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.’5 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.
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
There are times when open countryside by itself is not quite enough. Walkers – especially city-dwelling ramblers – instead feel the need to seek out raw, authentic wilderness; areas that are remote, untouched and bare. This compulsion to shake free from oppressive urban life seems relatively modern, yet has its antecedents in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, and the first stirrings of an organised walking movement in the nineteenth century.
These days, many hardy ramblers are drawn to Rannoch Moor, in the north-west of Scotland; a stark landscape that can make you feel that you have swirled back in time to the very beginning of the earth. The wide empty prospect of echoing hills can evoke an odd mix of leaping euphoria and quiet unease. The term ‘prehistoric’ does not quite cover it: this is an elemental realm of sparse grass, wet mud, freezing clear water, and lonely peaks. For a walker stepping, slightly dazed, off the Caledonian Sleeper train at 8.40 a.m. and standing taking cold breaths on the platform of tiny Rannoch station, it is rather disorientating. It is one thing to yearn for such prospects while sitting at home, to arrive at them always feels just a little different.
The question of whether