The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths

by Mike Parker

  Paul Salveson expected a couple of hundred to come on the march, but in the event nearly 2,000 made it, confirming Bolton’s historic ability to mobilise numbers when needs be. Benny Rothman, the public face of the Kinder protest, came along, as did Labour MP Andrew Bennett, a brass band and Mike Harding, comedian, folk singer, soon-to-be President of the Ramblers’ Association and all-round professional Lancashire Lad (the title of his first album). Further celebrations were held in 1996, the centenary of the mass trespass, including the long-awaited dedication by the local council of Coalpit Lane as an official right of way. Having been so strangely forgotten, Winter Hill 1896 is now firmly etched in the folklore of both Bolton and the access movement.

  On a chilly March Sunday morning, Paul met me at Belmont, the end of the protest route, and ferried me back to its start, at the disputed gate on Coalpit Lane. He had to rush off, but pointed me on my way up to the soggy, still-snowbound peak of Winter Hill. Not that you could miss it: a cluster of massive telecommunications masts occupies the summit now, making it even more desolate than nature alone has managed. There is something powerfully gloomy about the place: famous for a gruesome murder in 1838, regular sightings of UFOs and a litany of plane crashes. In the worst one, on a grim winter’s day in 1958, a flight from the Isle of Man mistook its position and smacked into the hillside, killing 35. The impact was only 350 yards from the summit transmitter station, yet so severe was the weather that the men working there didn’t even realise that there had been a crash.

  If you’re blessed with a clear day on Winter Hill, and mercifully my cold March morning was one such, it’s the view that stuns, all the way over the whole of Greater Manchester. A few silent chimneys are the only reminder that, not so long ago, this would have been a view over Hades itself, a seething, smoking cauldron of humanity crammed into every crevice. Now, the most obvious landmark, glittering Teutonically in the cold sunlight, sits right over the other side of Manchester: the Chill Factor indoor ski slope, next to the candy domes of the Trafford Centre.

  Walking down the other side to Belmont, I couldn’t shake from my head the chorus of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Manchester Rambler’, a song written from his personal experience of the Kinder protest. Checking there was no-one within earshot, I even bellowed it out a couple of times, swelling to a climax on the immortal chorus, ‘I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday.’ It felt brilliant to be high up on the Lancashire moors on a bright, blustery Sunday morning, and I was far from alone. Since first thing, I’d been aware of ramblers everywhere, alone, in couples and in joyful groups of all ages. It was particularly thrilling to see so many kids and teenagers along with their parents and grandparents, and none of them looked grumpy or bored. Perhaps, though, if I’d been near enough, I might have heard ‘Graaaan, next time can we go to t’Chill Factor? Pleeeeeease.’

  By that strange law of universal coincidence, on the very day of the first Winter Hill trespass, Sunday, 6 September 1896, another hill just up the road was witnessing its precise antithesis. The people of Darwen, a smaller mill town less than ten miles north, were celebrating the end of a long access battle with a procession, mayor, corporation, brass bands, banners and all, up on to the moor above the town. There too, generations of locals had been used to walking, but had suddenly found that it was ruled off-limits by the landowner, in this case a vicar who rarely even made it to Darwen, as his parish was in Dorset. Two years later, another procession headed up the hill, this time to open a viewing tower that looks to be the very epitome of the Victorian age – dark, severe, yet lofty and ambitious, and built to celebrate its apogee, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Nominally, that is. The florid plaques on the tower’s base all celebrate the Queen’s longevity and list the aldermen who shuffled up the hill to applaud the dignitaries on that day in September 1898, but a more recent addition gives the game away. That is a plain crest that celebrates the 1996 centenary of the victory for the townspeople in gaining access to the moor that glowers above their streets.

  It may have taken nearly a century to get the real reason for the Darwen Tower inscribed on its side, but the ambition was explicit from the start. Letters in the local press supported the idea of a Jubilee Tower, but as long as it also served as a celebration of the townsfolk’s victory over their absentee landlord, the Rev. William Arthur Duckworth. With sweet irony, it was Duckworth himself, on one of his rare forays north to Darwen, who had to preside over the opening ceremony of the very symbol of his recent defeat. As I walked towards the tower earlier on that windswept Sunday morning, the mist whipping across the moor brought its shape in and out of focus. At a certain stage of semi-visibility, it looked like nothing more than a fat, raised middle finger, quite probably from the people of Darwen to the good reverend. From another angle, and in another stage of atmospheric opacity, there’s something undeniably phallic about it, and that’s probably aimed at him too.

