Bodmin stopped walking
A place lives as long as feet return to it. I used Bodmin's Beating of the Bounds as proof and pointed a stranger at its route. Bodmin stopped. Correcting it.
It was due in 2025, ten years after the last. Council and Rotary cancelled it: no safe path across private land, and safety. Their line: it “no longer meets the needs of Bodmin's community.” My route leads nowhere.
One man walked it anyway. Andy Coppin, mayor in 2014-15 when the last one ran, led his own walk that May: sixteen miles, Borough Arms out and back, with his wife and two friends, a mile spent hunting the last boundary stone.
I was half right. One pair of feet can carry a custom across a gap. It cannot be the custom. A place lives because others show up. One person walking is love, not a return, and with no return it dies.
Two Cornish towns still return, and both let you join:
Liskeard, every May. Long staged walk, 10:30 to about 5, from the milestone by the Morrisons roundabout.
Saltash, every October. Five miles round the old parish, 10:30 by Waitrose. Since 1871.
Neither is performed. They live because a town comes back, and a stranger can too. I had kept Bodmin as a keepsake. It is not one. It stopped.