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

village station. Viewpoints and campsites are dotted liberally amongst the contours, and of course, Edale is the starting point of the Pennine Way, its deeply scored route striding west out of the village and up on to Kinder. That would be my way back off the mountain in a day that would have me touch the soul of what walking means to the British.
    If the glorious myth of the mass trespass has rather overtaken the reality, then so has the status of Kinder Scout itself. When I mentioned to various people locally that I was going to walk across Kinder, with thick snow still visible against the black peat of its top, the same reaction came almost every time. ‘Tha’s walkin’ oop Kinder? A’this time uh yur? Dear God, tha wants to be curful, tha knows – thur’s feet o’snow still on top. Can change in’n instant oop thur. Mek sure tha’s got plenty o’provisions, wurterproofs, torch, whistle, map, coompuss – eeh, be curful, lad.’ They made it sound like the Eiger, and it got me very excited indeed.
    The train journey to New Mills took just 15 minutes, and getting off, the near-holy status of the Kinder mass trespass loomed large, in the shape of a mural at the station depicting a romantic tableau of the events of Saturday, 24 April 1932. It was the visual equivalent of a book that I’d happily devoured the previous evening, Fay Sampson’s A Free Man on Sunday , her imaginative reworking of the event into a children’s story. In it, she invents a sixth trespasser who was imprisoned, and gives him a back story that mainly revolves around a feisty little daughter who loves nowt more than to dubbin her dad’s boots and accompany him on his moorland rambles. It’s charming, heart-warming stuff, where every rambler is kindly, and every copper and gamekeeper a bloodless bully. In it, Benny Rothman is sainted before we even get to the trespass, as poor little Edie, the heroine, tumbles off her bike on the way to the gathering point at Hayfield. Sure enough, it’s Rothman who swoops by to the rescue.
    Looking at the way different anniversaries of 1932 have been celebrated, there’s an undoubted sense that, the further it retreats into history, the more bloated the myth becomes. Now that all of the protagonists have died, the anchor of reality has been cut loose and the story is free to float where it wants. We need Kinder Scout as a totem, a crystal-clear symbol of good versus evil, and everyone – with the possible exception, it seems, of the footpath professionals of the north-west – is keen to make it their own. On a website about the protest, you can find videos of the 75th anniversary rally, held in April 2007 in New Mills. Inevitably compèred by Mike Harding, the keynote address was given by David Miliband, then the Secretary of State for the Environment. His bug-eyed enthusiasm to appropriate the mass trespass as the kind of thing the New Labour government admired and encouraged is received in near stunned silence, save for a solitary cry of ‘Bollocks!’ from somewhere off-camera. In a not untypical piece of statistical mangling, he also manages to inflate the number of trespassers to 4,000, ten times the actual figure. Even that, though, doesn’t quite reach the level of awkwardness achieved by Harding’s rousing singalong of ‘The Manchester Rambler’ as the zenith of the celebration. Harding himself does a fine enough job, but it’s ruined by the sight of Lord (Roy) Hattersley slumped in a too-small chair behind him, silent and immobile, imperiously unwilling to join in and with his arms folded across his ample bosom, looking for all the world like Les Dawson’s gossipy housewife.
    Leaving New Mills station, my first path on a day of many was exhilarating. The town’s Millennium Walkway is a 175-yard-long steel trajectory, pinned to a massive embankment wall some 20 feet above the churning waters of the River Goyt. This is a path that gives a perspective never available before, and it