скачать книгу бесплатно
Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain
Sinclair McKay
A history of walking over the British countryside.Published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Ramblers’ Association, ‘Ramble On’ tells the story of how country walks were transformed from a small and often illegal pastime to the most popular recreational activity in the country.From the brave band of hikers who scaled the off-limits peak Kinder Scout in 1932, via the intricate Lake District guides of Alfred Wainwright, to the resistant landowners (including the notorious Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, Madonna and Jeremy Clarkson) who have done their level best (and worst) to keep walkers off their land – this is the definitive history of rambling.Perfectly capturing the sense of exhilaration on reaching the summit of a blustery hill-top path, ‘Ramble On’ is for anyone who has ever pulled on a pair of walking boots or is partial to the taste of Kendal mintcake.
Sinclair McKay
Ramble On
The Story of our Love for Walking Britain
DEDICATION
To my mother Helen and father Peter
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Edale to Kinder Scout: The Peak District and the First Modern Rambling Battle
Chapter 2
Rannoch to Corrour Shooting Lodge in a Howling storm: An investigation of the Lure of Wilderness, and the Earliest Days of Organised Rambling
Chapter 3
Dorking to Box Hill: Introducing Jane Austen, and the Subsequent Rise of the Victorian Walking Club
Chapter 4
A Swift Detour: To Briefly Examine Walkers as Deviants, Outcasts and Fugitives – and as Doomed, Wandering Souls
Chapter 5
A Day Out Among The Tors and Mires of Dartmoor: The Prototype National Park
Chapter 6
Seatoller to Haystacks, Underskiddaw to Dodd Point: The Lake District and the Cults of Wordsworth, Wainwright and Withnail
Chapter 7
Rhossili to Llanrhidian: In the Gower Peninsula to Consider the Surprisingly Long History of Walking Gear – While Wearing Quite Unsuitable Clothes
Chapter 8
Higham to Cooling: The Hoo Peninsula, North Kent, in Search of Beauty in Ugliness
Chapter 9
A Brief Detour into the Lures and Attractions of Walking at Night
Chapter 10
Exploring the Preternatural Forest of Dean and Woodland Legends – While Examining the Beguiling History of Youth Hostels and B & Bs
Chapter 11
A Quick Detour Through Regenerated Cities and the Art of Urban Rambling
Chapter 12
In the Steps of Tom Stephenson Along Britain’s Many Ways – and Paying Tribute to Generations of Self-Taught Botanists
Chapter 13
Wendover to Princes Risborough: Chilterns and the History of Trespass, Via Some Very Private Property
Chapter 14
Warminster to Battlebury Fort, Salisbury Plain – an Effort to Reach England’s Inland Atlantis
Chapter 15
A Diversionary Walk on the Weird Side: A Brief Flit from Ley Lines to Stone Circles to Pan
Chapter 16
Exploring the Lures of Solitude and Dodging The Grey Man of Ben Macdhui
Chapter 17
A Day Out in Brontë Country – What Happens When Much-Treasured Walking Landscapes Become Theme Parks
Chapter 18
Recent Furious Countryside Battles: The Patches of Forbidden Land that Remain and an Unsuccessful Attempt on the River Path at Windsor
Chapter 19
From Chilham to Canterbury along the North Downs Way: The Future of Walking and of the Countryside Rolled into one Ancient Pilgrimage
Endnotes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Sinclair McKay
Copyright
About the Publisher (#ub7b845e0-b92e-5ac5-88fb-b94b25a45372)
INTRODUCTION
You are not long out of the railway station before you catch the desired view: the enchanting old windmills – one white, one black – on the crest of the hill, like odd little boats with bright wooden sails riding a giant green wave. A map is scarcely necessary, your destination can be in no doubt. The authorities have fallen over themselves to pepper the road with brown signs that point insistently. They gesture to the ‘South Downs’, as if to say: ‘Well – why else would you be here?’
