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

by Mike Parker

  The old railway line to Hayfield is now a path, so it was an easy, flattish canter to breakfast. There was, it seemed, plenty of choice: pubs, cafés and hotels all with ‘RAMBLERS WELCOME’ displayed prominently on their signs. It was a very different picture back on the day of the mass trespass, when legions of police filled the town and bristled up against the gathering hundreds intending to reach the peak above them. Reports from the day suggest that nearly all the residents of Hayfield shut themselves indoors, terrified of trouble.

  The Peak and Northern might be a little standoffish about the whole Kinder protest, but they weren’t missing a trick in terms of potential recruitment at this ramblers’ holy grail, for their lovely cast-iron signs were everywhere up the Kinder Road. As I climbed, I started to recognise landmarks from the photographs taken in 1932. On rounding a corner, a stab of déjà-vu announced the Bowden Bridge quarry, where perhaps the most famous Kinder photo of all was taken, of an improbably youthful Benny Rothman addressing his troops from atop a rock before they set off up to the moor. Apart from the fact that it now acts as a car park, the quarry really hasn’t changed much, and I lingered for a good fifteen minutes, soaking up the atmosphere that, in my charged state, was beginning to feel almost sacred. Thankfully, another piece of rubbish Kinder art was on hand to break the spell, in the shape of some excruciating doggerel inscribed proudly on a bench:

  As I trudge through the peat at a pace so slow

  There is time to remember the debt we owe

  To the ‘Kinder Trespass’ and the rights they did seek

  Allowing us freely to ramble the Dark Peak.

  On that Saturday nearly 80 years ago, the protestors could not, in their wildest fantasies, have imagined that their little adventure would be so massively, passionately remembered. The idea had first germinated a few weeks earlier, when a youth camp organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) had taken place at Rowarth, a couple of miles north-west of Hayfield. Some of the campers had gone for a walk up to Bleaklow and had got into an argument with a gamekeeper. Back at camp, discussing the event, the idea of a well-publicised mass trespass on Kinder Scout was floated, and enthusiastically adopted. The date was set, and Benny Rothman, a 20-year-old unemployed mechanic, used his considerable flair for publicity to ensure that knowledge of the event was spread to the winds. To that end, he wrote and distributed leaflets, organised posters, inscribed chalk advertisements on pavements and went to visit the offices of the Manchester Evening News, who duly obliged with a sensationalist spread about the bust-up to come.

  After the rally in the old quarry, the trespassers marched up past Kinder Reservoir, which was being heavily patrolled by officials of the water corporation, and thence into open country, along a rising valley called the William Clough. This was the disputed territory: once open to all, but through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gradually closed off for grouse shooting. The grouse are still there today, and as you walk through, they squawk and fly off suddenly, but soon return unperturbed to their original spot. They are not, as gamekeepers and landowners have so stridently claimed over the years, much bothered by ramblers. In the William Clough, the first skirmishes took place with stick-wielding keepers, one of whom was slightly injured in a fall. The trespassers broke through and made it to the top of the Clough, on to the hallowed summit plateau of Kinder Scout. There they met a contingent from Sheffield who had walked unimpeded up the other side from Edale station, whereupon a short victory meeting was held, before the Manchester contingent returned to Hayfield. The police and keepers were waiting, and six ringleaders, Benny Rothman included, were picked off and arrested. At Derby Assizes three months later, five of them were imprisoned for a few months apiece, by a jury that comprised of two brigadier-generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains and two aldermen.

