you start seeing them. It doesn’t take long for a path to develop
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