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

by Mike Parker

  The bill was introduced by the Minister of Town & Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, who attempted to turn the bleak national mood to its advantage, in stating that ‘with the increasing nervous strain of life, it makes it all the more necessary that we should be able to enjoy the peace and spiritual refreshment which only contact with nature can give.’ There was none of the circumscribed language of earlier debates, when access campaigners had had to tiptoe deftly around the Sir Bufton Tuftons on the Tory benches. Silkin rose to unaccustomed powers of oratory in summing up what the bill meant: ‘Now at last we shall be able to see that the mountains of Snowdonia, the Lakes, and the waters of the Broads, the moors and dales of the Peak, the South Downs and the tors of the West Country belong to the people as a right and not as a concession. This is not just a Bill. It is a people’s charter – a people’s charter for the open air, for the hikers and the ramblers, for everyone who loves to get out into the open air and enjoy the countryside. Without it they are fettered, deprived of their powers of access and facilities needed to make holidays enjoyable. With it the countryside is theirs to preserve, to cherish, to enjoy and to make their own.’

  Conservative opposition was muted, and where it came, it sounded by contrast like the mumblings of some bespittled old buffers in a dark corner of the Athenaeum. A few made reference to the fact that they dreaded rural areas of Britain becoming like ‘Mr Butlin’s holiday parks’, a name that they could barely say without a shudder. Sir Edward Keeling, MP for Twickenham, talked about England’s highest peak, Scafell Pike, and felt obliged to point out that ‘there is nothing in the Bill to prevent the local planning authority from acquiring that summit and erecting on the top a Tea Kiosk – with one capital K – or a Kozy Kafe – with two capital K’s and a z.’ Colonel Sir Ralph Clarke, MP for East Grinstead, worried that, with the trespass law gone, ramblers who were accidentally shot by grouse-hunting parties might now feel emboldened to take legal action. Major Tufton Beamish, who’d inherited his safe seat of Lewes from his father, Rear Admiral Tufton Beamish, snorted that great danger came from ‘townsmen who probably did not know the difference between a badger and a fox or, at any rate, not the difference between their smells’.

  A small number of Tories stayed obstinately off-message, and could raise no enthusiasm for the measure at all. The Lonsdale MP, Sir Ian Fraser, declared that ‘it is unthinkable that a farmer should bring his horse into one’s back garden in the suburbs, but it is not unthinkable that one should take one’s clumsy ignorance into his farm yard and let his beasts stray. Indeed, the people in the towns demand the right to go and harm the countryside because they do not understand it.’ Osbert Peake, a Leeds MP, voiced his suspicion that Labour sympathisers were temperamentally unable to enjoy the places they were planning to free, telling the chamber how ‘I remember during the war giving a night’s hospitality to a war-time colleague, who now occupies an important position on the Government Front Bench, and taking him for what I thought would be a treat for him. It was a drive through one of the most beautiful parts of Yorkshire. I must say that he did not seem very interested, and spent the drive reading in Lloyds Weekly News and the Sunday Dispatch the accounts of a speech he had made the day before.’

  Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the greatest opposition to the measures being proposed by a Labour minister came from behind him on his own benches. To some of the new intake of Labour MPs, whose election had surprised everyone, themselves included, it gave them a chance to roar out a few of their most cherished radical tenets. One such came from the veteran Suffragette Barbara Ayrton Gould, who had snuck an unexpected election victory in Hendon North on her eighth attempt at getting into Parliament. The 1945 Times Guide to the General Election had certainly been caught on the hop: her defeated Conservative opponent, Brigadier E. W. C. Flavell, was given a fulsome biography, including the fact that he ‘formed and commanded the first Paratroop Brigade, and on D-Day was the first brigadier to drop with his troops’, whereas all they could find to say about the new MP was that she was ‘a journalist’.

  Her beef was that Silkin proposed to give much of the power of administration of the new National Parks to members of the local county councils. ‘I ask myself,’ she posited imperiously, ‘what is the personnel of a great many of these county councils? Many of these councils are reactionary. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of reactionary councils today, largely composed of the descendants of men who originally enclosed beauty spots for their own convenience . . . Frankly, I do not trust them.’

