Hardened readers may recall, doubtless with a blend of loathing and compassion, that I am fascinated by the law of footpaths. (I also enjoy Alexander Pope and Hieronymous Bosch. Unlike Footpath Law, Psychoanalysis seems to be  unreal without being ornamental so I just live with this,)

This brings us to the subject of prams. A polemicist from GLEAM, in the course of an understandable but misguided attack on the principle of "once a highway always a highway" states there is no distinction  made between different kinds of wheels . . . whether on a pram a 4x4 or a lorry. There I believe he is wrong.. Prams don't count.

The only person who has been mildly martyred on a point of highway law was a nineteenth  eccentric, William Matthias, who lived in Bristol and devoted decades to a dispute with its Corporation and the Society of Merchant Venturers - a sort of Livery Company sometimes called the Bristol Mafia. At the age of ninety-two, he was thrown in gaol for contempt of court because he dug a road and refused to reinstate it on the grounds that, in his opinion, it wasn't a public carriageway. You will be pleased to learn that although this venture brought him close to his second bankruptcy, William Matthias  was released to enjoy a short spell as a privileged heckler in the local Magistrates' Court.

Matthias's place in the legal text books (R v Matthias 1861) was based on an earlier episode. The story is so complicated that no one has  unravelled it. In essence, the Merchant Venturers wanted to develop some land. gaining carriage access to it along a path across Matthias's property. He denied that there were carriage rights and persistently blocked the route to wheeled vehicles. As it is a footpath to this day, he was presumably correct.

One day Matthias challenged and technically assaulted a nursemaid in the belief that her pram was a carriage. For this, at the instigation of Bristol Corporation a body closely entangled with the Merchant Venturers, he was prosecuted. The prosecution, or a series of prosecutions, seems to have failed but in the process it was decided that a perambulator, an innovation the law had not hitherto considered,  is the usual accompaniment of a large class of foot passengers, being so small and light, as neither to be a nuisance to other passengers nor injurious to the soil.

The papers report  some heavy Victorian humour in court. . "The absurd female fashion of wearing  crinoline, an article which had just swollen to extreme  monstrosity, was also amusingly introduced. Mr Matthias's counsel asked if  a lady whose dress spread the entire width of the path was to be turned back by a perambulator, upon  which Mr. Justice  Byles thought that a baby's carriage would not be half so formidable an obstruction as the meeting of one lady with another."

The inference must be that a pram is not a carriage and provides no evidence of vehicular use..

Peter Gould

Offstage, imagine the very expensive drone  of a lawyer splitting hairs.
"We submit; m'lud, the pram was a pram in the sense of  a milk float or conceivably a flat bottomed dinghy on a trailer …" 
A wheezing ghost attempts a joke about a bustle. Fade back to the  Real World As Quick As You Like.