They will never go out of stile

There is a wooden step stile a mile or so from my front door: old and rickety, mossy-stumped and hedge-bound. I rarely approach it without thinking of our first family dog. A stout, sturdy and athletic fellow, he crossed that stile from puppyhood, front paws as a lever to his leap, landing on the other side with a thump or splosh depending on the weather. Then, one day when he was in his 11th year, he made to do the same. This time, however, he failed to clear the cross-bar and fell backwards in an inelegant heap. Twice more he gamely tried to vault the stile with the same painful result. After the third failure, he sat down and looked up at me with the sad, bewildered eyes of one who had just come face to face with his mortality. I lifted him over from then onwards. Although the Elizabethans used the phrase ‘to help a dog over a stile’ to denote an act of kindness, ours could not stand the indignity of it. He left us 12 months later. Now, some 25 years on, that wobbly old stile is a reminder of long gone, greener days. The mere thought of it can make me misty eyed.

I am in good company. In his journal of September 1824, the poet John Clare lamented the sight of a farmer removing an old wooden stile ‘from a familiar spot which it had occupied all my life… it hurt me to see it was gone for my affections claim a friendship with such things’. Clare lived most of his life in rural Northamptonshire and his verse is filled with ‘old crooked stiles to rest upon’ and from which to contemplate the sweetly smiling meadows. To Clare, and many other country dwellers, the stile is as much a place for pause and reflection, for conversation, perhaps even romance, as it is a simple, if sometimes hazardous, route between fields.

The stile is a unique feature of the British countryside. Dating back to Anglo-Saxon days (the name derives from the German stighel, meaning to climb or clamber) and mentioned by William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the oldest surviving stiles are likely those in Cornwall, where small fields are enclosed by high hedge banks. Many comprise a simple stone lintel bridging a gap that is reached by granite steps. Close by Treloan Farmhouse near St Mawes, a stone stile topped by a Cornish cart axle is Grade II listed.

That westernmost county is also home to examples of the stile in one of its more singular forms: the coffin stile — stone slats laid over a shallow pit — is an early form of cattle grid. Often used at the entryway to churchyards in lieu of a gate, the coffin stile allows pallbearers in and keeps livestock out.

Stiles come in as many variations as our accents. Although you can order stiles online in much the same way you would flat-pack furniture, most have a vernacular style that often suggests they have been assembled by the same people who make gymkhana fences or obstacle courses for the Royal Marines. A scaffolding pole is cemented between stones or a sheet of slate slotted home at the top of a narrow flight of steps. To the nervous eye, the latter looks rather like a guillotine blade.

The step stile is the commonest type. Quite often wobbly and slippery when wet, the crosser has to balance on one foot, reliant on the accompanying post for support, even when it moves around like a mast in a gale. They are an unsteady reminder of the nursery rhyme about the crooked man who ‘found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile’. Stone step stiles built into walls seem stout and sound, but the arrangement of the steps requires the climber to execute a balletic swivel on the top platform or descend backwards like a small child on the house stairs.

The clapper or tumble stile, which is particularly, if not exclusively, associated with Cambridgeshire, looks like a row of giant mallets. The wooden heads weight one end of the stile like a medieval siege engine. You push the opposite end downwards before flinging a leg across, mindful that, if your bracing hand slips, the stile will deliver a barbaric upward blow of the sort justly outlawed by the Marquess of Queensbury.

The ladder stile first appeared in the later decades of the 18th century (the Enclosures Acts were a great boon to stile builders). As does the stone step stile, the ladder requires some inelegant pivoting at the apex, although the view is often grand and you can generally get a mobile-phone signal when up there. It features in two of Northumbrian artist Thomas Bewick’s justly celebrated end pieces. In one, an old and infirm man is given a piggy-back by his younger companion; in the other, an elderly woman’s attempts to mount the stile are hindered by a fearsome bull. Even in the 1790s, it seems the stile was a common countryside feature that was rich with potential for slapstick comedy.

Metal designs became popular with the owners of country estates in the Victorian era. Bought from hardware catalogues (which included among the selection a particularly vertiginous ladder stile high enough to cross fences in deer parks), these are usually more elaborate and elegant than the homemade stile, albeit lacking its rough-hewn charm.

Whatever it looks like, the stile affords a walk an element of the steeplechase. Flora Thompson seems to ascend a veritable Matterhorn of them in Lark Rise to Candleford. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet crosses ‘field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles’ in her eagerness to get to Netherfield, home of the eligible Mr Bingley, to visit her sister Jane. Alas, her cantering point-to-point has left her rather hot and perhaps a little sweaty and the snooty Miss Bingley is unimpressed by her glowing face. Even Austen’s strong-willed heroine stopped short of the young lady of Majorca’s aunt who, in the Edward Lear limerick, ‘walked 70 miles and leaped 15 stiles’.

In Persuasion, the ill-fated Louisa Musgrove finds that, when she goes on walks with the dashing Capt Wentworth and he has to ‘jump her from stiles’ the sensation ‘was delightful to her’ (all perfectly innocent I’m sure, although Sigmund Freud might have had something to say about it). As Miss Musgrove’s experience attests, the stile was often a place of romance, where lovers met and where, in the age of the floor-length dress, a would-be suitor might catch an exciting glimpse of an ankle. There were, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson observes in Marriage Morning: ‘Stiles where we stay’d to be kind.’

For many, the stile offered an escape into a quieter world, as Thomas Hardy described when he wrote of going ‘by footpath and by stile, beyond where the bustle ends’. Edward Thomas, meanwhile, paused at one ‘looking along a path’, pondering lost time and the verdant pastures of his youth (albeit whether the Anglo-Welsh poet ever had to lift a flummoxed old dog over one goes unrecorded).

Today, the stile is under threat. The Miles without Stiles campaign aims to replace them with kissing gates. The Offa’s Dyke Path national trail once had 900 stiles along its 177-mile course; now, there are fewer than 250. With an ageing population and rural emergency services and healthcare provision stretched, the idea, perhaps, makes practical sense, but many will, as Clare did two centuries ago, feel a wistful pang at the removal of so many sweet and painful memories.

This article originally appeared in the September 17 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here