Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain

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This was only true to a certain degree, though. There were also a great many rambling clubs in Lancashire – some established since the 1820s – that felt deeply disinclined to take part; groups that might also perhaps have felt that their walking movement was being hijacked by a small number of agitprop figures. By 1932, there was already a Ramblers’ Federation, and having observed this pre-publicity for the Kinder Scout trespass, the Federation felt moved to disassociate itself from this particular cause; although a few of its members were none the less among those who turned up on Sunday 24 April.

These advance notices were also acted on by the authorities, and even before the prospective walkers had had a chance to set foot on private property, the police were out in force to make it clear that a Hayfield council by-law forbad meetings on the recreation ground. Such were the numbers of people who assembled that morning that there was little the officers could do. The walkers, discouraged from assembling in the park, gathered instead in a disused quarry nearby. From this point, they were urged to start the march upwards. Faced with such a multitude, the police could hardly hold them back; all they could do instead was follow them.

There was, according to Rothman, a cheerful atmosphere that day. Bear in mind that all the young men and women who joined him habitually worked six-day weeks, and very long hours; this was their precious day off, and they were clearly determined to enjoy it. Rothman said that they ‘all looked picturesque in rambling gear, khaki jackets and shirts, abbreviated shorts, colourful jerseys. Away we went in jubilant mood, determined to carry out the assault on Kinder Scout, which was planned, and determined that no authority would stop it. Some of our youngsters [previously] wanted to go up on to one of the tops here,’ Rothman added, ‘and they were turned back. And they came back very annoyed, and they talked it over, and we decided that they couldn’t turn all of us back. We didn’t want any violence, we didn’t want any clashes – but we were going up.’

The marchers that day were joined by a journalist from the Manchester Guardian. The reporter wrote his account of how, on those slopes, the trespassers caught their first glimpse of the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers. They, like the police and the press, had clearly been informed in advance of what was going to happen that morning. ‘In a few moments,’ the journalist wrote,

the advance guard – men only, the women were kept behind – dropped down to the stream and started to climb the other side. I followed. As soon as we came to the top of the first steep bit, we met the keepers. There followed a very brief parley, after which a fight started – nobody quite knew how. It was not even a struggle. There were only eight keepers, while from first to last, forty or more ramblers took part in the scuffle.

The keepers had sticks, while the ramblers fought mostly with their hands, though two keepers were disarmed and their sticks turned against them. Other ramblers took belts off and used them, while one spectator was hit by a stone. There will be plenty of bruises carefully nursed in Gorton and other parts of Manchester tonight … though no one was seriously hurt except one keeper, Mr E. Beever, who was knocked unconscious and damaged his ankle.

It leaves you wondering what, if any, part the police took in the brawl. But in the aftermath of this strange, symbolic fight on the peaty moor, the police were to step in more assertively. Benny Rothman himself was so fixated on the notion of reaching the top of Kinder Scout that he was not aware of the punch-up at all, save for an awareness of some ‘confused shouting’ on his right, and also the sight of just one keeper ‘launching an attack on ramblers’. Then, near the top, he recalled seeing a dense group of people – these were walkers from Sheffield, equally determined to join in with the trespass.

Ironically, as the walkers then made the journey back to Hayfield, they adhered to a perfectly legal footpath that wove across another part of this land, and had done so for the past thirty-five years. The reason for this, according to Rothman, was to outwit the police. It would be impossible to levy fines on the walkers if they saw that the walkers were in fact marching on perfectly legitimate territory. However, the police had other ideas. According to the journalist from the Manchester Guardian, ‘Ramblers formed up into a column and marched into Hayfield … singing triumphantly, the police car leading their procession.’ It was their last happy moment. When they got properly into the village, they were halted by the police. Still they suspected no ill, and it was not until police officers, accompanied by a keeper, began to walk through their ranks, that they realised they had been caught:

Five men were taken to the police station and detained. The rest of the now doleful procession was carefully shepherded through Hayfield while, as the church bells rang for evensong, the jubilant villagers crowded every door and window to watch the police triumph.