  This is hard country. Old snow lay curdled in piles in north-facing clefts and gullies, or packed up against the dry stone walls, sullen lines of dirty sandstone augmented by concrete blocks and broken paving slabs wherever they’d collapsed. It’s a well-worn path, but you have to keep your eyes on the ground, as ankle-turning ruts and rocks litter the way. Wherever I looked, the whole scene appeared to have been painted by an artist with just three colours in his palette: olive green, battleship grey and a mucky ochre. Even calling it olive green gives it a continental raffishness that the month of March over Darwen can never possibly fulfil, but you get the picture.

  Around the top of the tower there are optimistic little toposcope plaques, telling you what you might be able to see if only the mist would thin a while. It won’t. Everyone who writes about Darwen Tower mentions not seeing anything. Official boasts claim that, on a clear day, you can see Snowdonia, but someone I read said that he’s been up there dozens of times, and never caught sight of it. The plaque facing Wales has long since been jemmied off the tower, but the other two are still there. I looked out into the fog that was zipping past like a battalion of ghosts, willing myself to see, as promised, the Old Man of Coniston or Kinder Scout, my ultimate destination on this tour of the north-west’s much fought-over footpaths. A couple walking a pair of very fat Labradors loomed out of the mist instead.

  Just for a minute, it suddenly cleared. Only enough to see the town of Darwen below, but given that I’d only been able to see for about 20 yards prior to that, the effect was startling. The town is a sprawl, but a sprawl of straight lines and right angles: long terraced streets in blocks and grids, angular great buildings, a vast chimney or two. It looked sharp and harsh, as if you might cut yourself on one of its edges. Suddenly, the cheerless moor and pompous little Victorian tower looked like softness itself, the swirls of tracks and billowing clouds of heather a vital antidote to all that lay beneath. Something clicked in my head about the umbilical urgency of these wild open spaces to the people locked in that once-teeming grid on the valley floor. Down below, the smog, the chapels, the factories, the watchful eyes, the gossip, the iron rules. Up above, a transitory freedom, nature red in tooth and claw, redder still in unshackled loins. Blake’s line about ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ was never far away as I drove through these towns, all the more so when every turn seemed to take me back on to the A666.

  The people have not been slow in marking their victory in the battle for access. All over Darwen Tower, and in the benches around it, names and initials, going right back to the tail end of the nineteenth century, are carved into the sandstone, into the wood, or scribbled in marker pen. Snow-haired old gentlemen, pillars of the town, can still find the initials they carved as bullish youths. And it was good to see too that the modern identity of Darwen, and that cluster of towns nearby, is well represented in the daubings and chisellings. There’s football rivalry, of course (Darwen Scum ’97), and heartfelt scratchings of love and lust (Jak Is Fit As by Nicola H, Mick + Gail, Pat & Stace, Lisa Kev), but there’s also Haleema, Radek and
Irmina, Wrocław and Ian Antony.

  And so to Kinder Scout, the name that looms largest of all, not just over the many struggles in the north-west to get into the wild places, but over the entire history of the British access movement. Even its name – half chocolate egg, half bob-a-job – seems wholesome and aspirational; it’s hard to imagine that the names of nearby Bleaklow, which suffered even stricter prohibition, or Winter Hill would have galvanised public support quite so effectively, and consistently over the past 80 years and counting. It is the British rambling community’s holy relic, and has inspired dramas, books, school projects, paintings, films, TV and radio programmes, poetry and music. In the proud bastion of the north-west itself, I fully expected to see eyes mist over and voices get a little croaky at the first mention of Kinder. I was very wrong.

