upon the South Downs Way with pleasure. This trail is ministered to by the National Trust, a charity. This path – and countless thousands others around the country – is the result of a burst of idealism that found its fullest flowering during and after the Second World War. But in effect, be it National Trust, Woodland Trust, National Park or just simple privately-owned land, the fact is that there is now remarkably little hindrance anywhere for the dedicated walker. Certain recent Parliamentary Acts have had a bearing, but the momentum has somehow been more philosophical than political.
Whether they know it or not, walkers have, over the decades and centuries, changed our entire national approach to ideas of property and ownership. Boundaries, both physical and mental, have shifted greatly. The relationship between landowner and walker – very often a source of rancour – has changed like the colours of a kaleidoscope. Perhaps the only constant factor between the two is a sense of wariness. In some cases, today’s landowners are warier of walkers than walkers are of them. It wasn’t so long ago that some landowners were still illegally employing steel-jawed traps to deter trespassers. It also wasn’t so very long ago when local county magistrates could be counted on to favour the landowner’s case over that of the walker. Such bias would be relatively unusual to come across now, not least because the relevant laws have changed dramatically even in the space of just the last fifty years or so.
We can drift where we like, within reason. But the other fascinating thing, of course, is why we would wish to do so. Why are we happy to spend so much time yomping across rugged heaths or muddy meadows? That’s not as easily answered as you might think. For walking can be as much an unconscious, abstract activity as one involving concrete decisions and plans. My own walking patterns over the years have been quite random. In common with many other Londoners, for instance, I have been pacing different parts of the city by means of exploration for years. There were all those names on the A–Z map, so redolent of bucolic charm: Arnos Grove, Gospel Oak, Burnt Oak, Belvedere. Once you have walked around such places, the rather less than sylvan reality sinks in (no offence to the good people of Belvedere in south-east London, but can I just say – I was not expecting that).
Yet the urge to walk persists. Often quite randomly, with only the faintest sense of where you want to get to. Like William Blake, I’ve wandered through each chartered street. I have certainly marked many faces of woe. But none of that is the reason for walking. It goes deeper and deeper yet. Of late, that twitch, that desire, has taken me with greater frequency beyond the symbolic boundaries of the M25, that eight-laned border around London. Like many who live in the East End, I had some residual apprehension about the countryside; some sense that it was filled with malevolent cattle, barely rational farmers and tightly regulated footpaths from which one was never allowed to deviate. Then, almost from the start, I found that the freedom out there is rather greater than I had imagined. It is still not quite enough for the Ramblers’ Association – there are still certain areas, both physical and mental, where the barriers are still in place and full access is not possible. In the time that I, a thoroughgoing townie, have been exploring this undiscovered country – this land of sharp hills and deep hidden valleys, of warm gritstone and bright, slightly vulgar foxgloves, of silent woodlands and windy, roaring coasts – my notions of the countryside formed by 1970s Ladybird books, beautifully painted pictures of dairies and deep red tractors, have changed rather sharply.
The only way to understand a land is to walk it. The only way to drink in its real meaning is to keep it firmly beneath one’s feet. In all these years driving up and down motorways, I had no idea about the different sorts of emotional resonance that each individual area has, like a charge of electricity. Drivers can never know this. Only the walker can form the wider view. The question of how we walkers arrived at a position of such extraordinary luxury – the ability, finally, to explore the vast majority of the country, and the huge, almost unquantifiable effect that this has had upon the British landscape – are themes that we shall be exploring as the book progresses.
The story of walking – how the very nature of the activity has changed so much in the last 200 years or so – also happens to be the story of a population’s evolving relationship with what we now term ‘the countryside’ – this single word implying that all forms of landscape are somehow one and the same thing, and that it can always be quite easily separated from urban land. It is a story that embraces all sorts of fads, fancies, intellectual and physical quirks – from the rise of the Romantic movement to the psychogeography of Alfred Watkins’ ley lines; from the development of wet weather gear to the ever-shifting tectonic plates of class; from the first stirrings of the Green movement, to the highly furtive pursuit, favoured by a few, of outdoor lovemaking.
There are other forms of gravity at work too. When many of us walk in our leisure hours, we are not even walking towards things – rather, we are rambling in carefully plotted loops, traced on a map, in order to get back to where we started. The circular route is one that Defoe would have found particularly extraordinary – the walk without a destination other than where one started. Yet even this has its roots in something more ancient. The image that comes to mind is that of medieval labyrinths. The path through these labyrinths twists, winds, and ultimately folds back on itself. People would process through them and understand, through these loops and double-backs, the metaphor. The procession, or the walk, is more important than the destination. ‘Above all,’ wrote the philosopher Kierkegaard in a letter in 1847, ‘do not lose your desire to walk; every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.’
The South Downs Way, with its unending stream of walkers going in both directions, is the cheering confirmation that more of us than ever enjoy regenerating our weary town-bound selves by taking to paths and bridleways. But the genesis of this walking enthusiasm, the idea that rambling could be a mass pursuit, enjoyed by all classes, and all over the country, was actually sparked a few hundred miles north of here. In particular, there is one rather bleak, weather-ravaged spot in Derbyshire where, in 1932, the story of the modern walking movement began.
CHAPTER 1
Edale to Kinder Scout: The Peak District and the First Modern Rambling Battle
It is a prospect that can conceivably dampen the soul, as well as lift it. The round hills swooping up in a crest and rising away into the distance, promising mile after mile of austere pale grass; black, wet peat; and moist limestone. This is the skeleton of Britain, the nobbled spine protruding through the dark muddy flesh.
Catch a view of the high empty peat-lands near Edale in the Derbyshire Peak District, on a cold day when the iron-grey clouds are hanging oppressively low, and a darker curtain of rain is drawing in from the west, and you might find yourself turning away from it. Perhaps like Daniel Defoe, who travelled through these parts in 1715 with a mounting sense of dismay, you might observe that
Upon the top of that mountain begins a vast extended Moor or Waste which … presents you with neither Hedge, nor House or Tree, but with a waste and howling wilderness, over which when Strangers travel, they are obliged to take Guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way.1
For Defoe, this was a region where one would be confronted with ‘frightful views’ of ‘black mountains’. Today, by contrast, such ‘frightful views’ – from the remote north-western tip of Scotland, to the hearty Cheviots, to Cornwall’s wind-scoured Bodmin Moor – are, of course, considered extremely attractive to walkers. No matter how lowering the weather, or inhospitable the terrain, or hedge-less or tree-less the perspective, a wide expanse of country on any day of the year will have a guaranteed number of rambling enthusiasts tramping around.
For those more accustomed to the dainty charms of rural southern England, Edale – and the raw Derbyshire hills around – might not sound immediately alluring. But maps and guidebooks can only ever convey
