There is a wooden step stile a mile or so from my front door: old and rickety, mossy-stumped and hedge-bound. Now, some 25 years on, that wobbly old stile is a reminder of long gone, greener days. Close by Treloan Farmhouse near St Mawes, a stone stile topped by a Cornish cart axle is Grade II listed. That westernmost county is also home to examples of the stile in one of its more singular forms: the coffin stile — stone slats laid over a shallow pit — is an early form of cattle grid. They are an unsteady reminder of the nursery rhyme about the crooked man who ‘found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile’.