Pat Wilson

A feisty footpath campaigner who asked for a pair of wirecutters as a Christmas present has died aged 97.

Pat Wilson was described as a legend by the Open Spaces Society general secretary Kate Ashbrook.

Ms Wilson died peacefully at her Kent home on Friday, in the midst of her continuing campaign work.

She fought for the rights of walkers to use paths and open spaces in Kent and Medway form more than 50 years, and was vice-president of the OSS, local secretary for the area for 20 years and the Ramblers’ footpath secretary for Kent.

Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, who worked with Ms Wilson for more than 30 years, said: “Pat was a legend but also a reality.

“She was feisty and determined and tirelessly hard-working to the very end. She was motivated to challenge authority and was rewarded with many fine victories for paths and spaces in Kent and Medway.

“And she was so up-to-date; I know no other 97-year-old who works and communicates with the world by email.”

She was born in Bristol in 1917 and went to school at Redland High School, later graduating from Bristol University in 1938 with a BA in commerce.

She grew up in the inter-war years. She danced in the Pump Rooms the night before the Luftwaffe blitzed Bath; she potholed in the Mendips, and she danced, sheet-clad, on Stonehenge at midsummer.

She and friends hitchhiked through Europe; she was in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics and heard the roars as Jesse Owens won the 100-metres sprint.

In 1942 she married Peter Wilson and four years later, pregnant, sailed to British Honduras where they lived for three years in a timber camp in the jungle, with two small children born there.

Ms Ashbrook said a principled belief in what is ‘right’ underpinned her lifetime of activism, ranging from anti-apartheid marches to wanting wire-cutters as a Christmas present for clearing footpath obstructions.

Her first major campaign was to lobby Parliament to legislate for safety-glass to be mandatory in windscreens after her elder daughter almost died in a car accident. She was mentioned in Hansard; it took her three years.

Ms Wilson saved countless paths and open spaces in Kent and Medway. In 2012 she claimed more than 120 urban alleyways in Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham for the official path-map. Her name is inextricably linked to legal cases which have clarified path law in the public interest. She instigated two far-reaching Ramblers’ cases which not only saved paths in Kent but set crucial precedents for other paths.

When she and her late husband Peter returned from British Honduras in 1949 she knew little about the law of public paths, but a blocked path close to her home at Harvel in 1961 made her furious and she fought to get it reopened.

After that she launched the Meopham and District Footpaths Group and lobbied to get the paths in order.

In the early 60s, more than half the 80 paths on the official map for Meopham were impassable. Ms Ashbrook said the activist believed that the best way to get them open was to encourage people to walk them, and the Meopham Group had a regular programme of local walks.

In 1984 she played an important part in saving countryside at Luddesdown, north Kent, from military occupation.

Ms Ashbrook said: “As we walk through Pat’s country, and the towns too, we can feel certain that, were it not for her persistence, determination and hard work, path-users would be much the poorer.”

Ms Wilson is survived by her daughters Hilary and Jo and granddaughters Emma and Laura.