Rothman was among those arrested. In his account, he recalled how they were first taken to cells in Hayfield, but their fellow ramblers knocked so hard upon the doors in protest that they were transferred to the nearby town of New Mills, and held overnight in the police station there. One more arrest had been made that afternoon, so in total, six men were standing in the dock of New Mills police court the next day. Aside from Benny Rothman, there was Julius Clyne, Harry Mendel, and nineteen-year-old David Nussbaum. There was also a student from Manchester University called Arthur Gillett, also nineteen; and up on a charge of grievous bodily harm committed against the gamekeeper Edward Beever was twenty-one-year-old John Thomas Anderson. The others were looking at charges of riotous assembly, assault, and incitement. According to the prosecution, one of the walkers had in his possession documents with the heading ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’. There was also BWSF literature that proclaimed ‘It is a crime for working class feet to tread on sacred ground on which Lord Big Bug and Lady Little Flea do their shooting.’ Rothman conducted his own defence. It did not impress the judge, or indeed, the jury. Incidentally, the jury was apparently made up of ‘two brigadier-generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains and two aldermen.’

As a result of the fracas, five of the Kinder Scout trespassers were sent to jail. John Thomas Anderson was found guilty of bodily harm against keeper Beever, and he received six months. The others, guilty of incitement to riotous assembly, were sentenced to four months. The nineteen-year-old student, Arthur Gillett, might just have been spared, were it not for his reply when the judge asked him if he was ashamed of his behaviour. Gillett replied ‘No sir. I would do it again tomorrow.’

It is now an episode of what might be termed folk history, and one that still stirs powerful emotions. The folk singer Ewan MacColl, also there on that day, at the tender age of seventeen, set the events to music in his song ‘The Manchester Rambler’. And just ten years ago, on the seventieth anniversary, the Duke of Devonshire attended a special anniversary event on Kinder Scout, and issued an unreserved apology on behalf of his father. It was perfectly sincere and in its way rather touching. It also helped to draw attention to the real injustice of that day in 1932, which was not merely an aristocratic landowner behaving heavy-handedly, but the authorities then colluding disgracefully in an over-reaction to a largely imaginary transgression. For the fact was that the actual physical trespass on that day was a curiously insubstantial thing. As some in the Ramblers’ Federation noted, the forbidden land on which the walkers had strode amounted to no more than a few yards. On top of this, we might also see that some of this land was only strictly ‘forbidden’ for a small part of the year – the grouse-shooting season. ‘In some ways,’ says ninety-three-year-old rambling campaign veteran John Bunting, ‘the Kinder Scout trespass was a publicity stunt. The real action over paths was happening on the other side of the Pennines.’

In other words, Rothman and his BWSF colleagues had found a cause of ideological, as opposed to practical, importance. The actual portion of land under dispute was not in itself of the greatest significance. For the BWSF, was this not really more about class? In the early 1930s, this was certainly the view of the Daily Mail (before it began to see the value in suggesting walks and hiking tips to its readers). In one feature, the Mail stated:

Our hikers by the ten thousand shoulder their packs and fare forth to discover the beauties of Nature. But the Communists are determined that they shall tramp our footpaths careless of rural charm, musing only on the iniquities of the capitalist system.

These views aside, there were also, in national terms, many in the walking movement who felt some unease about Benny Rothman’s enthusiasm for direct action. Those moderates who gathered from around the country annually at Winnat’s Pass (just a few miles from Kinder Scout) to make their demands for greater access did not think that taking the fight to the game-keepers was the way forward. But what we see in this story now is one of those pivotal little episodes that throws a light on years, sometimes centuries, of traditions and rights being challenged. It came at a time when cheap motorised public transport – in the form of charabancs – was making access to Britain’s wilder regions easier for prospective walkers. It also came during a time of uncertainty for Britain’s upper classes, once so wealthy and impregnable, but now starting to seem a little vulnerable, particularly in terms of political influence, and with the rise of a growing, articulate middle class. Two centuries beforehand – by way of contrast – reluctant traveller Daniel Defoe had found that the then Duke of Devonshire was a force for extreme good in this landscape. Defoe wrote:

Nothing can be more surprising … than for a Stranger coming from the North … and wandering or labouring to pass this difficult Desart Country, and seeing no End of it, and almost discouraged and beaten out with the fatigue of it (just such was our case) on a sudden, the Guide brings him to this Precipice, where he looks down from a Frightful height and a comfortless, barren and, as he thought, endless Moor, into the most delightful Valley, with the most pleasant Garden, and the most beautiful Palace in the World.

This ‘Palace’ with its ‘pleasant garden’ was Chatsworth. The land had belonged to the Cavendish family since 1549, when Sir William and his wife Bess of Hardwick bought it from the Leche family. By 1932, the estate was not in a healthy financial position; the death of the eighth Duke in 1908, with the heavy death duties incurred, had greatly increased the debt levels. Nonetheless, when the Kinder Scout trespassers mounted their incursion, the Duke of Devonshire was maintaining his lands in the old style, with a full retinue of gamekeepers. So, for the walkers, it was not so much the land itself, as what its ownership represented. How could there be any natural justice in the idea of a region of such great beauty being the exclusive preserve of one man and his family?