The initial stretch of railway-hugging concrete pathway is slightly urinous in smell, but bordered on the other side by delicate woodlands, throbbing with bluebells on this sunny spring day. It is a trifling nuisance, this blistered tarmac cut-through that discreetly ushers you out of the Sussex town of Hassocks; a tiny price to pay for the goal that lies ahead. A mile later, you look right up again, at the green hill with its white skeleton of chalk beneath. You rejoin the ‘South Downs’ path, with more of those signs urging you on; you gaze up at that distant ridge, and the sky above that with all its pale blue promise. No one who considers themselves to be any kind of a walker could conceivably hold back.
The old children’s story formulation ‘over the hills and far away’ is one of the most evocative phrases in the English language. It expresses that impossibly ancient curiosity and yearning for adventure; there is also, somehow, the possibility of transformation. Any rambler will also know that the phrase has a physical truth; that when one is walking across a great plain towards hills, the urge to see beyond them becomes magnetic, instinctive. To stop, to turn, to go back requires a powerful exertion of will. So here I am, after a short, rigorous climb, by those old windmills called Jack and Jill, but gazing at yet more green ridges above. This is the South Downs Way, in the South Downs National Park. It is the most recent of such Parks, having attained this special status in 2009. This path is a superb and beautiful tribute to a movement that has been campaigning not merely for decades – but centuries.
On a day such as this, with a refreshing but subtle breeze, and the sun dazzling down, the obvious weekend destination for urban fugitives is not here. It is about five miles to the south: the huge majority of the people crammed – standing room only – on to the train out of London were heading for the beach at Brighton. But we who are up on this ridge – and there are a good many of us – have a purer purpose in mind. And as we pass one another, on that path that is now snaking around towards Ditchling Beacon, we recognise each other through clothing conventions.
There are the big beige sunhats, with a hint of floppy foppishness; the baggy shorts of indeterminable synthetic fibre; the sturdy boots, laces wrapped around like thick spaghetti. For some, there is also a map, worn around the neck on a lanyard. And having made the effort of getting up this hill – as we will see, there is always this Calvinist question of effort – we happy few are richly rewarded. This is a ridge of cattle-nibbled grassland – the grass is crew-cut, military neat – spotted with cakes of sun-dried dung. For those with the eyes and the experience to see, here is ribwort plantain, squinancywort and Devil’s bit scabious. Meanwhile, dancing and being hurled in random directions by puffs of breeze, are rare butterflies such as the Adonis blue and the Chalkhill blue. Come the summer, there will be the shy, secretive magenta of retiring pyramidal orchids.
This path – bright with white chalk – is on a gentler upward gradient now, and sweeping across the ridge to Ditchling Beacon. As you walk along this handsome escarpment some 800 feet up, the woods and green fields of Sussex are laid out beneath you, sharp and neat and crisply three-dimensional in the bright sunshine. There are churches and old windmills and manor houses and playing fields; there are also intimations of distant post-industrial warehousing and offices. You are looking at the past and the present simultaneously. Meanwhile, small birds compete in the blowy skies above. The attentive might see linnets, or yellowhammers, or skylarks. There is one elderly couple here with binoculars, lurking by the bushes of bitter-yellow gorse. One assumes they are here for avian reasons, as opposed to human surveillance. You always think the best of your fellow walkers. When seen from a great distance – in our walking gear, on hillsides, or marching along the edges of fields – we ramblers ourselves look like tiny colourful butterflies milling around on green plant-life. There we go: processing up slopes, in lines, like fluorescent ants. We are the very image of unabashed enthusiasm. Sometimes, the more adverse the conditions, the better. Such dedicated walkers will look out upon stinging rain whipping across bare moorland, take a deep breath of pleasure, then stride forwards – and upwards, into the raging storm.
Daniel Defoe, who made a tour of the nation in the 1700s, would have regarded such walkers with some mystification. In the eighteenth century, the only people to be seen tramping across such a landscape either worked it, owned it, or were trespassing on it. The idea that ordinary men and women would simply walk upon it for pleasure and recreation would have struck him as insane. As it was, he was already quite rude enough about those before him who had professed to have seen the beauty in landscapes such as this.