  She had a point. Under this legislation, it was up to the county councils to draw up definitive maps of the rights of way under their jurisdiction. As most of the cities operated as county boroughs of their own, the elected representatives of Manchester or Liverpool, for instance, had no say in the definitive maps of Lancashire; this was a job solely for the rural authority, despite the fact that the majority of walkers likely to benefit from the legislation would be people from the nearby big towns and cities. With the rural councils heavily weighted towards the landowning squire, both politically and in terms of actual membership, it was inevitable that the definitive maps, when they finally came, would significantly under-represent just how many well-used paths there were on their patch. The rights of way that still shudder to an inexplicable halt at old county or parish boundaries demonstrate the point.

  Another new female Labour MP, whose victory in Blackburn had also not been widely predicted, made a huge mark on the debate. Unlike Mrs Ayrton Gould, past retirement age and shortly to lose her seat and die soon after, Barbara Castle was one of the brightest young things of the new Parliament and went on to become the foremost Labour matriarch of the twentieth century. Even into her nineties, she was vocal in needling Tony Blair’s government into remembering its heritage; Gordon Brown called her ‘my mentor and my tormentor’. To her, the bill was a major factor ‘in the social revolution that is now taking place’, for it ‘marks the end of the disinheritance of the people of this country from enjoyment of the countryside’.

  Mrs Castle was particularly excited about the new Long Distance Paths (LDPs) that would arise from the legislation. The previous year, she had been one of a group of Labour MPs (Hugh Dalton, the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, was another) to walk sections of the proposed Pennine Way, in the company of its creator, Tom Stephenson. They became a regular walking group under Stephenson’s tutelage, and explored many of his putative new paths, in Pembrokeshire, the Lake District, the Cheviots and the Brecon Beacons. ‘I should like to think that some of the foot-slogging the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster [Dalton] and some of my honourable friends and I did last May has blazed the trail in that regard,’ she announced triumphantly.

  Good-natured references to Tom Stephenson’s walking group cropped up repeatedly throughout the debate. Fred Willey, another of their number, said that he’d found it rather less ‘blazing the trail’, as Barbara Castle had put it, but that ‘personally I found it more like a forced route march, and I understand that we are still remembered in the locality as members of “Dalton’s Circus”.’ The patrician Westmorland Tory William Fletcher-Vane laconically described it as ‘that deplorable event . . . when the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, waving, I believe, a red silk handkerchief, and followed by about half a dozen admirers, trooped all along the Pennines . . . what my constituents said, particularly about the troop of photographers who followed them, is nobody’s business.’

  Reading the debate made me think how much we could do with a few more politicians pulling on their walking boots today. In the past 20 years, we’ve heard of very few, or at least any that have continued walking once the press photographers have left. On the Labour benches there have been former leader John Smith, ex-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Chris Smith and Dennis Canavan, a salutary roll call when you remember that half of that group died of massive heart attacks in their fifties (Cook while walking in the Scottish mountains). On the Conservative side, the
re’s former MP turned Times columnist Matthew Parris and, always looking like a slightly melted Action Man, William Hague. In the 2010 election, the Tory ranks were swollen by the arrival of a real live Action Man, über-yomper Rory Stewart, as the new MP for Penrith and the Border in Cumbria. As part of his Boy’s Own pedigree of soldier, diplomat, writer and adventurer, he spent nearly two years walking 6,000 miles from Iran to Nepal, via Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and, on being selected as candidate for the 1,200-square-mile constituency in late 2009, spent much of that winter getting to know the patch by walking around it, something that he said ‘allows me to capture the spirit of a place in a way that I could not by car’. As you might expect, most Liberal Democrat MPs claim to be fond of walking, even the ones who look as if they would drop dead if they tried, but none really spring to mind as hardcore ramblers. Or anything else, for that matter.

