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

Forbidden Land , he pulls no punches in assessing the success, and otherwise, of the century’s many access tussles. On the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, he is unambiguous, describing it as ‘the most dramatic incident in the access to mountains campaign. Yet it contributed little, if anything, to it.’ He goes further, becoming positively snicky when he nicknames Benny Rothman, the highly voluble leader of the trespass, as ‘General’ Rothman, and sneering on numerous occasions that it wasn’t a proper protest, because they didn’t make it to the absolute top of Kinder Scout.
    Clarke Rogerson was not understating it when he said that there was little support at the time for the mass trespass amongst more middle-class ramblers. An official of the Manchester & District branch of the Ramblers’ Federation wrote to the press to condemn it before it had even happened, and the organisation very publicly disassociated itself from it in its raucous aftermath. Their successors, the Ramblers’ Association, tend to gloss over that one. To those seeking a more softly-softly approach of polite parliamentary lobbying, the demonstration was pure anathema, and many howled that it had set the cause back, rather than progressed it any. To the young firebrands who organised the trespass, this just proved that they were right, especially when you remember that attempts to lever greater access through Parliament had been a major cause for half a century by then, and yet had delivered precisely nothing.
    All the same, I was inexplicably excited to be tackling Kinder for the first time, and to see in the dark flesh a part of the world that I’d often gazed at on the map. Despite never having been there, I’d always been intrigued, even slightly intimidated, by the look of the High Peak on my Ordnance Surveys. The summit of Kinder is a vast, almost contour-free plateau 2,000 feet up and in the rough, elongated triangle shape of a primitive arrowhead (or, if you prefer, as seventeenth-century poet Charles Cotton had it, ‘nature’s pudenda’). Technically, of course, it does have an absolute summit (636m), but that’s just a slight swelling of elevation over the neighbouring ground and with little difference discernible between that and the plateau’s three scattered trig points, at 624, 633 and 590 metres, an obvious fact that make Tom Stephenson’s sneer about them not having reached the summit look unnecessarily bitchy. The trig points delineate the outer edge of the summit plateau, almost as if they were guarding it; the miles of moor in between, an elevated void of very little indeed.
    Look on the larger-scale Explorer map, however (number OL1, appropriately enough, for this has long been the biggest seller of all OS paper maps), and a whole load of new detail leaps out. Dozens of tiny peaty brooks fan out like the capillaries on a wino’s nose, followed by a few contours that look like the marks made by mould as it sneaks its lacy way up a damp wall. Pretty, but kind of downbeat, and that was how I imagined the area itself to be. All around the flat arrowhead summit, contours tumbled down to the farms and settlements below. The outer limits of the plateau looked thrillingly sharp, and with suitably crisp names: Blackden Edge, Seal Edge, and across the northern perimeter, simply The Edge. Other names to chew on like old-fashioned blocks of toffee – Cluther Rocks, Kinder Downfall, Fairbrook Naze, Grindslow Knoll, Madwoman’s Rocks – were scattered around this bizarre, extraordinary-looking mountain.
    My plan was to camp the night in Edale, then take the train to New Mills the following morning and walk back over the Kinder plateau, following the route of the trespass. I’d wanted to go to the Vale of Edale, tucked down below the south-eastern edge of Kinder, for decades, again all thanks to the map. No main roads pass through, but there’s still a railway, the high route between Sheffield and Manchester, and a