But fashions changed – quite soon after Defoe passed away, in fact. In the 1700s, the stern mountains and valleys began to draw poets and painters who were freshly alive to the more sublime aspects of nature. The echoes of their enthusiasm are still heard now. Whether we know it or not, we continue to be influenced by their passions, even if we consider our own regular rambles to be happily quotidian. These days, for a huge number of people, any satisfactory weekend should ideally include a drive out into the country, a loading up of the knapsack with refreshments ready for a good few hours of walking. The ostensible reasons all overlap: the need for some exercise and fresh air after a week sitting in an office, staring at a computer; the desire to see a wider horizon, one not interrupted by houses, tower blocks, or out-of-town supermarkets; and then perhaps the slightly more spiritual sense that it is important to keep in touch with the land itself – that by planting our feet on grass and soil, we are reasserting our true, organic natures. Yes, those reasons are certainly part of it. But it goes rather deeper than that.
It is estimated that some 18 million Britons enjoy regular country walks. Less casually, the Ramblers’ Association has over half a million members. Think of all these people, taking off on Sunday mornings, eager to stride across meadows, and to survey grand views. Think how, just a few generations ago, so many of these people would have been spending Sunday morning in church. Walking is sometimes a form of religious practice in itself; a meditation or even prayer, but at a steady pace. The very idea that there should be an official association for those who enjoy walking is in itself telling. We spend colossal quantities of money on our desire to get mud on our boots. Mud that our forebears would have strenuously tried to keep off theirs.
Despite the peaceful, even meditative nature of the pursuit, the story of rambling, as we shall see, is actually a story of constant bitter conflict. It is grand country aristocrats pitted against town-dwelling working class men and women. It is farmers with spring-guns and bone-shattering man-traps dedicating themselves to thwarting those who wish to tread ancient rights of way. It is municipal water boards, hysterically convinced that walkers could infect reservoirs with TB, and doing everything in their power to close off all the land around. It is game-keepers in tweed with heavy sticks neurotically certain that the slightest suggestion of footsteps on the moor would disturb the partridges and plovers. The story of rambling is, in one sense, a prism through which we can view the ebbs and flows of social conflict in Britain, from the Reformation right up to the present day.
Nor is the story entirely about the pursuit of innocent, wholesome pleasure. There are darker reasons for walking, too. Again, reaching back through history, we find that walking has sometimes been a symptom of depression, even madness. The compulsion that leads the hearty rambler on to the hills is not too far away from the compulsion that has led poets onto long, long walks on which they lost their minds. Sometimes the walker is a tired fugitive; often they are outsiders. These figures move around at the very edge of popular imagination and they are always there.
So it is unsurprising that walking is also threaded through British literature, like a network of well-trodden paths. Celebrated trampers include Wordsworth and Coleridge, the countryman poet John Clare; Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen; Charles Dickens and W. G. Sebald. In many cases, walking is integral to their poetry and their fictions. It brings to the fore far wider truths about human nature. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the space of a single day in Dublin in 1904, Leopold Bloom seems to be constantly walking – from Dignam’s funeral to the newspaper office; from pub to beach to brothel. Yet although he is at the centre of the narrative, Bloom is also the novel’s great, profoundly moving outsider: it is the others who watch him, as he walks alone.
Walking also carries an element of enlightenment. For instance, many weavers and mill-workers in the nineteenth century educated themselves through their rambles across the land. They became greatly knowledgeable about geology and botany, to the extent that some went on to attain academic posts. Walking, for these men and women, provided intellectual liberation from the grim fetters of urban or domestic life. In the twentieth century, one of the rambling movement’s most influential figures was an entirely self-taught man who had left school at thirteen to become a calico printer.
The other curious thing about the story of rambling is that this struggle over forbidden land, the furious conflict over incursion, is an almost uniquely British struggle, certainly in the European context. By contrast, walking throughout Continental Europe – from the experiences of Jean Jacques Rousseau to the film director Werner Herzog – has always been, and still is, relatively free and easy. Over here, the phrase ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ is practically stamped upon the national psyche. Or it was. In the last decade or so, though, there has been a quiet revolution in Britain. The balance has invisibly, miraculously, shifted. And now, the sheer acreage of land that we can stroll across with impunity is one that would have surprised our grandparents.