  To today’s politicians, walking is not the hobby du jour that quite projects the image that they are so eager to cultivate. It’s all a bit too frumpy and slow for the insatiable demands of the 24-hour news media. So instead, they must go jogging, for that is far more in keeping with our adrenaline-fuelled, go-getting culture. Jogging is macho and sweaty, and allows them to look as if they are sponsored by Nike (hey, the youth vote!) as they manfully grunt and tug on a water bottle helpfully carried by their private detective. Like so many elements of our modern political system, it is a direct import from the USA, where no self-respecting presidential hopeful fails to take a well-photographed jog or two just prior to an essential vote. It’s a high-risk strategy, though. In May 1991, George Bush senior collapsed while jogging and, for one awful day, the world contemplated the possibility of President Dan Quayle. Even Bill Clinton had a go, when you’d think that footage of him all pink and panting would have been the last thing the spin doctors would want to remind us of. It was, of course, Tony Blair who first brought the habit to our shores, but even Gordon Brown – looking like a sack of coal in trainers – was seen tottering around St James’s Park, no doubt in a vain attempt to outdo serial jogger David Cameron. I suppose that at least we should be thankful that our politicians have looked west for inspiration, rather than east, or we’d have Nick Clegg wrestling bears on the Six O’Clock News or a bare-chested Boris Johnson harpooning carp in the Serpentine.

  The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act came into law two weeks short of the end of the 1940s. The decade had been brutal, bloody and difficult, but there was a sense that better times were on the way, and that the new provisions of the act would be a significant contribution towards that. Bizarrely, however, driving through the creation of ten new National Parks proved to be a whole lot easier than establishing a handful of official Long Distance Paths. While provision for the National Parks could be somewhat vague and general, with extensive exemption from planning restrictions for farming and forestry, the establishment of footpaths was far more specific. Each one needed to be precisely measured, mapped, signed and publicised, and every landowner on its route could – and often did – object. Establishing exactly where public rights of way existed was the major problem, for these were not yet mapped by Ordnance Survey, who were concerned only with the existence on the ground of tracks and paths, and not their legal status as public or private routes. The official OS Instructions to Field Examiners of 1905 had stated their case with characteristic baldness: ‘the Ordnance Survey does not concern itself with rights of way, and Survey employees are not to enquire into them.’ It was not until 1958 that the Ramblers’ Association finally persuaded OS to mark them on their maps.

  Neither were rights of way generally mapped by local authorities. Just as general access legislation had taken tortuous decades to be enacted, and only then once it had been almost entirely castrated by landowners, the course of footpath legislation was similarly rutted. The first attempts to bring in simpler rules to identify and map public footpaths, based largely on a certain number of years of continuous use, were made in 1906, but despite general support in Parliament and amongst the public, the bill was sidelined. So were the next ten attempts over nearly 30 years, and it was not until 1932 that the Rights of Way act was finally passed. Once again, unwelcome alterations were forced into the act by the Lords at the very last minute, but at least it gave a legally defined notion of a public right of way as being a footpath, even across private land, that had been in continuous use for 20 years.

  Every inch of access to land and the use of footpaths has depended – and continues to depend – on tiny nuances of law, common practice and precedent, all sifted and nitpicked over in countless court cases. In 1905, a judge had succeeded in declaring that the tracks used since time immemorial by visitors to Stonehenge were not public footpaths, and it was against this kind of backdrop that the much-emasculated 1932 Act finally limped on to the statute book. It also included the idea of councils holding maps of rights of way within their remit (although this had been included in the measure as a way for landowners to document that disputed routes were not public, by doing so they had to show which were), and it was hoped that these would gradually coalesce into definitive maps of the rights of way network. The 1949 Act enshrined this as a legal requirement, and every council had now to map its paths. Some urban authorities, such as Cardiff, Ipswich, Norwich, Plymouth and various London boroughs, have still not managed it 60 years later.

  The new Long Distance Paths were, for the most part, carved out of existing rights of way as mapped throughout the 1950s. That in itself was difficult enough, for there was considerable opposition in many places, but when trying to forge a new link path, the problems were massive. For the Pennine Way, the highly charged totem of the new policy as it crested the backbone of England through some of the most hotly contested areas of all, 70 miles of new path were needed, and there were numerous local enquiries stuffed full of the area’s many vested interests. The usual crew of grouse shooters muttered their opposition, but the lion’s share came from water boards, who insisted that walkers would pollute the gathering grounds of municipal supplies. Bearing in mind that the path would take the high ground along the watershed of northern England, this was an argument that ran and ran, even though it was dismissed by expert opinion time and again. And what of other users of the land? As an editorial in the Manchester Guardian put it, ‘does the minister now intend . . . to close all those paths, roads and railways over [the water authority’s] gathering grounds, and if not, why not?’

