Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain. Sinclair McKay
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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.’2
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,