Finding all possible paths between two points in a grid using recursion
No optimization will make this run effectively for large inputs because fundamentally the "all paths problem" is hard. In short, as the size of the input increases incrementally, the number of paths increases exponentially. Your best option may be to ask "what is a similar question I can ask that will give me a useful answer for less computational expense."

In terms of code quality, using try-catch structures for branching is often considered bad form. In many languages this would be a performance issue, but from my 30 seconds of googling it appears the performance impact isn't huge in python. 

One adjustment you could make is to parse the file into an adjacency matrix and then using a known algorithm to solve for your lists of paths.