  On Saturday, 24 April 1965, after 14 years of enquiries and a full 30 years since he had first floated the idea in the Daily Herald, Tom Stephenson was the guest of honour at the ceremony in Malham to open the Pennine Way. By now the secretary of the Ramblers’ Association, Stephenson was justly thrilled with his achievement, realised exactly as he visualised it three long decades earlier, as ‘a long green trail from the Peak to the Cheviots . . . just a faint line on the Ordnance Maps which the feet of grateful pilgrims would, with the passing years, engrave on the face of the land’. Strangely enough, Stephenson himself never did the walk in one go; neither did Alfred Wainwright, who produced one of his celebrated guidebooks of the route in 1968. His promise to stand everyone who finished the walk half of bitter in the Border Hotel at Kirk Yetholm is said to have cost him £15,000 in the 23 years from then until his death. Wainwright’s book ends with the weary promise that ‘you won’t come across me anywhere along the Pennine Way. I’ve had enough of it.’ This might be related to the fact that he famously sank to his waist in a peat bog on the Dark Peak, and had to be rescued by a National Park warden. The many boggy mishaps aside, the path even spawned its own bespoke injury, Pennine Way Knee, specifically affecting the left leg and caused by the fact that the path most often took the westerly route around peaks, thus stretching the left side more than the right.

  Even with the hundreds of named trails that we have these days, the Pennine Way, the one that started it all, remains the undoubted alpha male of the pack, the toughest, hardest bastard there is:
268 miles from Edale to Kirk Yetholm (plus however many you have to add to reach your accommodation or because you got lost), a total of 32,000 feet climbed, and all invariably in shocking conditions. Most people take between two and three weeks, although the 20-year-old record stands at two days, 17 hours, 20 minutes and 15 seconds, with no sleep at all.

  The ‘faint line on the Ordnance Maps’ became scored rather deeper than Tom Stephenson had anticipated, for Britain’s first National Trail struck an instant chord, and tens of thousands came to sample it. By the mid-1970s, large sections were a squelchy morass, and others so wide from the feet of hikers walking abreast that they were likened to a six-lane motorway, three tracks going north, three south. With two school friends in 1982, I walked the Dales Way from Ilkley to Windermere, the last (and only) time I’d ever walked a long-distance path. There’s a section north of Horton-in-Ribblesdale where it joins the Pennine Way for a mile or two, and I can still remember the shock when we hit it, for it was like stepping off a country lane on to a busy, wide highway. On the worst-affected stretches, plastic netting and mats were laid, which were later replaced with flagstones salvaged from the floors of demolished cotton mills, which seems entirely fitting when you remember the Winter Hill and Kinder protestors, the spiritual ancestors of the route. Many people hate the flagstones, but as I trekked along them on top of Kinder Scout, the thin grey ribbon of pavement stretched off over the black peat as if in a monochrome Wizard of Oz, and I was strangely charmed. But then, I wasn’t carrying a 25lb backpack and with 270 miles to go.

  I knew that I had to walk at least one of the National Trails for this book, but the more I read of the Pennine Way, the surer I felt that it wasn’t going to be this one. Although the grand-daddy of British LDPs, it has been comprehensively eclipsed by other routes, most notably Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk, and it’s now estimated that fewer than 2,000 people complete it every year. More than that, though, the route itself didn’t much appeal to me, for it is always portrayed as relentlessly dour and dirty, mile upon mile upon bloody mile of bog, moor and driving rain. I could imagine all too easily the kind of misanthropes that such bleakness would appeal to. And always has: in the 1971 Countryside Commission report on the route, when hundreds of walkers were counted and surveyed, reasons given for doing the Pennine Way included that it is ‘the furthest thing from so-called civilisation’, ‘remote from crowds, motor vehicles and the destructive influences of modern life’ and ‘to get away from the prying eyes of bureaucracy’. Wouldn’t you love a night in a remote moorland pub with that lot?