The safeguarding of Britain’s – and the world’s – dark skies revolves around a change in people’s thinking when it comes to their own use of light. By this reckoning, all that Britain’s wild places seemed to need in order to attain what the residents of the Brecon Beacons National Park were now obliged to do was a collective effort to reduce the amount of light pollution projected into the sky.
Something as simple as ensuring an outside light is angled downwards instead of obliquely, using a different type of lightbulb and – heavens – actually turning the things off when not being used to read the paper or shoot a burglar seemed, if embraced en masse, to be all that was needed to make a difference. In January 2012, the Somerset village of Dulverton – which lay within the other of Britain’s Dark Sky Reserves* – staged a mass switch-off of the village lights for a live TV event to highlight the difference even a modest settlement could make. As it happened it was pouring with rain, and instead of the jolly amassed crowd cooing in wonder beneath a newly unveiled ceiling of stars, they were spooked by the opaque blackness of a night not dissimilar to the one increasing around me on the summit of the Black Mountain. The last time our cities experienced the same sort of consciously collective darkness – besides the odd power cut, during which people were presumably more preoccupied with reclaiming light than appreciating dark – was during the Blitz.
However modest, the Brecon Beacons’ new status was enough to illustrate that, as the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, we should ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ And when it comes to the search for space and freedom in the British mountains, it’s not just in matters of ‘light trespass’ where the actions of a few can trigger a reaction that will be influential down the generations in their enjoyment of wild places. In fact, were it not for the actions of one group in particular, weather would be the least of my barriers to experiencing the starlit skies of the Brecon Beacons; in all likelihood, I wouldn’t be there at all. Actions which, funnily enough, also involved a trespass.
Today, like all of us in Britain, I enjoy constitutional access to wild places under a law called the Right to Roam. And this is something we should be very, very proud of, on two fronts: one, that we have a country enlightened enough to have introduced such a law. And two, that it did so based on the acts of what our new friend Maggie Mead might call ‘thoughtful, committed citizens’: namely a bunch of working-class Manchester socialists who, on one otherwise unremarkable morning between the world wars, decided to go for a walk.
In 1932 Britain was a grim place if you were poor. The bite of the Great Depression was being painfully felt: industrial output fell by a third, and that summer saw unemployment hit a record high of 3.5 million – most of them casualties of the downturn in northern industries such as mining and steel. Seeking focus and amusement for little or no cost, many of the unemployed began to walk for pleasure. The problem was, this pastime – ‘rambling’ – was a play without a theatre. In 1932 there were no national parks, no long-distance footpaths. Land was owned, and enforced as such. Areas that weren’t practical for agriculture – that is to say, mountain and moorland – were ring-fenced and populated with grouse, which landowners would make available, sometimes for as little as two weeks a year, to be noisily and gleefully dispatched by those who could afford cars, guns and time to fritter.
The ‘ramblers’ were almost comical in contrast. Unable to afford specialised gear, they would improvise: army clothing, work shoes, ragged clothing they didn’t mind being ruined. In addition, many walked under the auspices of groups such as the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF), which were often suffused with broader moralistic leanings – in this case, communism – and which in many people’s eyes gave the activity a disagreeable air of rascal politics.
It’s difficult today to envision the kind of restrictions early ramblers were subject to. By restrictions we aren’t talking about barred access to a few manicured grounds or fenced fields: in the early 20th century an estimated four million acres of mountain and moorland in England and Wales were owned by a few inattentive individuals who didn’t – and couldn’t possibly – make anywhere near full use of it. Paths existed for ramblers to use, but such was the uprise in popularity in the pursuit amongst the working classes (it’s estimated that in 1932 some 15,000 ramblers took leave of Manchester on a Sunday to go walking) that these were often becoming as crowded as the suburbs, and potentially problematic frustrations were starting to mount. Worse, so-called ‘respectable’ walking organisations such as the Manchester and Stockport wings of the Holiday Fellowship – via deep-running relationships with dukes, earls and other influential citizens – were enjoying the freedom to wander on land forbidden to unemployed working-class ramblers. Enjoying the countryside – whether in the form of shooting, hunting or rock climbing – was, inexorably, a perk of the privileged.
By default, the wilder places of Britain became the scene of a strange class war. Landowning aristocrats were irritated by unkempt, Catweazle-type characters drifting illegally onto their land, and ramblers were increasingly frustrated at being barred from harmlessly entering what was effectively unused wilderness a bus ride from the inner city – and all over what they saw as little more than historic, ceremonial ownership by a few Hooray Henrys. It was a dangerously unstable stand-off: the ramblers had numbers and spirit, but the landowners and gamekeepers had the written law and cash – as well as employees with guns.
One of these landowners was the Duke of Devonshire. His particular 148,000-acre patch occupied an area of northern England known as the Peak District, which – despite a name that conjures pointy drama – is largely peaty moorland and vast, open plateau, reaching its elevational zenith atop Kinder Scout at 636 metres. It’s an agreeable if bleak place to wander, and its proximity to the northern industrial cities of Sheffield, Manchester and Huddersfield made it a natural choice for ramblers seeking to escape the depressing, economically stricken cities. But in April 1932 fewer than 1,200 acres of the Peak District were open for them to enjoy. Based on our estimate that 15,000 Mancunians left the streets and took to the upland paths each Sunday, this gave each person an area of considerably less than one tenth of an acre in which to find space and tranquillity. Something had to give – and on Sunday 24 April 1932, it did.
In the weeks prior to this a scrawled leaflet found its way into the hands of interested parties on both sides of the fence. One handed out in Eccles read:
B.W.S.F. RAMBLERS RALLY
This rally will take place on Sunday 24th April at 8 o’clock. At Hayfield Recreation Ground. From the rec, we proceed on a MASS TRESPASS onto Kinder Scout. This is being organized by the British Workers’ Sports Federation, who fight:
Against the finest stretches of moorland being closed to us.
For cheap fares, for cheap catering facilities.
Against any war preparations in rambling organisations.
Against petty restrictions, such as singing etc.
Now: young workers of [Eccles] to all, whether you’ve been rambling before or not, we extend a hearty welcome. If you’ve not been rambling before, start now; you don’t know what you’ve missed. Roll up on Sunday morning and once with us, for the best day out you’ve ever had.
Scenes photographed in Bowden Quarry near Hayfield – the hastily rearranged meeting place in an attempt to shake off gathering police attention – on the day of what history would remember as the Kinder Mass Trespass are extraordinarily vivid, despite their age. One shows a crowd numbering in their hundreds gathering amidst an amphitheatre of fractured rock looking up towards a figure standing on a gritstone plinth and purposefully addressing the crowd. Were he holding a medieval sword aloft it would resemble a scene from an Arthurian saga. According to contemporary accounts, the man on the rock launched into a passionate sermon against trespass laws and access restrictions, and after warning the crowd against using violence against whatever they encountered, presumably signed off with something