Augé’s best-selling book kicks off by imagining the experience of Pierre Dupont as he drives to Roissy airport, parks, goes through security, boards his flight and reads a magazine. His experience is far smoother than mine was: “He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted … by the certainty that, now he was ‘sorted out’, his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.” Dupont flicks through ads for hotels and reads a book review that contemplates “the homogenization of needs and consumption patterns”. This is supermodernity: a globalised, homogenised, economy in which the same experiences and products are replicated in far-flung geographic locations.

It’s an unusual technique for scholarly writing. But Augé’s willingness to engage in make-believe in this way allows him to draw the general reader into what could have been an alarmingly theoretical essay on the state of anthropology.

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Because French, and philosophically inclined, Augé, who died last month, is often lazily bracketed with the Derrida and Foucault and the like. But he was first and foremost a practitioner. He began his career with field studies of the Alladian cultures of the Ivory Coast, writing books about power, death, symbols — key touchstones of anthropology. And though French scholarship after the student protests of 1968 was marked by radicalism, Augé comes across as a genial thinker: political without being ideological, keen to build bridges in the Francophone academy at a time of upheaval.

Augé was keen to explain how the transformations of the contemporary world had made anthropology more complicated. “We are in an era characterized by changes of scale,” he wrote. “Images of all sorts, relayed by satellites and caught by the aerials that bristle on the roofs of our remotest hamlets, can give us an instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event taking place on the other side of the planet.” So far, so postmodern; what Augé called the “acceleration” of events is an idea that crops up repeatedly in political theory. The specifically supermodern condition that he identifies is the dominance of non-places.

We live in “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions” — from “hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps”. In non-places, exchange between human beings is transactional: you buy a sandwich, or a massage, or a train ticket. Speech is replaced by text; signs direct behaviour, instead of people, giving instructions and advertising products. We are, therefore, isolated, in “a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others”.

Anthropology has traditionally been interested in circumscribed places, the best example being the island, which allows one to consider a culture in its entirety; but non-places offer the opportunity to study a kind of psychic isolation. This “world thus surrendered to solitary individuality … offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object”.

The implications of the rise of these non-places are many and varied. For instance, access to the sort of anonymity they allow is granted only if we provide evidence of our individuality, in the form of identification documents; Augé foresaw that supermodernity would increasingly require us to prove who we are. He also goes so far as to speculate that non-places are terrorist targets not only for practical reasons, but also because they refuse the very idea of the historical territories that nationalist causes wish to restore.

Augé suggests, though, that we shouldn’t simply surrender to their ambiguous charms and to the seductive “feeling of freedom” they offer. Instead of giving in to the temptation to be passive, he suggests we can preserve our humanity through activity — observing, recording, storytelling. In this pursuit, he has influential fellow travellers. Take, for example, the writer Iain Sinclair, whose practice is psychogeography, which both examines and tries to subvert the behaviours produced by urban space; he was interested in precisely the kinds of non-places Augé identified — car parks and industrial estates. London Orbital, a book tracking a motorway, routed him through the Heathrow suburbs. Where Augé is an anthropologist with a poet’s touch, Sinclair is the opposite; he has the eye of an anthropologist but his project is that of an avant-garde poet, imagining afresh these overlooked zones.

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The attention Augé paid to the airport also aligns him with J.G. Ballard, who Sinclair visited in Shepperton on his orbital walk. Ballard’s 1997 essay on airports for Blueprint magazine comes across as a piece of rogue anthropology. “We are no longer citizens with civic obligations,” he writes, “but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open.” The airport is perhaps the ultimate non-place, a “discontinuous city, whose vast populations … are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.” Happy because, as Augé pointed out, anonymity can be a liberation; airports, because so familiar, provide a sense of being at home when far away.

Yet what at one moment can be experienced as liberation and comfort can, in another, become boredom and oppression. The non-place is double-edged. But supermodern life inevitably channels us into these non-places: we have no choice but to enter. We therefore need to learn how to endure them.

Augé, in search of guidance on how to do so, inclines towards the Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau, who in fact first used the term non-place. In his enduringly wonderful The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau draws a distinction between the “strategies” used by institutions to control our behaviour public places — city-planning, for example — and the “tactics” employed by ordinary people to resist that control — such as climbing a high building to enjoy the view. Certeau’s book has become a kind of manual, which guides us towards imagining our own tactics, whether it be walking against the arrows on the floor of Ikea or pulling up our trousers to paddle in a fountain.

Non-places is an analysis rather than a manual, but it is clearly much inspired by de Certeau’s emphasis on the “itinerary”, the individual journey. To chart a path through non-places, we must become supermodern flaneurs. But above all, Augé argues for restoring a social element to places that impose upon us solitariness. Talking to strangers may be the best way to push against the dehumanising effects of supermodernity. Pleading with airport officials using words rather than glares may be the way to reassert agency in a non-place that would rob us of it.

Psychogeography was invented by the 1950s Lettrists, a kind of French version of the Beat movement. The Lettrists spent most of their time getting drunk and wandering round Paris, during which time they came up with the theory that cities carry emotive force-fields. These, they posited, vary from location to location, and can be most easily detected by bumbling aimlessly about without trying to get to anywhere in particular.

Cynics might call this an elaborate way of justifying spending your Metro fare on beer and getting lost on the walk home. But the idea that built environments have something akin to emotional content has proved persistent, and regularly reappears in arty protests against (for example) urban gentrification or advertising.

