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

by Mike Parker

  You know, I’m sure. Who else but the shamelessly precocious Manic Street Preachers, Gwent’s finest in eyeliner, would attempt to weave words by such an unlikely triumvirate into a massive hit record? Gladstone gave it its title (‘All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes’), Camus its coda (‘A slave begins by demanding justice, and ends by wanting to wear a crown’), whined out at the dying fall by lead singer James Dean Bradfield, but it was the words of Chomsky that grab you by the throat at the very outset, and launched us into the new millennium on a surge of pure adrenaline.

  ‘The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority – and so it remains,’ intones Chomsky, before the guitars and drums storm in and speed us into submission. It’s a great line, and one that the linguist-philosopher-guru expands upon on his web-site, saying, ‘American democracy was founded on the principle, stressed by James Madison in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, that the primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority [his italics]. Thus he warned that in England, the only quasi-democratic model of the day, if the general population were allowed a say in public affairs, they would implement agrarian reform or other atrocities, and that the American system must be carefully crafted to avoid such crimes against the rights of property, which must be defended (in fact, must prevail).’

  Strong stuff, but look at the agonised history of legislation around the issue of access to our hills and paths, and it’s hard to disagree with any of it. Inspired by my trip to the north-west, I wanted to read up on the turbulent background that had sparked the fights at Flixton, Bolton, Darwen and Kinder, especially how they had been conducted within the political discourse of the day. It was an illuminating, and not terribly inspiring, search.

  Since huge tracts of the countryside were enclosed, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of massive industrial expansion and concomitant urbanisation of the population, public rights of access have only ever been grudgingly returned, and only in the most piecemeal of ways. Scores of pieces of legislation, each one chipping just a fragment off the granite block of our obsessions with property and privacy, have occupied Parliament for months at a time. Helped perhaps by listening to ‘The Masses Against the Classes’ at full volume, reading up on this interminable struggle was a fine way of making the sludgy blood of a lapsed lefty fizz once more through my veins.

  The bottom line is that, had it been left to the Conservative Party, we’d still be peering through the gates. Every single advance in our rights of access has come about because of the dogged persistence of campaigners, their willingness to break the law and their often few friends in Parliament. Such members have invariably been drawn from the radical fringes of the Liberal and Labour parties, and often faced considerable opposition on their own benches, let alone the scarlet-faced opprobrium of those on the opposite side of the chamber. At every measure, Tories have spluttered indignantly and tried to bat away progress with a well-worn litany of disingenuous half-truths, perverse speculation, scaremongering and a persistently nasty seam of hatred towards the lower orders. As a result, it has taken well over a hundred years of constant new legislation to reach the point we are at today, with a half-decent public footpath network and a modest right to roam, mainly on uncultivated land, in England and Wales. In Scotland, there’s a rather bolder presumption of access to the land (and, importantly, to waterways too), one that brings the country into line with the age-old Scandinavian ideal known in Swedish as Allemansrätt, or ‘every man’s right’.

  The first parliamentary attempt to claw back some of the land came in 1884, with James Bryce’s Access to Mountains (Scotland) Bill. Scotland’s story is even more remarkable than that south of the border, for the most liberal access rights today have come out of a background that was the most generally repressive anywhere in these islands. With the infamous Highland Clearances fresh in the popular memory, the late nineteenth century saw something of their ghostly echo, as vast swathes of the Highlands were cleared and closed off for deer forests, in which a growing numbers of wealthy industrialists, from America as well as Britain, would hunt. Ghillies and stewards policed their perimeters, and innumerable instances were recorded of people being forcibly barred from entering land and using old paths that had been open to all since anyone could remember.

