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.
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