Синклер Маккей – Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain (страница 6)

As I walk back the way I came, striding across the peat, about to descend into the deep valley, back to the dinky railway station, a burst of sunlight falls on the dark path and makes it twinkle and glitter strangely. On the surface of the black mulch, as far as you can see, there are countless tiny fragments of quartz, scattered around like stage diamonds, flashing prism colours; these seem momentarily inexplicable. Have they been here as long as the hills themselves? There are those who don’t react at all positively to the Peaks. Perhaps this is because the region looks familiar at first glance but feels odd on closer examination. For the otherwise enthusiastic seventeenth-century aristocratic traveller Lady Celia Fiennes, the area held very little charm. ‘All Derbyshire is full of steep hills,’ she wrote, ‘and nothing but the peakes of hills.’⁵ Nothing?

To climb Kinder Scout now is to experience some of the exultation, but also some of the paradoxes thrown up by the rambling movement. Any sense of solitude in this place, especially in the summer months, is illusory; you will never be more than a few yards from another rambler. And any sense of genuine wildness is dispelled by the views of Manchester. Yet for some, it is not the views, but simply the walk itself, that is the thing. In the 1848 novel Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell, there is a small scene when a group of Manchester factory workers take to the paths, not so far from the Peak District, on a day off:

Groups of merry and somewhat loud talking girls, whose ages might range from twelve to twenty, came by with a buoyant step. They were most of them factory girls, and wore the usual out-of-doors dress of that 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.

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