Stretching even further back, there is an interesting sense of philosophical similarity between today’s walking campaigners and the Diggers – the radical seventeenth-century movement, led by Gerrard Winstanley – which aimed to take over tracts of common or vacant land for cultivation. Winstanley’s stand, a religious one, was to do with the iniquity of huge expanses of open, fertile land being owned by a few rich individuals. The Diggers, working in tiny communities, began moving onto patches of common land from Northamptonshire to Surrey, and distributing crops to local villagers. Grand landowners took fright at this apparent anarchy and sent in hired thugs to expel the Diggers – with violence. Winstanley’s pleas to the authorities for help met with silence. Yet somehow the essence of Winstanley’s short-lived crusade finds a much more fruitful echo in today’s Ramblers’ Association, which believes that cherished English landscapes – even the most secluded – should not merely be at the disposal of a few property owners, but open for all to roam upon.
The shade of Winstanley might look upon the South Downs Way with pleasure. This trail is ministered to by the National Trust, a charity. This path – and countless thousands others around the country – is the result of a burst of idealism that found its fullest flowering during and after the Second World War. But in effect, be it National Trust, Woodland Trust, National Park or just simple privately-owned land, the fact is that there is now remarkably little hindrance anywhere for the dedicated walker. Certain recent Parliamentary Acts have had a bearing, but the momentum has somehow been more philosophical than political.
Whether they know it or not, walkers have, over the decades and centuries, changed our entire national approach to ideas of property and ownership. Boundaries, both physical and mental, have shifted greatly. The relationship between landowner and walker – very often a source of rancour – has changed like the colours of a kaleidoscope. Perhaps the only constant factor between the two is a sense of wariness. In some cases, today’s landowners are warier of walkers than walkers are of them. It wasn’t so long ago that some landowners were still illegally employing steel-jawed traps to deter trespassers. It also wasn’t so very long ago when local county magistrates could be counted on to favour the landowner’s case over that of the walker. Such bias would be relatively unusual to come across now, not least because the relevant laws have changed dramatically even in the space of just the last fifty years or so.
We can drift where we like, within reason. But the other fascinating thing, of course, is why we would wish to do so. Why are we happy to spend so much time yomping across rugged heaths or muddy meadows? That’s not as easily answered as you might think. For walking can be as much an unconscious, abstract activity as one involving concrete decisions and plans. My own walking patterns over the years have been quite random. In common with many other Londoners, for instance, I have been pacing different parts of the city by means of exploration for years. There were all those names on the A–Z map, so redolent of bucolic charm: Arnos Grove, Gospel Oak, Burnt Oak, Belvedere. Once you have walked around such places, the rather less than sylvan reality sinks in (no offence to the good people of Belvedere in south-east London, but can I just say – I was not expecting that).
Yet the urge to walk persists. Often quite randomly, with only the faintest sense of where you want to get to. Like William Blake, I’ve wandered through each chartered street. I have certainly marked many faces of woe. But none of that is the reason for walking. It goes deeper and deeper yet. Of late, that twitch, that desire, has taken me with greater frequency beyond the symbolic boundaries of the M25, that eight-laned border around London. Like many who live in the East End, I had some residual apprehension about the countryside; some sense that it was filled with malevolent cattle, barely rational farmers and tightly regulated footpaths from which one was never allowed to deviate. Then, almost from the start, I found that the freedom out there is rather greater than I had imagined. It is still not quite enough for the Ramblers’ Association – there are still certain areas, both physical and mental, where the barriers are still in place and full access is not possible. In the time that I, a thoroughgoing townie, have been exploring this undiscovered country – this land of sharp hills and deep hidden valleys, of warm gritstone and bright, slightly vulgar foxgloves, of silent woodlands and windy, roaring coasts – my notions of the countryside formed by 1970s Ladybird books, beautifully painted pictures of dairies and deep red tractors, have changed rather sharply.
The only way to understand a land is to walk it. The only way to drink in its real meaning is to keep it firmly beneath one’s feet. In all these years driving up and down motorways, I had no idea about the different sorts of emotional resonance that each individual area has, like a charge of electricity. Drivers can never know this. Only the walker can form the wider view. The question of how we walkers arrived at a position of such extraordinary luxury – the ability, finally, to explore the vast majority of the country, and the huge, almost unquantifiable effect that this has had upon the British landscape – are themes that we shall be exploring as the book progresses.
