that day, and more was falling; the air was so cold that I could feel it sharp in my lungs. Good though my boots were, the road I was walking up was glassy with impacted ice. The going was slow, but it was so intensely enjoyable that there was no question of cutting the walk short.
On this particular road – private, though without any of the big, irritable signs that remind you so – the gradient was acute and it was not long before I was above the tree-line, looking upwards at shimmering hills of white, luminous against a sky of solemn dark grey. Save for my boots croaking and crushing the snow beneath, there was not even the riffle of any wind in my ears; the falling snow was sound-proofing the entire world.
But then came the reminder of just how indifferent to life this beautiful world was. There was a small iced hummock on the left of the road, on it sat a small, shivering hare. I wondered why it did not leap away at the very sight of me and as I drew closer to it, I saw the snow dappled with the brightest red, and one of the hare’s legs seemed to be hanging half off. The hare watched me as its tiny muscles shook, and its entire body rippled with convulsive shudders. I drew closer, a weight of dismay in my stomach. Then I walked on. To this day, I still feel a pang of remorse about this. Could I not have put the small animal out of its pain? Or perhaps – on the wilder shores of compassion, and utterly absurd, but it did flit through my mind – have tucked it inside my coat and taken it to a local vet? The notion of killing it did fleetingly occur to me: perhaps stove in its small skull with a big stone? But I also knew, almost without having to think about it, that I would bodge the job through urban squeamishness and incompetence. I wouldn’t hit hard enough, or would hit the wrong spot, or the hare would try to escape and the leg would become even more mangled. I would somehow end up adding to its pain a hundredfold.
In that one moment, the winter wonderland feel of this land had been exposed for what it is: a perfectly impervious, blank wilderness. The snow was still falling, big fat chunky flakes. I walked on, higher and higher up this road, which now, in its dazzling whiteness under that dark iron sky, was snaking up between two glacial hills.
It never occurred to me on that mid-December afternoon – with the temperature falling still further – that I was vulnerable too. I was stupidly oblivious to the never-ending snow, and the distance that I was covering. I didn’t have a hat, or gloves. I was, quite simply, not dressed properly. There came a point, after about two hours of walking, that I was still not at the peak, nor within sight of any pleasing views of lochs or forests. There was now just the whiteness that seemed to throb and pulse. And the sun was very low; looking eastwards, the clouds had shades of both pink and green in them. It was time to turn back.
The road down was slippery, and after two tumbles, which left me winded, I felt a flutter of apprehension. My hands were numb and my fingertips were stinging and pulsating with icy pain, but I couldn’t jam them into my pockets for warmth because I needed to balance properly on that hazardous snow. Then the idiocy of what I had done began to dawn on me. I was just another inadequately dressed townie, the sort which Highland rescue teams despair of. I had completely failed to appreciate the true nature of the landscape that I was walking into. It was a mixture of ignorance and urban arrogance, at the root of which lay the simple misguided conviction that, here in modern Britain, we have tamed the land and no harm can come to us when we are walking on it.
Perhaps I am overstating the case, especially since, after ninety minutes of sliding, shuffling and crawling, I eventually made it back down. The sun had set behind me and the rich blue snow-capped peaks of the Cairngorms in the far distance seemed to hover in that indistinct twilight, with the stars out above, and the lights of Kingussie beneath me, looking like an old-fashioned illustration on a Christmas biscuit tin. The sheer physical discomfort of that journey back rather outweighed the earlier pleasure of walking and climbing without care. Yet I would do exactly the same walk again without hesitation. One crucial element of the rambling movement in Britain is the paradoxical belief that old wildernesses are disappearing, but that we can preserve them in all their purity by walking on them. Rannoch Moor stands as the most perfect example of this strange, nostalgic, in many ways completely counter-intuitive yearning.
The idea of preserving wild landscapes is older than we would perhaps think. The year 1824 saw the formation of the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths In The Vicinity of York. This was followed two years later by the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths. Despite the formality of these titles, the groups were more to do with a sense that working people needed a sanctuary, a guaranteed place of escape.
As nineteenth-century journalist Archibald Prentice wrote of the environs of Manchester at that time: ‘There are so many pleasant footpaths, that a pedestrian might walk completely round the town in a circle which would seldom exceed a radius of two miles from the Exchange.’ He also noted that other northern towns were similarly close to excellent country, and that ‘thousands … whose avocations render fresh air and exercise an absolute necessity of life, avail themselves of the rights of foot-way through the meadows and cornfields and parks of the immediate neighbourhood.’
The closure of many footpaths at a time when urban populations were beginning to increase dramatically also started to attract attention. A petition was drawn up in 1831 to protest against the ‘stopping up’ of such paths. Then, in 1833, a Select Committee on Public Walks was formed. It found that there were no common lands around Blackburn and that the inhabitants had nowhere that they could walk. Meanwhile, in Bury, there was some ‘uninclosed heath’ – but it was over two miles away from the town. In the same period, this idea of walking and escape percolated into popular literature. In 1842, John Critchley Prince wrote an essay, ‘Rambles of a Rhymester’, which was published in ‘Bradshaw’s Journal.’ In one passage, he declares: ‘What relief it was for me, after vegetating for twelve months amid the gloom, the filth, the squalid poverty … to find myself surrounded by green fields, luxuriant hedgerows, and trees just opening to the breath of Spring!’2 Similarly, local newspapers in towns such as Burnley would often publish readers’ verse to do with the beauty of the countryside. They were appealing, not merely because of the conditions in the towns, but also because each family would have in its antecedents all sorts of memories of the rural life that had not long passed away. The preservation and protection of footpaths was also a metaphor for the preservation of treasured family memories.
These rights of way had a political dimension as well, though. From the eighteenth century, Parliamentary Acts of enclosure had been parcelling up the land: areas that had once been common land were acquired by landowners, and the result had been countless bitter disputes, not just about rights of way, but also about wood and berry gathering, and the trapping of rabbits and hares. By the late eighteenth century, poaching was, in some cases, a capital offence. Enclosures had been going on rather longer; common grounds had been encroached upon heavily in the wake of the Reformation, when new landlords made grabs for former monastery lands. Hedges – which these days stand as one of the beloved metonyms for the English countryside – were once extremely unpopular. They marked the boundaries of seized land. Asserting the right to walk on what had been regarded as an ancient footpath was a symbolic way of redressing the balance a little. It seems that this in turn had the effect of making rural landlords rather more hostile to the old Rights of Way that bisected their lands. There was further fencing, and hedging, and stone walls were built. Although this was partly to do with new agricultural techniques – in essence, not allowing cattle to roam as far as they used to – there was also an undeniable effort to keep labourers off private land.
On the banks of the Clyde in the 1830s, there was the case of one landowner who decided to prevent walkers – usually working men from closer to the centre of Glasgow – using the river path. The case grew so heated that it was put before the local authorities, who ordered that the path be opened again. But for every such victory, there were countless cases up and down the country of the Enclosure Acts making landowners consolidate their rights of ownership.
Nevertheless, this nascent walking movement
