route to the highest point of the Black Mountain – the trig point of Fan Brycheiniog – was less than 500 metres away. I was wet as hell. Stupidly I’d neglected to pack waterproof trousers; although the ones I wore were supposedly robustly resistant, seven years of more or less constant use had evidently depleted their ability to withstand torrential rain and wind, and everything from my hips to my ankles on my left side was numb. I’d spare warm layers in my rucksack, but they were for emergencies. What’s more, I knew that once out of this sheltered fold in the escarpment, I’d be exposed to the full temper of the bludgeoning wind – wind that, quite possibly, would have the muscle to blow me clean off the top of the mountain.
I should really have called it quits, but I decided to push on to the top of the escarpment – or until my natural shelter ran out, whichever came first. If I stuck my head above the top and it was too blustery, I could turn round and climb back down without being mugged of dignity. Whether it’s Mount Everest or a Brecon Beacon, the basic physiology of a mountain can’t be argued with: the summit is only halfway home, and overstretching yourself before you’ve even made it there is usually a bad idea.
This wasn’t Everest, but it was certainly feeling extreme enough for what was originally supposed to have been a leisurely wander under the stars. I continued on up the path, and swiftly – much more swiftly than expected – I was high above the lake and approaching the top of Bwlch Giedd. Good paths make short work of ascent, and bad visibility – whilst a swine for views – can psychologically aid you, as you simply can’t see how much further you have to go.
As I reached the top of the escarpment I could feel the wind beginning to gather once more. It seemed bearable, so I tentatively carried on towards the summit. At first, the pushing gale from the south-west was robust, but not extreme; I could walk without too much trouble, albeit with a jaunty tilt of twenty or so degrees into the jet of wet air blasting the left side of me. I was now on the plateau’d top of the Black Mountain – the ‘billiard table’ – and whilst my eyes were fixed ahead for any indication of the top, I couldn’t ignore the huge drop that was now on my right. It seemed perverse that the direction of the wind was inclined perfectly to push me towards it.
In an effort to keep track of progress and stay focused, I kept pace in my head. From practice I knew that, on reasonable ground, every 64th time my left foot hit the ground I’d covered roughly 100 metres. This double-pacing technique was a staple of basic navigation, and for all my hopelessness with remembering my waterproof trousers, I knew that whenever I used this technique it was usually pretty accurate – as well as being a handy mental focus whenever things got stressful. My count was approaching 400 metres when ahead a squat rectangular shape began to solidify from out of the mist. The map didn’t indicate the presence of such, but that had to be a summit shelter. I reached it, and it was; a low, roofless horseshoe of slate, perhaps two foot high, but with its back to the wind and substantial enough to hunker inside and take stock.
The second I was beneath and away from the gale, I realised just how silly my decision to push on had been. My clothing was now so saturated my trousers were falling down with the weight of the water they had sponged up, and my sleeves hung limp around my arms. This little shelter would, most likely, have been my place of repose had I been lucky enough to catch a clear, calm night from which to appreciate the dark skies of the Brecon Beacons. But to me, right now, the thought of spending the night up here, in this weather, was chilling. I felt cold, soaked, and – however disappointed I was at not being able to reap the starry benefits of being this far from other people – truly, comprehensively alone. This was certainly an antithesis to comfort and civility, but it was starting to feel a little out of control. Were I to give up and stay here, hunkered down in this little windbreak in these conditions and the saturated state I was in, it wouldn’t be long before hypothermia began to gnaw. I can’t say the thought occurred to me at that exact moment – huddled and cold, being blasted by storm-force gales high on a mountain, miles from anywhere, with night solidifying around me – but my, what a strange way to spend a Saturday night this was. Or, put a slightly different way, what a privilege.
The safeguarding of Britain’s – and the world’s – dark skies revolves around a change in people’s thinking when it comes to their own use of light. By this reckoning, all that Britain’s wild places seemed to need in order to attain what the residents of the Brecon Beacons National Park were now obliged to do was a collective effort to reduce the amount of light pollution projected into the sky.
Something as simple as ensuring an outside light is angled downwards instead of obliquely, using a different type of lightbulb and – heavens – actually turning the things off when not being used to read the paper or shoot a burglar seemed, if embraced en masse, to be all that was needed to make a difference. In January 2012, the Somerset village of Dulverton – which lay within the other of Britain’s Dark Sky Reserves* – staged a mass switch-off of the village lights for a live TV event to highlight the difference even a modest settlement could make. As it happened it was pouring with rain, and instead of the jolly amassed crowd cooing in wonder beneath a newly unveiled ceiling of stars, they were spooked by the opaque blackness of a night not dissimilar to the one increasing around me on the summit of the Black Mountain. The last time our cities experienced the same sort of consciously collective darkness – besides the odd power cut, during which people were presumably more preoccupied with reclaiming light than appreciating dark – was during the Blitz.
However modest, the Brecon Beacons’ new status was enough to illustrate that, as the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, we should ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ And when it comes to the search for space and freedom in the British mountains, it’s not just in matters of ‘light trespass’ where the actions of a few can trigger a reaction that will be influential down the generations in their enjoyment of wild places. In fact, were it not for the actions of one group in particular, weather would be the least of my barriers to experiencing the starlit skies of the Brecon Beacons; in all likelihood, I wouldn’t be there at all. Actions which, funnily enough, also involved a trespass.
Today, like all of us in Britain, I enjoy constitutional access to wild places under a law called the Right to Roam. And this is something we should be very, very proud of, on two fronts: one, that we have a country enlightened enough to have introduced such a law. And two, that it did so based on the acts of what our new friend Maggie Mead might call ‘thoughtful, committed citizens’: namely a bunch of working-class Manchester socialists who, on one otherwise unremarkable morning between the world wars, decided to go for a walk.
In 1932 Britain was a grim place if you were poor. The bite of the Great Depression was being painfully felt: industrial output fell by a third, and that summer saw unemployment hit a record high of 3.5 million – most of them casualties of the downturn in northern industries such as mining and steel. Seeking focus and amusement for little or no cost, many of the unemployed began to walk for pleasure. The problem was, this pastime – ‘rambling’ – was a play without a theatre. In 1932 there were no national parks, no long-distance footpaths. Land was owned, and enforced as such. Areas that weren’t practical for agriculture – that is to say, mountain and moorland – were ring-fenced and populated with grouse, which landowners would make available, sometimes for as little as two weeks a year, to be noisily and gleefully dispatched by those who could afford cars, guns and time to fritter.
The ‘ramblers’ were almost comical in contrast. Unable to afford specialised gear, they would improvise: army clothing, work shoes, ragged clothing they didn’t mind being ruined. In addition, many walked under the auspices of groups such as the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF), which were often suffused with broader moralistic leanings – in this case, communism – and which in many people’s eyes gave the activity a disagreeable air of rascal politics.
It’s difficult today to envision the kind of restrictions early ramblers were subject to. By restrictions