The story of walking – how the very nature of the activity has changed so much in the last 200 years or so – also happens to be the story of a population’s evolving relationship with what we now term ‘the countryside’ – this single word implying that all forms of landscape are somehow one and the same thing, and that it can always be quite easily separated from urban land. It is a story that embraces all sorts of fads, fancies, intellectual and physical quirks – from the rise of the Romantic movement to the psychogeography of Alfred Watkins’ ley lines; from the development of wet weather gear to the ever-shifting tectonic plates of class; from the first stirrings of the Green movement, to the highly furtive pursuit, favoured by a few, of outdoor lovemaking.
There are other forms of gravity at work too. When many of us walk in our leisure hours, we are not even walking towards things – rather, we are rambling in carefully plotted loops, traced on a map, in order to get back to where we started. The circular route is one that Defoe would have found particularly extraordinary – the walk without a destination other than where one started. Yet even this has its roots in something more ancient. The image that comes to mind is that of medieval labyrinths. The path through these labyrinths twists, winds, and ultimately folds back on itself. People would process through them and understand, through these loops and double-backs, the metaphor. The procession, or the walk, is more important than the destination. ‘Above all,’ wrote the philosopher Kierkegaard in a letter in 1847, ‘do not lose your desire to walk; every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.’
The South Downs Way, with its unending stream of walkers going in both directions, is the cheering confirmation that more of us than ever enjoy regenerating our weary town-bound selves by taking to paths and bridleways. But the genesis of this walking enthusiasm, the idea that rambling could be a mass pursuit, enjoyed by all classes, and all over the country, was actually sparked a few hundred miles north of here. In particular, there is one rather bleak, weather-ravaged spot in Derbyshire where, in 1932, the story of the modern walking movement began.
CHAPTER 1
Edale to Kinder Scout: The Peak District and the First Modern Rambling Battle
It is a prospect that can conceivably dampen the soul, as well as lift it. The round hills swooping up in a crest and rising away into the distance, promising mile after mile of austere pale grass; black, wet peat; and moist limestone. This is the skeleton of Britain, the nobbled spine protruding through the dark muddy flesh.
Catch a view of the high empty peat-lands near Edale in the Derbyshire Peak District, on a cold day when the iron-grey clouds are hanging oppressively low, and a darker curtain of rain is drawing in from the west, and you might find yourself turning away from it. Perhaps like Daniel Defoe, who travelled through these parts in 1715 with a mounting sense of dismay, you might observe that
Upon the top of that mountain begins a vast extended Moor or Waste which … presents you with neither Hedge, nor House or Tree, but with a waste and howling wilderness, over which when Strangers travel, they are obliged to take Guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way.
For Defoe, this was a region where one would be confronted with ‘frightful views’ of ‘black mountains’. Today, by contrast, such ‘frightful views’ – from the remote north-western tip of Scotland, to the hearty Cheviots, to Cornwall’s wind-scoured Bodmin Moor – are, of course, considered extremely attractive to walkers. No matter how lowering the weather, or inhospitable the terrain, or hedge-less or tree-less the perspective, a wide expanse of country on any day of the year will have a guaranteed number of rambling enthusiasts tramping around.
For those more accustomed to the dainty charms of rural southern England, Edale – and the raw Derbyshire hills around – might not sound immediately alluring. But maps and guidebooks can only ever convey a fraction of the attraction. There are keen walkers I know – of a certain age – who have retired to Sheffield in order to have easy access to this exhilarating countryside. But even for me, travelling up from London by train, it couldn’t be simpler – one change at Sheffield, and a small local train bound for the valleys of the Pennines. It is here, on this line, that the sense of occasion begins. My fellow passengers are wearing big walking boots. I should imagine that we are all heading for the same destination. Of course we are. Thousands upon thousands do, every year. For some, it is a ritual. And like any ceremony, it carries with it a palpable charge of anticipation. You can feel it on that little train, a butterfly-flutter of mounting excitement. For this particular area – noted not only by Defoe, but also by the sixteenth-century traveller Lady Celia Fiennes, and by seventeenth-century ‘Leviathan’ author, Thomas Hobbes – has the greatest symbolic importance to walkers everywhere.
