GRIFF RHYS JONES is forced to take drastic action after cyclists came rattling through his garden 

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Oh dear. Here we go. Like breast-beating Radio 4, I now bring you a terrible story of Covid-19-induced torment and instability. My own.

Who would have thought lockdown would turn me into a foaming, red-faced, bearded loon? Don’t answer all at once.

On March 22, I was on my way back from my vulnerable mother’s (but don’t call her that) when I noticed a carload of walkers mooching around the entrance to the local reservoir.

Like my ducks, caught outside the electric fence at nightfall, they were confused. The gate was locked — and had been since the authorities shut all publicly owned amenities to prevent people infecting themselves while doing their physical jerks.

So what did the walkers do? They came and parked up at my place instead.

I have a footpath running through my garden. I won’t tell you where it is, because if you live in East Anglia you seem to know already.

A while back, I was hailed by a policeman on the A12 way up in north Suffolk. He wanted to point out that I was in excess of some speed limit or other. Taking details, he told me he knew exactly where I lived.

‘Blimey’, I said. ‘That’s some radar you have there.’

No. Apparently, he often used the footpath that runs directly past my house.

‘And you’re welcome to it,’ I said. ‘Just as long as you don’t exceed my speed limit, copper.’

When I first bought my rustic dwelling in south Suffolk some 40 years ago, I was entranced by the parish boundary that ran straight through the dining room. ‘Look, darling,’ I called. ‘It’s painted on this beam. I can wake up in one village and pee in another.’

Luckily, the footpath doesn’t traverse the actual premises. But an ancient right of way does go across my carefully tended wildflower meadow, past my holly hedges and over my back doorstep.

And this is a good thing. I am not a rambler myself (members of my family might disagree) but I do love the idea of a footpath being there — unlike my neighbours, who have refused a diversion of the nearby National Coastal Path across their properties in case, using powerful binoculars from their attic windows, they should spot a human being half a mile away on the shoreline.

I encourage folk to stroll on through.

The Stour and Orwell Walk, as the path is called, was created to allow Anglo-Saxons from outlying farms to get to church. Technically, a bit of it is a ‘permissive path’, which means the landowner has to approve its use. I permitted it. Back in the Eighties.

Last year, the Government sent a man with a beard to propose that, given the intransigence of the neighbours, I might like to have the permissive bit made into a permanent super-footway as part of the National Coastal Path.

I should be flattered, really. Britain has offered to take almost 400 square metres of my own land off my hands for nothing.

The man recommended that costly lawyers should oversee this and, er, I can pay for those, too.

Yet I agreed. As I say, I like footpaths. But now I worry that my naivety has been exploited by some rather irritating keep-fit cyclists who insist on rattling past even though, according to the Countryside Act 1968, bicycles should be ridden only on bridleways, not footpaths like mine.

Of course, most of the path’s users are harmless.

Many of my neighbours walk their dogs on it and I only have to clear up after a few of them. I even felled an ancient ash to prevent that tree felling a human.

I also don’t really mind the people who seem to get lost and spend a few minutes walking in the rose garden, or even the slightly abrasive manner of some of the trudging folk when I point out that having a picnic on my extensive lawn is a bit intrusive.

It was my son George who first pointed out that things were getting dangerous.

He had come to Suffolk before lockdown, formed a ‘bubble’ with us and brought my grandson, who had just learnt to walk. I told him not to worry.

‘But they’ve closed the reservoir,’ he persisted, ‘and they’re coming down here.’

Really? Half-listening, I bent to examine a young holly and felt an unaccustomed wind up the fundament, as a cyclist whisked past within inches of my bottom at approximately 40 miles an hour.

This yellow jersey shot down the path’s slope, through a gap no bigger than a doorway, across the yard and out the other side, as if I had provided him with an obstacle course.

‘What if young Elwyn had been tottering across there,’ my son pointed out.

I nodded, groping at the back of my shorts. ‘We have to stop this.’ I was foaming up.

So we started with logs. Not log barriers, just half-logs left at intervals to allow buggies to get through at walking pace: organic sleeping policemen.

‘They’ve moved them,’ said George on the Monday.

‘What?’

‘They just came along and lifted them out of the way.’

Now, I have nothing against cycles. I know that soon we will be issued with free bikes and Lycra and no one will travel by plane or car any more, because I listen regularly to the BBC. I used to cycle everywhere myself, in London long ago.

But I didn’t puff along exhorting others, or dress like one of those aliens inside spaceships that crash-land in Hollywood blockbusters.

I wasn’t a knobbly-legged homunculus, like the scrawny ET who then stopped by my front door near the path. ‘Look at this,’ he shouted to his mate, who screeched to a halt alongside him. ‘They’ve put them back.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, as I approached. ‘This is a garden. There are toddlers here. You are riding a machine at high speed.’ (We had now put up a big sign: ‘Cyclists please dismount.’) He looked at me grimly. ‘And by what authority?’ he asked sternly.

‘Well, er, this is private land.’

‘Mm.’ He mounted up and sped off. In front of me.

I was boiling up now. That’s it. We would put in gates. Proper kissing gates. I have rights!

Except it turned out I don’t.

I went online to Suffolk County Council Highways Department and discovered that the footpath system has an elaborate complaints procedure against landowners, gardeners and shouters. And… hang on. What was this? There was one against me.

‘Somebody has put piles of logs obstructing this footpath with a sign telling cyclists because of baby buggies to dismount, even though you couldn’t get a buggy through this.’ I goggled. I reached for my green ink.

The Highways Department wrote me a wonderfully courteous reply. They pointed out that I have no right to put in a gate unless I have animals in my garden.

Right. But (note this, bikies) they added: ‘As you correctly point out, cycling on a public footpath is a trespass and is therefore a matter for the owner of the land upon which the highway sits to address.’

Yes. This made feel good. I can now actually do, er, nothing. No gates. And we removed the logs.

All we could do was lock up the toddler and put up polite signs.

So I bought the signs. After all, I want to stop gangs of blowhards in silly, very tight short-sleeved shirts mowing down old ladies tottering off to Evensong.

But I also feel slightly aggrieved that I have to litter my paradise with signs to protect it from yobs who will ignore them anyway.

As for the reservoir, Mrs Jones predicted that when it reopened the mad pedallers would return to their favoured haunts. And of course she was right. Mostly.