  Had they not been arrested and imprisoned, the mass trespass would probably have been remembered only by Ramblers’ Association archivists and local historians. But Kinder proved to be the inevitable flashpoint in a smouldering fire of resentment and agitation that had been building up since the end of the First World War. As is hinted on the famous Ellis Martin covers of OS maps of the time, this was the first great age of the rambler. Walking clubs were everywhere, from groups of well-to-do middle managers tramping the lanes and hills of the Home Counties to the great working-class mass movements of the north, furiously campaigning for access to their nearest open spaces. Inevitably, there was more mutual suspicion dividing the two than any sense of comradeship uniting them. No surprise, perhaps, for this huge chasm was not just circumstantial, but deeply ideological as well, and gave the Establishment press plenty of ammunition against the trespassers. In the Derby court case, the prosecution claimed that demonstrators had sung ‘The Red Flag’ (probably true) and chanted ‘Down with the landowners and ruling classes!’ and ‘Up with the workers!’ (probably not) as they clambered on to the moor. Counsel noted that a book by Lenin was found in the home of one of the defendants, to which the judge, Mr Justice Acton, responded. ‘Isn’t that the Russian gentleman?’ In a foretaste of much that has happened since, youthful naïveté and exuberance were portrayed as something much darker and more disreputable. And the case pandered to darker instincts still, for the fact that three of the six defendants had demonstrably Jewish names did not go unnoticed.

  Read any number of accounts of that distant April day, including first-hand ones, and they differ quite markedly, even in basic facts such as the number of participants. Benny Rothman claimed 600–800. The reporter from the Manchester Guardian, who accompanied the protest, stated it to be in the region of 400–500. The Daily Express went with 500 too, while the prosecution case at the trial in Derby put it at between 150 and 200.

  In the north-west, I’d heard a fair few disdainful things said about the Kinder trespass, and Benny Rothman in particular. He had a terrific, unabashed flair for promotion, self-promotion included, a tendency guaranteed to upset those of more oatmeal tastes, if only because of their secret envy of his showmanship and shamelessness. As he got older, though, he was treated increasingly as a holy relic and, almost until his death in 2002, was regularly wheeled out to inject a little Kinder stardust into ramblers’ meetings, rallies and photo-calls. And as I followed his footsteps up past the reservoir and into the William Clough, I looked up at the snow-smeared black pillows of the summit plateau, and any antagonism dissolved. Off to my right, the spray of water coming over Kinder Downfall was catching the wind and being blown upwards like smoke. An intoxicating jolt of freedom surged through my veins, and all I could do was thank him.

  I thanked him and his comrades again when I reached the top. Despite the wide-eyed warnings of some locals, it had been a relatively simple ascent, following an easy track up the side of a peaty brook. The reward was magnificent. Views were endless, as was the sea of black peat rippled and cut into chunks and slabs by streams the colour of an old-fashioned porter beer. In the keen sunlight, the great slabs of millstone grit glittered like black diamonds, presenting themselves as terrific impromptu picnic tables, chairs and even sunbathing platforms. I stopped to munch my sandwiches by Kinder Downfall, watching the spray of the water tumble over the edge, vaporise and float free into the sharp sky.

  Melting snow had swollen the river and, to cross it, I joined with a group of others in trekking upstream to find a spot where it could be forded. We nearly lost one braveheart, who strode out, shouting ‘Follow me!,’ on to a packed shelf of hard snow over the river. Just as he reached a point where he could almost jump to the other side, the shelf groaned and cracked, dropping with a splash into the rushing water. Looking like a surprised polar bear in a nature documentary, our man flailed downstream towards the fall, but managed to jump free back on to the rocks before cartoon calamity struck. We were all a bit hysterical by then, wheezing laughter and shouts of ribald piss-taking at each other in clouds of wintry breath. There was, I realised, a different atmosphere on these norther
n peaks: far more comradely, much less pompous than you’d sometimes find elsewhere. And more than anywhere I’d walked in years, Kinder looked and felt like a completely different world to the one below, a world that would never fail to lift sagging spirits or inspire new ways of seeing things. It had been a peak well worth fighting for, even if the fight had been a little overcooked by the Chinese whispers of constant retelling.

