was a huge misjudgement. Far from putting down such actions, the convictions dished out to the Kinder trespassers further ignited the cause. The public response had repercussions still felt today; in many respects, the treatment of Rothman and his cohorts was really the best thing that could have happened to wild places. A rally in Castleton a few weeks after the trial was attended by 10,000 people. In 1935 the Ramblers Association was founded, and a year later the Standing Committee for National Parks was formed, publishing a paper titled The Case for National Parks in Great Britain in 1938.
A setback came in 1939 when the progressively intended Access to Mountains Act was passed by Parliament in such an aggressively edited form it actually sided with the landowners, and made some forms of trespassing a criminal as opposed to a civil offence. But opposition to draconian access restrictions continued, and in 1945 – just as soldiers were returning home from the war to a country undergoing profound social changes – architect and secretary of the Standing Committee on National Parks John Dower produced a report containing the definition of what a national park in England and Wales might be like. Given what went before – and what would follow – it’s worth quoting at length.
An extensive area of beautiful and relatively wild country in which … (a) the characteristic landscape beauty is strictly preserved, (b) access and facilities for public open-air enjoyment are amply provided, (c) wild-life and buildings and places of architectural and historical interest are suitably protected, whilst (d) established farming use is effectively maintained.
In 1947, Sir Arthur Hobhouse was appointed chair of the newly enshrined National Parks Committee, and proposed twelve areas of the UK that would be suitable locations for a national park. ‘The essential requirements of a National Park are that it should have great natural beauty, a high value for open-air recreation and substantial continuous extent,’ he decreed in his report of that year. ‘Further, the distribution of selected areas should as far as practicable be such that at least one of them is quickly accessible from each of the main centres of population in England and Wales.’
In 1949 the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was passed, and on 17 April 1951 – with an irony not lost on many of the Trespass participants – the Peak District, including Kinder Scout, became the first national park in Britain.
The Lake District, home to the highest mountains in England, followed on 9 May; Snowdonia, thick with legend and shattered geological grandeur, on 18 October; the Brecon Beacons National Park – where I was now being battered – was opened on 17 April 1957, six years to the day since the first, and itself the tenth national park to be opened in England and Wales. Somewhat slower on the uptake, Scotland opened its first national park in 2002 (Loch Lomond and the Trossachs), with the Cairngorms National Park following suit the next year.
For the first time, access to our high and wild places was gilded by law. By 1957, with the opening of the Brecon Beacons National Park, 13,746 square kilometres of the most arrestingly beautiful countryside was officially enshrined as national park – just under 9 per cent of the total area of England and Wales.
The golden ticket in the eyes of access campaigners, however, was not stamped until the turn of the 21st century. The national parks were a giant leap forward, but much of what truly lay open to free access was only the very highest land, where agriculture was poor. Other than areas owned by bodies such as the National Trust, access agreements still had to be reached with landowners concerning the often restrictive rights of way through their land. But in 2000 the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CRoW) was passed, coming into effect five years later, providing ‘a new right of public access on foot to areas of open land comprising mountain, moor, heath, down, and registered common land’. In other words, the balance had finally swung to the benefit of walkers, who could now roam freely in open country – the inverse to the Enclosure Acts of the 1800s that ramblers had fought so hard to repeal. In a stroke, the area of land upon which a walker could freely roam had expanded by a third.
Benny Rothman lived to see the CRoW Act passed. After a lifetime of lending his voice to access causes, the passing of the act was a vindication that came just two years shy of the 70th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Trespass. This he did not live to see; he died aged 90 just a few months before it, in January 2002.
Had he been at the anniversary celebrations he would have witnessed a fitting endstop, when the current Duke of Devonshire – grandson of the man who unleashed his gamekeepers on the trespassers of 1932, and evidently something of a good sport – took the podium. Presumably with a quiver in his voice, he addressed the crowd thus:
I am aware that I represent the villain of the piece this afternoon. But over the last 70 years times have changed and it gives me enormous pleasure to welcome walkers to my estate today. The trespass was a great shaming event on my family and the sentences handed down were appalling. But out of great evil can come great good. The trespass was the first event in the whole movement of access to the countryside – and the creation of our national parks.
Whether or not the national parks would exist today without the Trespass – and whether I’d be able to appreciate the feeling of gradually being ripped from my feet on the top of the Black Mountain in the chilly spring air – we cannot know. But what is clear is that access to the British countryside took a great leap forward that day in 1932, and the degree of freedom we can all now enjoy wasn’t easily won.
However grumpy I was feeling in the summit shelter atop the Black Mountain, I was glad to have made it. Now all I had to do was make it back to the car. Emerging from the shelter, I caught sight of the trig point – a slim concrete pillar found on many British summits, for reasons detailed later – twenty metres or so away. Staggering over and touching the top, I snapped an awful summit photograph and, with no small degree of haste, turned in the direction from which I’d come.
It was now almost totally dark, the descent seemingly destined to be desperate. While my eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, night was biting, and soon I’d barely be able to see where I was placing my feet. I had a head torch somewhere in my bag but I didn’t want to use it unless I had to. Any bright light would destroy my night vision in a flash, and besides, I didn’t want to stop – not even to rummage in my rucksack.
It turned out that walking back towards Bwlch Giedd was a hell of a lot harder than walking from it. The wind was now punching me directly in the face, chilling my skin and making the simple matter of looking up almost impossible. I could barely see where I was going and the wind was doing its best to exploit this. Every time I took an uncertain step I felt the gusts attempting to pick me up, or snare my backpack sideways and try to pull me from my feet. I focused on my pacing and tried not to panic. All I had to do was get down before I became too cold to walk. That was all.
My instinct had been to get as far from the cliff edge as possible, but walking on the grass wasn’t so good; the grip between my boots and the ground wasn’t as positive as on the stone of the path. Trying not to lose balance or composure, I pushed on along the stones, distracting myself by trying to figure out how strong the wind was. A steady 50 mph was my guess, possibly gusting to 70 mph. This might not sound much when you’re sitting at home listening to it rattle the windows, but on a mountain trying to walk, anything over 40 mph and you’re struggling.
I reached Bwlch Giedd with considerable relief, and stepped into the shelter of the path that descended the escarpment down towards the lake. The sudden silence caused by the drop in the wind made me realise my ears were ringing. The path was rocky and trip-prone, but I managed to stay upright all the way down to the shore. Pulling out my compass and wrestling with the flapping, shiny cased map, I struck a straight bearing from the edge of the lake to the point where I’d parked the car. It would be a cold, damp walk out – but at least I was down. Now I had to get back across the rolling grass and several streams, and I’d be out of this wind, and out of this rain.
It
