Natural England is trying to push landowners into dismantling stiles and installing closing gates instead. The idea of the new Countryside Code is to make rights of way more obvious, discourage trespassing, and to help parents with pushchairs and people in wheelchairs enjoy our lovely rural footpaths.

An honourable but somewhat misguided motive. Natural England – a most unnatural quango given to imposing ukases on land it doesn’t own – has made the mistake of thinking that a stile is simply a way of getting from one field to another. But stiles lie at the heart of British culture; in life and literature.

Jane Austen made stiles a barrier to be overcome in the hate-love relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy. In the 1995 television serialisation of Pride and Prejudice, Darcy – not yet reduced to swimming in his shirt – surveyed a muddy Lizzie after the viewer had just seen her jump from a stile into a squelchy patch. 

For once, this was something its adapter, Andrew Davies, hadn’t made up. The original novel had the protagonist so keen to get to Netherfield, Mr Bingley’s house, that she crossed “field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles”. On arrival she felt she was regarded with a certain contempt, not for squelching in mud, but no doubt for the sweat she had worked up – or, as the careful Miss Austen put it: “a face glowing with the warmth of exercise”.

Sweat or no sweat, in the early 19th century the stile was the outdoor equivalent of a staircase. And staircases were the place where young men and women met on the way into a ball or levee, or any of the fashionable upstairs assemblies rejoicing in the names of routs, hurries, tumults or kettle-drums.