  As is nearly always the way, it took a startling headline to bring the situation to a head. The ‘Pet Lamb Case’, as it became known in the Fleet Street papers that covered it with breathless excitement, came about when a lamb owned by Highland crofter Murdo Macrae strayed into the 300-square-mile deer forest rented as a shooting estate by American railroad millionaire William Louis Winans. Bearing in mind that Winans’s estate (although called a ‘forest’, it was mainly mountain and moor) engulfed the small hamlet where Macrae and his family lived, the lamb needed to go not much further than the end of the garden to be on forbidden turf. Winans turned the full force of the law on to Macrae, ultimately unsuccessfully. Worse, he made himself a laughing stock – even the landowner from whom Winans rented the estate publicly denounced him. Not that it much dented his swagger: The Times reported that, while he was travelling through the Highland village of Tomich, some stones were thrown at his carriage. He stopped and immediately offered a reward of £500 – a quite unimaginable sum to Victorian crofters – for the capture or discovery of the guilty people.

  It was at this time that Bryce was attempting to introduce his bill to Parliament. Public opinion could not have been more on his side. Editorials in The Times and other newspapers detailed the historical grievances in the Highlands and used the ‘Pet Lamb Case’ as the ultimate example of how skewed the situation had become. The time, it seemed, was ripe, but no-one had told members of Parliament. Bryce presented his bill, but it was dismissed without debate.

  A year later, in 1885, James Bryce’s constituency of Tower Hamlets was abolished and he headed to Scotland for a newly created one, becoming the Liberal MP for Aberdeenshire South until 1907, whereupon he took up the post of British Ambassador to the USA. The first MP to have his name scribed on the walkers’ roll of honour was a fascinating individual, fulsomely bearded, fearsomely intellectual and a prolific author on topics as varied as botany, ancient history, sociology and modern political theory. In his earlier years, he’d walked and climbed much in the Alps, Scandinavia, Russia and beyond, even climbing Mount Ararat in an 1876 expedition. At over 13,000 feet, well above the tree-line, he found a large piece of carved timber, four or five feet long, and deduced it to be a remnant of Noah’s Ark.

  Bryce resubmitted his Access to Mountains (Scotland) Bill on an almost annual basis, but it was not actually debated until 4 March 1892, some eight years after its parliamentary debut. He gave his long-awaited introduction to the measure with relish, as he described how difficult getting into and around the Highlands was at that time for the hiker, artist or scientist. So assiduous are the landowners in protecting their vast estates (which, at their peak, accounted for around 6,000 square miles, a fifth of Scotland), he said, that ‘one is obliged to stalk ghillies as the ghillies stalk the deer.’ Tory members opposite could not take him, or the idea, seriously. After Bryce claimed he had ‘climbed mountains in almost every country’, some buffoon shouted ‘Holland?’, to loud guffaws. Incidentally, even that was an ill-informed heckle: Holland has some fairly significant hills in its south-eastern corner around Maastricht, with Mount Vaals top-ping a thousand feet (321m). The micro-states of Monaco and Vatican City excepted, Europe’s flattest country is, by some distance, Denmark, where three ‘peaks’ scrap it out for national supremacy. They are all around 170 metres high, but, since 1998, have been topped by a new, man-made loftiest point in the country, the towers of the Great Belt suspension bridge between the islands of Funen and Zealand, each more than 80 metres taller. If we’re being really pedantic, there’s a TV mast even higher.

  In hi
s opening speech, Bryce stated that ideally, the measure he proposed would cover the whole of the United Kingdom, but that for now, he felt it necessary to concentrate on Scotland. He gave honourable members a history lesson, reminding them that the problem of access to the Highlands ‘is practically a new grievance. Eighty years ago everybody could go freely wherever he desired over the mountains and moors of Scotland. Eighty years ago was the time when Scott made Highland scenery familiar to the world, the time when Wordsworth displayed the effect of his sympathetic studies of nature, and it was just at that time when Scott and Wordsworth’s poems exercised such powerful spiritual and moral influences on the people that the policy of debarring people from the search after the truths of nature and intercourse with nature began to be pursued.’