  Clarke Rogerson at the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society was the first to set me straight. ‘I get a bit peed off with people going on and on about Kinder all the time,’ he declared. ‘It was a small event, and in some ways an ill-conceived event. Certainly, this society was opposed to it at the time, and we weren’t the only ones. The Snake Pass [a path from the north across Kinder], for instance, we got that open through negotiation, not by guerrilla tactics or threats. There are those who say that the Kinder trespass put the whole cause back thirty years, that it did more harm than good. I have mixed feelings about it. Was it the Kinder trespass that changed the law? No it wasn’t. It was hours and days and months and years of toil by lots and lots of people that got our moors open.’ And in answer to my question as to whether the five men imprisoned after the trespass were treated unduly harshly, he has an immediate response: ‘No. Not for what they did at the time.’ Following the success of a 2007 exhibition commemorating the 75th anniversary of the mass trespass, there are plans to establish a permanent museum about the access struggles of the north-west, but it was proving difficult to get people excited about anything other than ‘bloody Kinder’.

  Neither was this a bit of modern revisionism. Tom Stephenson (1893–1987), another man carved out of Lancashire grit, was a giant of twentieth-century land-access campaigns. His dogged persistence, encyclopaedic knowledge of the law and socialist drive saw him in the thick of the action from the First World War, when he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector, to the Thatcher years. Through the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, he led the Ramblers’ Association, and drove the establishment of the Pennine Way, the country’s first official long-distance footpath. In his memoir Forbidden Land, he pulls no punches in assessing the success, and otherwise, of the century’s many access tussles. On the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, he is unambiguous, describing it as ‘the most dramatic incident in the access to mountains campaign. Yet it contributed little, if anything, to it.’ He goes further, becoming positively snicky when he nicknames Benny Rothman, the highly voluble leader of the trespass, as ‘General’ Rothman, and sneering on numerous occasions that it wasn’t a proper protest, because they didn’t make it to the absolute top of Kinder Scout.

  Clarke Rogerson was not understating it when he said that there was little support at the time for the mass trespass amongst more middle-class ramblers. An official of the Manchester & District branch of the Ramblers’ Federation wrote to the press to condemn it before it had even happened, and the organisation very publicly disassociated itself from it in its raucous aftermath. Their successors, the Ramblers’ Association, tend to gloss over that one. To those seeking a more softly-softly approach of polite parliamentary lobbying, the demonstration was pure anathema, and many howled that it had set the cause back, rather than progressed it any. To the young firebrands who organised the trespass, this just proved that they were right, especially when you remember that attempts to lever greater access through Parliament had been a major cause for half a century by then, and yet had delivered precisely nothing.

  All the same, I was inexplicably excited to be tackling Kinder for the first time, and to see in the dark flesh a part of the world that I’d often gazed at on the map. Despite never having been there, I’d always been intrigued, even slightly intimidated, by the look of the High Peak on my Ordnance Surveys. The summit of Kinder is a vast, almost contour-free plateau 2,000 feet up and in the rough, elongated triangle shape of a primitive arrowhead (or, if you prefer, as seventeenth-century poet Charles Cotton had it, ‘nature’s pudenda’). Technically, of course, it does have an absolute summit (636m), but that’s just a slight swelling of elevation over the neighbouring ground and with little difference discernible between that and the plateau’s three scattered trig points, at 624, 633 and 590 metres, an obvious fact that make Tom Stephenson’s sneer about them not having reached the summit look unnecessarily bitchy. The trig points delineate the outer edge of the summit plateau, almost as if they were guarding it; the miles of moor in between, an elevated void of very little indeed.

  Look on the larger-scale Explorer map, however (number OL1, appropriately enough, for this has long been the biggest seller of all OS paper maps), and a whole load of new detail leaps out. Dozens of tiny peaty brooks fan out like the capillaries on a wino’s nose, followed by a few contours that look like the marks made by mould as it sneaks its lacy way up a damp wall. Pretty, but kind of downbeat, and that was how I imagined the area itself to be. All around the flat arrowhead summit, contours tumbled down to the farms and settlements below. The outer limits of the plateau looked thrillingly sharp, and with suitably crisp names: Blackden Edge, Seal Edge, and across the northern perimeter, simply The Edge. Other names to chew on like old-fashioned blocks of toffee – Cluther Rocks, Kinder Downfall, Fairbrook Naze, Grindslow Knoll, Madwoman’s Rocks – were scattered around this bizarre, extraordinary-looking mountain.