The Peak District was, and is, attractive for many reasons. There are some places that have a distinct, idiosyncratic feel, a presence, all of their own. The area has a quirkiness that piques curiosity. In contrast to the stolid images we all have of such places as the Yorkshire Dales or the Lakes, there is something slightly less easy to grasp in this landscape. It is neither homely, nor wild – unless you happen to stop by in one of the notoriously boisterous rural pubs dotted about this region, in which case the term ‘wild’ wins out. When you walk along the heights of Kinder Scout – even if there are bustling, rustling cagoule-wearing crowds all around you – you still get a sharp sense of otherness, which has the effect of transfixing the senses. The effect on the original Manchester walkers, escaping from uniformly drab streets and factories, must have been more powerful still. I have a moment of that pleasurable sense of dislocation while exploring the deep hollows between the vast, Easter Island-like boulders near the Kinder summit. Stand in certain spots – where the boulders form a slender passage, your hand against that rough gritstone weathered into undulating curves and holes – and the wind comes through with a sort of high sighing. Such aural effects are not what you automatically expect from English countryside. Round the other side of Kinder Scout lies Kinder Downfall – a dramatic waterfall which sometimes displays a curious phenomenon. If the wind is blowing hard in a certain direction, then the water appears to flow upwards. Ancient local folklore has it that the pools far below were the haunts of mermaids. Some have suggested that the medieval alliterative poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ was partly set in this region; Sir Gawain must travel across this eerie bog-land on his way to where the elemental Green Knight is said to have had his chapel, a little further north. Given that the Peaks are fretted through with mazes of natural tunnels, caves, and cathedral-like caverns, it is easy to envisage some of the possible chthonic inspiration for the poem. Meanwhile, in the Edwardian era, Dracula author Bram Stoker set his supernatural novel The Lair of the White Worm in the Peak District, drawing on both the subterranean element and strange northern folk tales of local heroes slaying giant snakes.

As I walk back the way I came, striding across the peat, about to descend into the deep valley, back to the dinky railway station, a burst of sunlight falls on the dark path and makes it twinkle and glitter strangely. On the surface of the black mulch, as far as you can see, there are countless tiny fragments of quartz, scattered around like stage diamonds, flashing prism colours; these seem momentarily inexplicable. Have they been here as long as the hills themselves? There are those who don’t react at all positively to the Peaks. Perhaps this is because the region looks familiar at first glance but feels odd on closer examination. For the otherwise enthusiastic seventeenth-century aristocratic traveller Lady Celia Fiennes, the area held very little charm. ‘All Derbyshire is full of steep hills,’ she wrote, ‘and nothing but the peakes of hills.’

Nothing?

To climb Kinder Scout now is to experience some of the exultation, but also some of the paradoxes thrown up by the rambling movement. Any sense of solitude in this place, especially in the summer months, is illusory; you will never be more than a few yards from another rambler. And any sense of genuine wildness is dispelled by the views of Manchester. Yet for some, it is not the views, but simply the walk itself, that is the thing. In the 1848 novel Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell, there is a small scene when a group of Manchester factory workers take to the paths, not so far from the Peak District, on a day off:

Groups of merry and somewhat loud talking girls, whose ages might range from twelve to twenty, came by with a buoyant step. They were most of them factory girls, and wore the usual out-of-doors dress of that particular class of maidens; namely a shawl which at midday or in fine weather was allowed to be merely a shawl, but towards evening, if the day was chilly, became a sort of Spanish mantilla or Scotch plaid, and was brought over the head or hung loosely down … There were also numbers of boys, or rather young men, rambling among these fields, ready to bandy jokes with anyone, and particularly ready to enter into conversations with the girls.

So, almost a hundred years prior to the Kinder Scout trespass, we see that – despite what George Orwell’s southerners may say – recreational walking in the north was already a strong tradition, certainly in Manchester, but in other industrialised cities too, such as Leeds, York and Glasgow. In fact, the forming of so many local walking groups was one of the first organised social responses to the depredations of the Industrial Revolution, and its fierce local conflicts percolated through to a nascent popular press. The way that rambling so swiftly evolved holds a mirror up to some of the greatest social changes that convulsed the nation.