Синклер Маккей – Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain (страница 3)

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 a fraction of the attraction. There are keen walkers I know – of a certain age – who have retired to Sheffield in order to have easy access to this exhilarating countryside. But even for me, travelling up from London by train, it couldn’t be simpler – one change at Sheffield, and a small local train bound for the valleys of the Pennines. It is here, on this line, that the sense of occasion begins. My fellow passengers are wearing big walking boots. I should imagine that we are all heading for the same destination. Of course we are. Thousands upon thousands do, every year. For some, it is a ritual. And like any ceremony, it carries with it a palpable charge of anticipation. You can feel it on that little train, a butterfly-flutter of mounting excitement. For this particular area – noted not only by Defoe, but also by the sixteenth-century traveller Lady Celia Fiennes, and by seventeenth-century ‘Leviathan’ author, Thomas Hobbes – has the greatest symbolic importance to walkers everywhere.

The small train passes through a very long tunnel, several miles in length. When it emerges, we are out in a different world of high green hills, and strong stone-built houses. Edale is such a tiny station that there isn’t even a canopy, a white-painted wooden gate marks the exit. Yet here we are, geographically pretty much in the centre of Britain, and arguably at the beating heart of its countryside. Edale is a pleasant village of dark grey stone nestling in the shadow of a vast wide hill that dominates the horizon like a great tsunami; an arrested wave of severe grey rock and grass. It is about twenty miles outside Sheffield, and not that many years ago, when that city lay under a perpetual cloud of industrial smoke, it was widely known as a village in the deep countryside which steelworkers could cycle to and taste unadulterated air. Now the place bustles with walkers, of every variety: eager day-trippers, solemn, solitary long-distance hikers, big family parties and groups of friends, and figures like the poet Simon Armitage, who frequently comes to these parts to feel the pulse of the land.

The train has practically emptied, and I was right: we are all here for the same thing. The famous historical aspect of the place is the Mass Trespass of the nearby Kinder Scout moorland in 1932 – the symbolic moment when the needs and desires of ordinary working people clashed with aristocratic landowners’ desire to keep their thousands of acres private. The present-day draw of this landscape is that it marks the beginning of the mighty 272-mile Pennine Way. This is not only one of the indirect fruits of that 1932 clash, but also represents a mighty triumph for the Ramblers’ Association in 1965, the year of the path’s inauguration.

The starting point of such an epic undertaking should, of course, have something of a celebratory atmosphere about it. Edale has this in quantities: that perky little railway station, self-consciously celebratory National Trust tearoom, and bluff, hearty pubs. Walking appears to be the village’s chief raison d’être now. Edale – and countless other villages and towns all around the country, near moors or meadows, close to grassy plains, on the sea – has taken on new life as a sort of shrine for recreational walkers. As rural economies wither, hikers bring fresh opportunities. The passengers who had been on that little train from Sheffield now, almost as one, make unerringly for the small path that leads down to the tearoom (a chance to grab water and sandwiches, possibly a last mug of tea) and thence to the path beyond. Striding along the track ahead is a straggling row of ramblers, snaking into the far distance. We are on the floor of a tight, vertiginous valley. I am fixing my eyes on distant high crags, and trying to see this place as it would have been seen back in the early 1930s by young people whose weekday city lives consisted of sulphurous smogs, and of sweltering manual labour.

On the morning of Sunday 24 April 1932, in the brisk air of these moors – the wind soughing and rushing through the grass, making it shiver, and the tiny white bobbles of nascent heather, nodding and bowing – there was another increasingly insistent sound to be heard. It was the soft thrum of sturdy boots on grass, and on the moist black peat. The local bird population, including the much-prized red grouse, as well as plovers and ring ouzels, must have been astonished by the sheer number of people climbing the hill on that day. Human footsteps were rare on those moors then. A long, winding procession of approximately 500 enthusiastic men and women – some sensibly attired in jerseys and stout coats, others in more hearty shorts – were walking up to the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire’s Peak District. The collective mood of this extraordinarily large group was determined; some of the party were singing ‘The Red Flag’. Others were singing the ‘Internationale’. These people were not just here to take in the wholesome air and the wide vistas; they were here to make a stand of a symbolic sort. For this wild, open landscape, stretching for mile after seemingly illimitable mile, was one that they had absolutely no right to be standing on.