The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker Read Free Book Online

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, LisaKev), but there’s also Haleema, Radek and Irmina, Wrocław and IanAntony.
    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