  My plan was to camp the night in Edale, then take the train to New Mills the following morning and walk back over the Kinder plateau, following the route of the trespass. I’d wanted to go to the Vale of Edale, tucked down below the south-eastern edge of Kinder, for decades, again all thanks to the map. No main roads pass through, but there’s still a railway, the high route between Sheffield and Manchester, and a village station. Viewpoints and campsites are dotted liberally amongst the contours, and of course, Edale is the starting point of the Pennine Way, its deeply scored route striding west out of the village and up on to Kinder. That would be my way back off the mountain in a day that would have me touch the soul of what walking means to the British.

  If the glorious myth of the mass trespass has rather overtaken the reality, then so has the status of Kinder Scout itself. When I mentioned to various people locally that I was going to walk across Kinder, with thick snow still visible against the black peat of its top, the same reaction came almost every time. ‘Tha’s walkin’ oop Kinder? A’this time uh yur? Dear God, tha wants to be curful, tha knows – thur’s feet o’snow still on top. Can change in’n instant oop thur. Mek sure tha’s got plenty o’provisions, wurterproofs, torch, whistle, map, coompuss – eeh, be curful, lad.’ They made it sound like the Eiger, and it got me very excited indeed.

  The train journey to New Mills took just 15 minutes, and getting off, the near-holy status of the Kinder mass trespass loomed large, in the shape of a mural at the station depicting a romantic tableau of the events of Saturday, 24 April 1932. It was the visual equivalent of a book that I’d happily devoured the previous evening, Fay Sampson’s A Free Man on Sunday, her imaginative reworking of the event into a children’s story. In it, she invents a sixth trespasser who was imprisoned, and gives him a back story that mainly revolves around a feisty little daughter who loves nowt more than to dubbin her dad’s boots and accompany him on his moorland rambles. It’s charming, heart-warming stuff, where every rambler is kindly, and every copper and gamekeeper a bloodless bully. In it, Benny Rothman is sainted before we even get to the trespass, as poor little Edie, the heroine, tumbles off her bike on the way to the gathering point at Hayfield. Sure enough, it’s Rothman who swoops by to the rescue.

  Looking
at the way different anniversaries of 1932 have been celebrated, there’s an undoubted sense that, the further it retreats into history, the more bloated the myth becomes. Now that all of the protagonists have died, the anchor of reality has been cut loose and the story is free to float where it wants. We need Kinder Scout as a totem, a crystal-clear symbol of good versus evil, and everyone – with the possible exception, it seems, of the footpath professionals of the north-west – is keen to make it their own. On a website about the protest, you can find videos of the 75th anniversary rally, held in April 2007 in New Mills. Inevitably compèred by Mike Harding, the keynote address was given by David Miliband, then the Secretary of State for the Environment. His bug-eyed enthusiasm to appropriate the mass trespass as the kind of thing the New Labour government admired and encouraged is received in near stunned silence, save for a solitary cry of ‘Bollocks!’ from somewhere off-camera. In a not untypical piece of statistical mangling, he also manages to inflate the number of trespassers to 4,000, ten times the actual figure. Even that, though, doesn’t quite reach the level of awkwardness achieved by Harding’s rousing singalong of ‘The Manchester Rambler’ as the zenith of the celebration. Harding himself does a fine enough job, but it’s ruined by the sight of Lord (Roy) Hattersley slumped in a too-small chair behind him, silent and immobile, imperiously unwilling to join in and with his arms folded across his ample bosom, looking for all the world like Les Dawson’s gossipy housewife.

  Leaving New Mills station, my first path on a day of many was exhilarating. The town’s Millennium Walkway is a 175-yard-long steel trajectory, pinned to a massive embankment wall some 20 feet above the churning waters of the River Goyt. This is a path that gives a perspective never available before, and it absolutely enchanted me, even more so because this audacious piece of civic bling sweeps through the middle of staggering post-industrial putrefaction. As I continued through the town, it became clear that this kind of vertiginous engineering was no new thing, for houses and factories teetered on top of cliffs, sheer rockfaces sprouted chimneys and windows like strange plants, tunnels vanished into the gloom while viaducts swooped overhead. It seemed that meaty buttresses and bolts were holding the whole place together.