The small train passes through a very long tunnel, several miles in length. When it emerges, we are out in a different world of high green hills, and strong stone-built houses. Edale is such a tiny station that there isn’t even a canopy, a white-painted wooden gate marks the exit. Yet here we are, geographically pretty much in the centre of Britain, and arguably at the beating heart of its countryside. Edale is a pleasant village of dark grey stone nestling in the shadow of a vast wide hill that dominates the horizon like a great tsunami; an arrested wave of severe grey rock and grass. It is about twenty miles outside Sheffield, and not that many years ago, when that city lay under a perpetual cloud of industrial smoke, it was widely known as a village in the deep countryside which steelworkers could cycle to and taste unadulterated air. Now the place bustles with walkers, of every variety: eager day-trippers, solemn, solitary long-distance hikers, big family parties and groups of friends, and figures like the poet Simon Armitage, who frequently comes to these parts to feel the pulse of the land.
The train has practically emptied, and I was right: we are all here for the same thing. The famous historical aspect of the place is the Mass Trespass of the nearby Kinder Scout moorland in 1932 – the symbolic moment when the needs and desires of ordinary working people clashed with aristocratic landowners’ desire to keep their thousands of acres private. The present-day draw of this landscape is that it marks the beginning of the mighty 272-mile Pennine Way. This is not only one of the indirect fruits of that 1932 clash, but also represents a mighty triumph for the Ramblers’ Association in 1965, the year of the path’s inauguration.
The starting point of such an epic undertaking should, of course, have something of a celebratory atmosphere about it. Edale has this in quantities: that perky little railway station, self-consciously celebratory National Trust tearoom, and bluff, hearty pubs. Walking appears to be the village’s chief raison d’être now. Edale – and countless other villages and towns all around the country, near moors or meadows, close to grassy plains, on the sea – has taken on new life as a sort of shrine for recreational walkers. As rural economies wither, hikers bring fresh opportunities. The passengers who had been on that little train from Sheffield now, almost as one, make unerringly for the small path that leads down to the tearoom (a chance to grab water and sandwiches, possibly a last mug of tea) and thence to the path beyond. Striding along the track ahead is a straggling row of ramblers, snaking into the far distance. We are on the floor of a tight, vertiginous valley. I am fixing my eyes on distant high crags, and trying to see this place as it would have been seen back in the early 1930s by young people whose weekday city lives consisted of sulphurous smogs, and of sweltering manual labour.
On the morning of Sunday 24 April 1932, in the brisk air of these moors – the wind soughing and rushing through the grass, making it shiver, and the tiny white bobbles of nascent heather, nodding and bowing – there was another increasingly insistent sound to be heard. It was the soft thrum of sturdy boots on grass, and on the moist black peat. The local bird population, including the much-prized red grouse, as well as plovers and ring ouzels, must have been astonished by the sheer number of people climbing the hill on that day. Human footsteps were rare on those moors then. A long, winding procession of approximately 500 enthusiastic men and women – some sensibly attired in jerseys and stout coats, others in more hearty shorts – were walking up to the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire’s Peak District. The collective mood of this extraordinarily large group was determined; some of the party were singing ‘The Red Flag’. Others were singing the ‘Internationale’. These people were not just here to take in the wholesome air and the wide vistas; they were here to make a stand of a symbolic sort. For this wild, open landscape, stretching for mile after seemingly illimitable mile, was one that they had absolutely no right to be standing on.
Kinder Scout – and indeed almost every other site of natural beauty in Britain at that time – was fiercely guarded by private landowners. And so, this was a quite deliberate, premeditated act of mass trespass. Although the day would end extremely unhappily for some participants, this moment – which had been in the offing for the last 100 years – finally galvanised the group’s aims into a campaign with mass appeal.
George Orwell, writing The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, sarcastically parroted southern middle-class views about how the labouring classes had very little taste for the natural beauties of the countryside:
The [industrial towns] go on being ugly largely because the Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it … Many of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it.
It was an extraordinary assertion for anyone to make, and one that those marching up Kinder Scout on that Sunday in 1932 would have had words about. Indeed, in a sense, one of the trespassers did.
