The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (7 page)

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.

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.

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 his 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.