particular class of maidens; namely a shawl which at midday or in fine weather was allowed to be merely a shawl, but towards evening, if the day was chilly, became a sort of Spanish mantilla or Scotch plaid, and was brought over the head or hung loosely down … There were also numbers of boys, or rather young men, rambling among these fields, ready to bandy jokes with anyone, and particularly ready to enter into conversations with the girls.
So, almost a hundred years prior to the Kinder Scout trespass, we see that – despite what George Orwell’s southerners may say – recreational walking in the north was already a strong tradition, certainly in Manchester, but in other industrialised cities too, such as Leeds, York and Glasgow. In fact, the forming of so many local walking groups was one of the first organised social responses to the depredations of the Industrial Revolution, and its fierce local conflicts percolated through to a nascent popular press. The way that rambling so swiftly evolved holds a mirror up to some of the greatest social changes that convulsed the nation.
CHAPTER 2
Rannoch to Corrour Shooting Lodge in a Howling storm: An investigation of the Lure of Wilderness, and the Earliest Days of Organised Rambling
There are times when open countryside by itself is not quite enough. Walkers – especially city-dwelling ramblers – instead feel the need to seek out raw, authentic wilderness; areas that are remote, untouched and bare. This compulsion to shake free from oppressive urban life seems relatively modern, yet has its antecedents in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, and the first stirrings of an organised walking movement in the nineteenth century.
These days, many hardy ramblers are drawn to Rannoch Moor, in the north-west of Scotland; a stark landscape that can make you feel that you have swirled back in time to the very beginning of the earth. The wide empty prospect of echoing hills can evoke an odd mix of leaping euphoria and quiet unease. The term ‘prehistoric’ does not quite cover it: this is an elemental realm of sparse grass, wet mud, freezing clear water, and lonely peaks. For a walker stepping, slightly dazed, off the Caledonian Sleeper train at 8.40 a.m. and standing taking cold breaths on the platform of tiny Rannoch station, it is rather disorientating. It is one thing to yearn for such prospects while sitting at home, to arrive at them always feels just a little different.
The question of whether Rannoch – or many other parts of the Highlands – can be strictly termed ‘authentic’ wilderness is one that we shall return to. This plateau seems in some ways the perfect distillation of what the modern rambler is looking for: the implacable, unbeautified face of nature: a plain upon which one would struggle to survive a winter’s night in the open; yet also a sanctuary for rare plant species that one would never find anywhere else. It is the sort of terrain that the enthusiastic walker cannot wait to test him or herself against. It promises the deep pleasure of heavy exertion, with the corresponding sense of wide open freedom. In the nineteenth century, as molten furnaces billowed blackening ash over darkened cities such as Glasgow – just 60 miles or so to the south – healthful, open hills and glens became places that men would dream of.
It is partly through Glaswegians that we see the organised walking movement first coalescing. In 1854, Hugh MacDonald published Rambles Around Glasgow, which described in detail long walks out of the city, along with examples of flora and history. In 1892, it was a group of working-class Glaswegians who formed Britain’s first ever rambling federation: the West of Scotland Ramblers Alliance. It should also be borne in mind that for a few of the manual workers, trapped by economics in Clydeside’s squalor in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, the wilds of the Highlands and Loch Lomond were just a few miles away. This represented a treasure that had been stolen from them, this is where some of their families had once lived and farmed before the notorious Clearances.
On Rannoch railway station platform, you drink in the silence after the train moves away. Look up at the low-pressing clouds, and you think: surely this land of hills and water and heather has always been like this. It cannot have changed in over 100,000 years. Yet can this be true? James Hutton, an eighteenth-century Scottish farmer who was also a pioneer in the science of geology, was among the first to grasp the vast yet infinitesimally slow processes that are wrought across the millennia. In 1785, Hutton wrote wrily:
As there is not in human observation proper means for measuring the waste of land upon the globe, it is hence inferred, that we cannot estimate the duration of what we see at present, nor calculate the period at which it had begun; so that, with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.
That is, human observation as it stood; yet Hutton was to bring his own human deductions to the subject and, in doing so, spark a religious uproar akin, if on a smaller scale, to that of Galileo. For Hutton was among the first to understand, and assert, that the earth is very, very much older than the Bible seems to say. He was among the first to see that the earth has been here rather longer than humanity itself. This sense of an unfathomably ancient landscape is certainly what pulls walkers here.
In this age of ubiquitous car travel and GPS orienteering, Rannoch Moor remains a formidably inhospitable prospect. It covers a vast area, with very few signs of habitation for miles around. There is only one road in and out, the rest is rough track, often leading nowhere. The nearest big town is Fort William, and Fort William is not a big town. Rannoch itself comprises two or three private houses, and a larger house which is now a popular hotel among keen walkers. Nor is this easy territory, by any means. Even though the Scottish authorities have been assiduously laying down paths and cycle routes all over the country, Rannoch remains one of those ancient regions that should always be hard-going.
Before the twentieth century, the remoter regions such as Rannoch were regarded by many travellers as utterly deadly. It was impossible to live upon, and difficult to cross. The forests were thought to be filled with lurking wolves with a taste for warm flesh. There was no perceived beauty here, just harshness, and silence, and everything inimical to human comfort. In the winter months, the vast black tarns that mark this watery plateau freeze over. The lochs quiver with tiny ice-cold waves. The earth sparkles with frost. In the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s historical adventure Kidnapped features a lengthy passage in which Alan Breck and Davey Balfour cross the treacherous ground of Rannoch Moor. They attempt to conceal themselves from troops and nearly perish in the process. More harrowing was the real-life construction of the West Highland railway line across the moor. Not only were the workmen fighting against the most savage weather conditions, they were also pulling off the unthinkably complex engineering feat of laying heavy steel lines across bog-land.
Even the doughtiest of poet-walkers William Wordsworth, weathered and wind-beaten after years tramping his beloved Lake District, could not find it within himself to recommend Scottish wildernesses to his readers. ‘In Scotland and Wales are found, undoubtedly, individual scenes, which, in their several kinds, cannot be excelled,’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘but in Scotland, particularly, what long tracts of desolate country intervene! So that the traveller, when he reaches a spot deservedly of great celebrity, would find it difficult to determine how much of his pleasure is owing to excellence inherent in the landscape itself: and how much to an instantaneous recovery from an oppression left upon his spirits by the barrenness and desolation through which he has passed.’1
Surprisingly, Wordsworth failed to see what many other walkers could: that the ‘barrenness and desolation’ could actually be powerful attractions in their own right. It is the perpetual draw of these places that takes us right back to the paradoxical roots of walking for pleasure.
In a centrally-heated, fleece-swaddled age, it is often difficult for us to imagine just how harsh some British landscapes can be. One dark December a few years ago, I was visiting family in Scotland. Fancying a brief taste of wilderness, I took a train to Kingussie, not too far away from Rannoch Moor, and from there followed a path directly up to the great shouldering hills