  The descent back down into the Vale of Edale was equally delicious, down the boulder-strewn track that serves as the first (or, less commonly, the last) stretch of the Pennine Way. Well-worn tracks, smooth gates, numerous discreet signs and little wooden fingerposts make it impossible to lose your way. Not for the first time, I marvelled at the ruthless, yet generally cheerful, efficiency with which the Peak District National Park deals with its many visitors. It has to: situated as it is between the great metropolises of the north and Midlands, with well over a quarter of the British population within an hour’s drive, it receives easily the greatest number of visitors of all 15 British national parks, something over ten million annually (the next most popular are all in northern England too: the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and the North York Moors, in that order). Yet despite this overwhelming influx, the annual spend of those visitors in the Peak District is the second lowest of all 15 parks: at £97 million per annum it’s higher only than lowly Exmoor, which receives around an eighth of the Peak’s number of visitors. The annual spend in the Lake District, by comparison, is nearly £700 million, and from two million fewer people.

  On all the leaflets and notice boards locally, I’d clocked the phrase about the Peak being ‘one of the family of National Parks’, and as I climbed down towards Edale and a pint in the Old Nag’s Head, the traditional starting point of the Pennine Way, I pictured this strange, diverse family. The well-loved grandparents of the clan, whom I imagined as a sort of Phil and Jill Archer, were undoubtedly the Lake District and Snowdonia, offering their venerable wisdom to the eager whippersnappers around them. Equally aged, if a little more bellicose, was Great Uncle Cairngorms, glowering by the fire in a big leather armchair and cradling a fine malt. Pembrokeshire and the Norfolk Broads were two flash cousins glued to their iPhones, one a surf dude, the other a braying yachtie. Pony-mad little sister, the New Forest, was something straight out of a Thelwell cartoon. The Yorkshire Moors and Dales were two of your favourite aunties, who always baked the best cakes, but who also told the filthiest jokes after a couple of sweet sherries at Christmas. Hovering ethereally in the shadows was Northumberland, a mysterious distant cousin that everyone’s heard of, but no-one’s really met. And judging from the statistics, the Peak District was the staple of every family, the good time had by all, but who rarely gets so much as half a shandy bought for her afterwards.

  In the Old Nag’s Head, Pennine Way and Kinder Scout ephemera coated the walls of the Hikers’ Bar, a name announced on the door. Another front door led into the Locals’ Bar, and it was evident that the divide was pretty absolute. It probably has to be: Edale has been so thoroughly consumed by the Great Outdoors industry that the locals need to create and police their own corners, from a bar in the pub to a section of the vast village car park that was marked as ‘VILLAGE PARKING ONLY’. I camped the night in my van at the top of the car park (it’s not encouraged, of course) and was mildly amused to see that, even when the whole place was empty save for me and one other camper van, locals very pointedly made sure that they still used their designated spaces.

  Immediately south of Edale is the ‘shivering mountain’ of Mam Tor, somewhere else that I’d wanted to visit for years. It’s almost my ultimate destination, as a spiritual pilgrimage to one of the great mother mountains of Britain, but also as a far more prosaic, positively spoddy one too, a chance to see our most spectacular abandoned modern highway. Mam Tor’s colourful nickname comes from its sheer precariousness as a vast pile of regularly shifting shale, just as it meets the firmer limestone to the south. Landslips are commonplace, which makes it a feat of towering optimism to have lain a trans-Peak road across its southern flank in 1810. This grew into the A625, a stretch of road notorious for its hairpin bends, unyielding gradient and harsh winter weather. Bits of the carriageway collapsed regularly and were patched up until the next slip, all causing terrible headaches for the Highways Agency and Derbyshire County Council. In February 1977, at the end of a wet winter that had itself followed a drought summer, the mountain shivered and the road buckled. Cracks and steps, some two foot deep, appeared in the asphalt. It was stitched back together once again, but as a single carriageway controlled by traffic lights. With more slips inevitable, the road was finally closed to all traffic in 1979. I can well remember the intriguing gap on the map in road atlases of the time: two thick red lines of main road failing to meet in the middle, and with the legend ‘No Through Road at present’ between them. I’m really quite ashamed that it had taken me this long to visit.