  ‘I cannot help remarking,’ he continued, ‘that the exclusion of the people from the enjoyment of the mountains of Scotland began just at the time when the love of nature and of the sciences of nature had been most widely and fully developed. The scenery of our country has been filched away from us just when we have begun to prize it more than ever before. It coincided with the greatest change that has ever passed over our people – the growth of huge cities and dense populations in many places outside those cities – and this change has made far greater than before the need for the opportunity of enjoying nature and places where health may be regained by bracing air and exercise, and where the jaded mind can rest in silence and in solitude. It is at this very time when these needs are so deeply felt, that the thoughtlessness or selfishness of the few has debarred the lover of scenery and science from those enjoyments and pleasures they desire.’

  The Bill’s seconder, Dr Robert Farquharson, the member for Bryce’s neighbouring constituency of Aberdeenshire West, eloquently echoed the point. ‘Light and air are two of the greatest necessaries of life. Light was taxed at one period of our history; there has been no attempt to tax air, because the process would be so difficult. If it were possible to reduce the air we breathe to a commercial commodity, we should soon have joint stock companies to deal with it, as in gas and water, and paying dividends more or less large – generally large’. In reply, the Solicitor General for Scotland, Andrew Graham Murray, the Conservative Unionist member for Buteshire, could not see what all the fuss was about. It was quite possible, he loftily stated, for anyone to walk in the deer forests ‘if only they ask permission and are accompanied by a forester’. He turned his sights on the motives of some supporters of Bryce’s bill, stating that ‘members who know anything of Scotland will be aware that there is a certain class of questioner whose desire to put a candidate at a difficulty is greater than his thirst for information. I am afraid the honourable gentleman’s Access to Mountains Resolution has become part of the stock-in-trade of the ordinary and unimaginative heckler. It is put forward by that class of person because they think that an unqualified answer in the negative would savour not at all of that platform generosity which gives away with lavish hand everything in the world save that which belongs to the speaker himself.’

  Now, I’ve read that dozens of times, and I still don’t have a clue quite what he was on about in that final rambling sentence. It’s almost as if he’s lost in some bitter, private memory; a public meeting somewhere in Buteshire, perhaps, where the Honourable Andrew Graham Murray was made to look like a complete idiot by some gobby constituent. It doesn’t sound as if it would have been too hard to wind the old buffer up (actually, quite young buffer; he was only 42 at the time), and he probably didn’t meet real members of the general public very often, so the chances of an epic culture clash would have been high indeed on such occasions. I miss Tories like that. Now that they have learned how to impersonate members of the human race, it’s quite difficult to nail the bastards down. Old-school Tories were so palpably, radiantly condescending and pompous. They still are, of course, but apart from the occasional misfired tweet, they know now to keep it behind closed doors.

  It had taken James Bryce eight years to get his bill even debated in the House of Commons, though in the meanwhile, another attempt, this time to open up land in Wales, had briefly flickered into life in 1888. The protagonist was another brilliant and highly individual Liberal MP, Tom Ellis, the member for his native Merionethshire in north Wales. In moving the Mountains Rivers and Pathways (Wales) Bill, he said that ‘the object of it was to secure public right of access to the mountains and waste lands in Wales, and also to the rivers, lakes, and streams. It provided that any pathway that had been used for any five successive years during the last 49 years should be again used by the public.’ Ellis conjured up ancient Welsh custom and law in support of his proposal, but this was denounced as ‘simple fancy’ by the veteran Tory MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, Edmund Swetenham. Swetenham fulminated at length against Ellis’s proposal, eventually talking the bill out under the 12 o’clock rule, whereby debate is automatically adjourned as midnight strikes. It never returned.

  James Bryce, and then his younger brother John Annan Bryce, the Liberal MP for Inverness Burghs, continued to present the Scottish Bill to Parliament, but to no avail. It was also presented, covering the whole of Britain, in 1908 by another renegade Liberal firebrand, Charles Trevelyan, the young member for Elland, West Yorkshire. His rhetorical introduction to the debate has become something of a poster slogan and rallying cri de coeur for British ramblers: ‘Who has ever been forbidden to wander over an Alp? Who has ever been threatened with an interdict in the Apennines? Who has ever been warned off the rocks of the Tyrol? Who has ever been prosecuted for trespassing among Norwegian mountains?’

