Receipt of Fernseed

I hope they never need applying to The Ridgeway, but the regulations on cross-compliance include a gem that deserves a wider audience than readers of the new edition of Rights of Way, a Guide to Law and Practice.

Cross compliance requires farmers who want an environmental handout from the EEC to obey various laws that apply to their land. In so far as they are visible features in the landscape - not like many "red or green dot" paths a mere legal right - footpaths and bridleways have to be respected.

'Visible' is defined in the regulations as meaning 'visible as a route to a person with normal eyesight walking or riding along it'. Guidance by DEFRA states that 'visible' includes that which would be visible if the requirements of the Highway Act 1980 had not been breached. Accordingly, where a path is not physically visible because it has been ploughed out, and the path has not been reinstated as required by the 1980 Act, the path is 'visible' for the purpose of the regulations.

As compensation for myopia, glaucoma, diabetic degeneration of the retina and traumatic cataract, I wonder whether I might make legal history by asking that the principle of cross-compliance be enforced in respect of a path that should have been visible (even though invisible) to a person with normal eyesight walking along it despite the fact that the person walking along did not, subject to any rulings on public euphemism (social workers for the use of) under the Disability Act, have the normal eyesight necessary to see something that should have been there but wasn't.

What I can see in my mind's eye, which perceives with total clarity things that are metaphysically, not physically, visible is all those angels dancing on the head of a pin: their number equals infinity plus one. I submit this rave is a trespassory assembly in defiance of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Against my soundest musical prejudices, I once supported someone's right to play the didgeridoo by the roadside in the vicinity of Stonehenge, but that entity noodling on the tuba has definitely untuned the sky. The law is the law. Fiat Justitia ne ruat caelum.

Peter Gould