  Getting there 30 years late was no anti-climax. In truth, it was way better than I’d dared hope, even after looking at so many photostreams of it from my fellow nerds on the internet. The old A625, after just three decades of abandonment, is a salutory lesson in the vanity of hoping to conquer Mother Nature, here on one of her very own named peaks. The shattered road drops away in cliffs, its layers of make-do-and-mend tarmac giving it the look of geological strata that had been painstakingly laid down over millennia. Faded white lines and Cat’s-eyes point into cracks, holes and sheer nothingness. Above sat Mam herself, calmly waiting, occasionally shivering, and in total control of all she surveyed.

  One unfortunate by-product of the A625’s closure was that the adjacent Winnats Pass, a narrow defile through limestone turrets, has seen a considerable rise in traffic thundering through. The thin road is a 1:5 hairpin rollercoaster, and on a bright March day it was plenty busy enough; it must be a nightmare on a bank holiday Monday. Winnats Pass has an honourable place too in the story of our fight for access to our wild places, for it was here that national Access to Mountains rallies were held annually from the late 1920s through to the outbreak of the Second World War. They were generally fairly polite affairs, a few hundred or thousand picnicking happily in the natural amphitheatre of the Pass and applauding the rambling lobbyists and sympathetic politicians of the day. The events on Kinder Scout of April 1932 galvanised the event, with 10,000 turning up for the rally two months later, many of them young Kinder veterans and their friends noisily demanding support from the more timorous wings of the access movement. The rather diffident and polite world of rambling had changed for good.

  Winnats Pass, and the neighbouring tourist honeypot of Castleton, were the perfect places to bring my northern footpath odyssey to an end, for I wanted to kick off the walking boots and place all these stories in their wider context of how folk up north like to relax. If Edale, with its cute train station and no main road or street lights, comes across like something off a 1930s OS map, all knobbly knees, mess tins, bad teeth and the tantalising chance of a fresh air-assisted leg-over, then Castleton is its twin in Sunday best. Castleton is where you take your aunties on a day trip, and although I’d never been there before, it felt somehow like the embodiment of my 1970s childhood, all lacquered hair-dos, gift shops that have you clucking at the prices, ice-cream faces and lacy doilies. It’s famous for its spectacular caves, and the unique local stone, called Blue John, that comes from them. Blue John is, you are regularly assured, one of the most prized of decorative rocks, but to my eyes its garish swirls looked tailor-made for clunky 1970s ashtrays, and not much else. Entirely fittingly, it was to Castleton that one of the earliest Coronation Street outings took place, a 1965 jaunt to the Blue John mine organised by upright Emily Bishop (or Nugent as she was at the time). In the shop at Speedwell Cavern, there’s a lovely photo of them filming Hilda and Stan Ogden, Len Fairclough, Elsie Tanner, and Mr and Mrs Walker as they tottered off the excursion coach. I pulled on my cardy, channelled the spirit of Annie Walker and went for a cup of tea.
Loose leaf, in a china cup.

  There were countless other paths I could have walked, innumerable hills, forests and moors that had witnessed the north-west’s struggle for access, but I felt that I’d seen and walked the most important, and that, in themselves, they represented a fine cross-section both of the issues and the landscapes involved. The trip had been superb, as much for the warm-hearted humour and easy-going chattiness of the locals as the imposing scenery. The umbilical link between the people of the north-west and their wild places had inspired me hugely, and it is as strong now as it ever has been. I had to admit that the bolshie buggers are quite within their rights to go on about it.

  Chapter 3

  BLAZING THE TRAIL

  Follow the beige brick road on Mam Tor, Peak District

  Pub-quiz time: which UK number one record included quotations from Noam Chomsky, William Ewart Gladstone and Albert Camus? A clue – it wasn’t by Westlife, but you probably guessed that. It did, however, storm straight in at number one and knock out the little Irish poppets, who’d been there for the previous four weeks with yet another damp ballad. It was the first new number one of the twenty-first century; over a decade on, it still pounds through you like a blast of amphetamines.