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Our rural landscape, as I have discovered, is every bit as much a built environment as Montmartre or the City of London. If you stroll through it while imagining you’re in some kind of pristine ‘natural world’, you won’t experience much beyond an uncomfortable sense of something pure that’s been ruined by human depredations. But if you let your mind wander like a drunken 1950s art-hobo, what emerges are murmurs of a conversation that has been going on for some 800,000 years.

Even those parts of the countryside we think of as untouched have been cultivated for millennia. Archaeological evidence shows the apparently wild, empty vistas of Dartmoor were first created by humans clearing ancient forest for hunting. The land there has been grazed for 4,000 years.

To hear the conversation, take to the footpaths. Such byways riddle the English landscape, in merry contrast to the ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY’ signs and anti-traveller bollards that sprout at estate gates and farm tracks. The very nature of footpaths evokes the past: their existence imposes a duty on landowners to keep them open, an echo of feudal landowners’ obligations to the peasantry. Even the term ‘right of way’ hints at a conception of ‘rights’ that predates our modern ‘universal human’ variety. And when travelling these ancient routes, even in the most unremarkable part of the country, you can still catch glimpses of old England out of the corner of your eye.

I don’t mean you’ll find the hay-wains and apple-cheeked peasants of some chocolate-box Turneresque vista. The modern world is as visible in the countryside as the cities, if you’re looking for it: wind turbines, the bluish-green tint of nitrogen-fertilised wheat, ancient hedgerows unlaid for a century and gradually morphing into trees. But the layers are still there. Bluebells along a footpath will give clues to old woodland now grubbed up for agriculture, while a byway between two villages mentioned in the Domesday Book is sure to be as old as those villages.

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These ancient habits of movement exert a gravity of their own, in defiance of our modern determination to gallop full-tilt at the future. Even repackaged in progressive colours as ‘access to nature’, well-used footpaths represent a Burkean understanding of conservatism, written into the landscape itself. Most of them are unpaved, many are un-signed, and they stay visible because people walk them, trampling cowslips and nettles back, re-carving old routes across farmland.

One of my favourite local runs cuts diagonally across a field that’s usually planted with wheat. The farmer ploughs it up twice a year, and every time that happens, within half a day the path is trodden back in again. Footpaths exist as much in human memory and habit as in the soil.

And indeed, the slippage between the words ‘habitual’, ‘habitat’ and ‘habitation’ richly suggests the small-c conservatism of all the ordinary people, unnamed in history books, whose feet trod (and still tread) our footpaths into the soil. In turn these habits create us: the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare, for example, was driven insane when the Enclosure Acts so annihilated his habitual ways of moving round his locality that he could no longer find his mental bearings.

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Once memorialised in culture and topography, habits of living take a long time to change. On one route, I pass a manor house whose layout is astonishingly medieval. Unlike the landscaped estates created in the 18th and 19th centuries, by mercantile grandees keen to distance themselves from the peasantry, here the L-shaped great house has no formal garden. Instead it abuts the home farm, while just inside the house gates sits a tiny Norman chapel that was still — until the lockdown — in public use every Sunday.

Beyond the manor, I run for miles without seeing a paved road, or another person, before cresting a rise to see two figures on horseback crawling ant-like across my field of vision two hillsides away, near the Norman spire. Abruptly I realise they are not crawling at all, but moving at a gallop. The distance I’ve run suddenly seems enormous, and I find myself thinking about that favourite post-liberal phrase, ‘human-scale’.

Geoffrey Chaucer worried in Troilus and Criseyde about being misunderstood, because of the ‘so great diuersity/In English and in writing of our tongue’. When he was writing, the denizens of two adjacent counties might travel so rarely they’d struggle to understand each other’s dialects. I find this much easier to imagine, having experienced the time and effort needed to travel 15 miles on foot via unpaved roads.

Despite such daydreams, I don’t live at ‘human scale’ in this sense. I’m an urban refugee, new to this area by local standards, and far more a product of the world of abstractions than the kind of rootedness I’m in danger of romanticising here. I consume the local landscape for fitness and thinking-time, not to earn a living. But as my feet make their small contribution to the latest rewriting of ancient paths, so it feels like the paths return the favour, over-writing me as well with the place’s story.

Opened, enclosed, lost or half-remembered, England’s old ways mark out a shared map of landscape-knowledge whose contours are cumulatively as old as human life on these islands, and which is constantly written and re-written by usage. Some of the paths local to me are Roman, or even Iron or Bronze Age. When running them, I find myself wondering: how much has the skyline changed over those millennia? What do I see today that those ancient Britons didn’t? What would they miss or marvel at?

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In those moments, for a split second I glimpse not the world turning, but the ages themselves. Then I turn and pound down the hill, past fields that have just been sold off to build a new commuter town. I wonder whether the new town’s streets will incorporate the ancient footpaths, or whether some central planner will finally scribble them out.

The geography of Britain is an ongoing push-pull between grand schemes (such as new towns) that rewrite the landscape itself, and the ‘little people’, poets or not, whose lives flow round such projects. The balance of power flows back and forth between abstract schemes and habitual experience: on the one hand land enclosures, towns or quarries and on the other, footpaths and other old ways, which stubbornly persist.

Post-liberals have a tendency to idealise the cultural and the collective, with its moral analogue, the ‘common good’, and to have little positive to say about the world of abstractions, modernisers and ‘progress’. But as I’ve delved into my local byways, the rural psychogeography they reveal is a dialogue between the abstract and the emergent, the Whig and the Tory accounts of England. Not wholly human, but everywhere humanised.

Now the Wilderness Drone Police have packed up their rambler-shaming cameras, celebrate the easing of crisis with a dérive through England’s profoundly cultivated natural world. If you do so slowly enough, the footpaths will tell you stories.