Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain. Sinclair McKay
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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.1
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