  A little prone to earnest high-mindedness they may be, but the Trevelyan family are a fine example of the kind of dippy Liberal gentry who have forged and steered our national relationship with the land. True to his upstanding words, Charles was an enthusiastic vice-president of the Ramblers’ Association and, when he inherited the family pile of Wallington Hall near Newcastle, set up Northumberland’s first youth hostel in a stable block. He then donated the entire estate to the National Trust, thus disinheriting his son George, who nonetheless went on to become one of the leading New Age gurus of the twentieth century. Charles’s daughter Katherine was also a notable free spirit, walking solo across Canada in 1930, aged just 20 and equipped only with a tent and a revolver. On writing of her experiences in a book, Unharboured Heaths, she became something of a transatlantic celebrity and a potent symbol of emancipated young womanhood.

  Charles’s younger brother, another George (usually known as G. M. Trevelyan), was an equally committed pedestrian who wrote one of the finest essays ever published on walking. Its opening words – ‘I have two doctors, my left leg and my right’ – are another motto often found pinned to a rambler’s kitchen cupboard. He continued in deft explanation: ‘When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other), I know that I have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.’ His essay is especially good on the mental benefits of a good walk, when ‘my thoughts start out with me like bloodstained mutineers debauching themselves on board the ship they have captured, but I bring them home at nightfall, larking and tumbling over each other like happy little boy-scouts at play, yet obedient to every order to concentrate for any purpose . . . I may wish.’ His book – Clio, a Muse and Other Essays – was published almost a century ago, but the condition, and the cure, are timeless.

  It is after this George, not his hippy nephew of the same name, that Trevelyan House, the St Albans headquarters of the Youth Hostel Association, is named, for he was their first president, in post for 18 years from the organisation’s launch in 1930. He’s left a rather less sober mark too, in one of the country’s oldest and oddest extant outdoor events, the Trevelyan Man Hunt. A boisterous hurrah for the upper classes, the idea was dreamed up in 1898 by Trevelyan and two Cambridge friends, having been inspired by the flight from the authorities of the two young heroes in Robert Louis Stev
enson’s tale of derring-do, Kidnapped. Since then, the format has changed little: it is an exhilarating three-day scramble that still sees posh boys and their paters (the ‘hounds’) galloping over the fells of the Lake District in hot pursuit of a handful of young stablehands and jockeys in red sashes (the ‘hares’). The Trevelyan Man Hunt, or Lake Hunt as it’s sometimes known (naked swimming is an integral ingredient of the chase, for in common with many other aristocratic pursuits, it’s a thin excuse for a chap to get his kit off with his chums), sounds terrific.

  Defecting from the Liberals to become a Labour MP and Cabinet minister under Ramsay MacDonald, Charles Trevelyan was always astute in seeing which way the wind was blowing, and by becoming one of the first stately home owners to present his pile to the National Trust, pre-empting it as best as possible. More importantly, his gift came from a profound belief that owning huge tracts of land brought responsibility to ensure some measure of public access to it. Other politicians were neither as prescient nor as philanthropic, and the sound of the landed and wealthy resisting inevitable change continued to echo through Parliament and the press right up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

  Trevelyan’s 1908 access bill seemed at first to be successful; the Commons voted heavily in its favour. But for all the fine words in the chamber, as soon as it was shunted into committee, the bill was quietly sidelined and left to gather dust. In the press, only the Manchester Guardian, predictably enough, made enthusiastic noises; The Times seemed to forget its earlier support for Bryce and retreat into its Establishment lair, from where it shouted grumpily, in an editorial headed ‘Mountains and Molehills’, that the whole access issue was a ‘bogey’, and that every ‘man or woman or child who wishes to explore the waste places of this island can do so without let or hindrance from anyone’. Over the next 30 years, there were a further nine attempts to bring in new access legislation, all largely based on Bryce’s bill and all equally unsuccessful.