‘The only chance that a young person had of getting away from mucky Manchester and Salford,’ said trespasser Dave Nesbitt, ‘away from those slums full of smoke and grime, for about a shilling or one and six, was to come out here in the fresh air, and there used to be a mass exodus every Sunday morning.’
By the early 1930s, Manchester had a population of around 750,000. Even though the vast cotton mills, which had powered the city’s wealth in the nineteenth century, were now in decline, the city’s industry had branched out into modern engineering works, chemical factories, and electrical plants. The nature of the work may have changed slightly, but it was no less intense. The concomitant need to escape from the remorseless production line, and the tightly packed streets and homes, was as strong as it ever had been. By the late 1920s, tension about access to the moors being denied to thousands of walkers had grown to the point where, in 1928, there was a large rally in nearby Winnat’s Pass, to the south of Kinder Scout. Attended by various members of established walking groups, these rallies became an annual fixture. But the Kinder Scout trespass of 1932 was a rather more direct and more shrewd form of action.
Today, I am following in some of these footsteps (though perhaps foolishly without the aid of a map). By the time I have clumped up an almost perpendicular hill of grass and muddy footholds – a gradient like a climbing wall which leaves me puffing like a fairground steam novelty – I can see exactly why this area attracted the trespassers. The immediate vista across this plateau is that of dusty brown heather and deep black peat; shivering tarns and vast boulders like enigmatic modernist sculptures. I know I have somehow taken a wrong turning because I have this part of the moor to myself; where are all the other hundreds of walkers I know are around here somewhere?
Thanks to the collective sense given by authors ranging from Bram Stoker to the Gawain poet, I was somehow expecting the area to be a little bleaker than this. But when the sun suddenly flashes out from behind fast moving clouds, all sorts of new colours bleed through the land – the peat becomes richer, more chocolatey, and there is a dash of citrus lime in the grass. Doubtless like all those walkers who came before me, I feel a surging sense of reward.
This high moorland was, in 1932, owned by the Duke of Devonshire. Its primary purpose was as a tract where his guests could enjoy shooting game. The moors were strictly patrolled by the Duke’s gamekeepers and in the recent past, there had been a number of skirmishes between young urban walkers and the keepers. There were natural rebels who would make evasion of the gamekeepers part of the fun of the walk. There were also many unemployed young men, for whom walks in this empty landscape were a simple and essential escape from an otherwise overwhelming sense of powerlessness and frustration. But for these men, it was also about the assertion of an ancient right. For had these not once been common lands, before the Enclosure Acts? Tony Gillet said of the 1932 trespass: ‘This was serious political action I was taking.’
A chief figure behind this ‘serious political action’ was Communist Benny Rothman, of a group called the British Walkers Sports Federation. Such were this group’s far-left politics that the well-established and rather more moderate Manchester and Sheffield Ramblers’ groups of the time kept a cautious distance from it. It could be that some people sensed that this proposed Kinder Scout action was less about asserting the simple right of walkers, and more about making a rather more aggressive point about property and land ownership. Nevertheless, Rothman was a charismatic and thoroughly committed enthusiast – he remains a folk hero to a great many today – and he was adept at recruiting followers to the cause. The Kinder Scout protest had been sparked directly by the failure of another British Walkers Sports Federation venture. According to Rothman, the BWSF had arranged a weekend camp for young people just outside the village of Raworth. These young people went for a hike across the moorland, and were met with furious gamekeepers, who forced them off the land. ‘It was decided then and there,’ said Rothman, ‘that we would do something about it, and we decided to organise a mass trespass over Kinder Scout.’ They went about this by distributing leaflets at railway stations to those who looked as though they might be ramblers and hikers. There were also notices written on pavements in chalk, all proclaiming that there would be a meeting at Hayfield Recreation Ground on 24th April. Rothman didn’t stop there, though. He also succeeded in getting an interview with the Manchester Evening News, which dutifully went to press, advertising, in big headlines, ‘Claims to Free Access’ and ‘Sunday’s Attack on Kinder.’ The reporter wrote that ‘working-class rambling clubs in Lancashire have decided upon direct action to enforce their claims for access to beauty spots.’
