Three weeks ago

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 01 October 2007 14:11:35

I tried to climb Kinder Scout.

I've attempted to recognize here that a certain fraternity of walkers will maintain that you haven't actually climbed a hill unless you reach the cairn on the summit, and possibly even added your own rock to those already assembled. I did not, as far as I can tell, reach the summit of Kinder Scout so cannot, by those terms, claim to have climbed it. But I've realized lately that what interests me most about hillwalking is not getting to the highest point, but getting the best views. Often the two coincide, but when they don't, it's the views I'll go for.

Part of me would like to say that I went up that particular hill in that particular year so as to celebrate a famous ascent seventy-five years previously. But to be honest it just happened that that weekend of that year was convenient for me, that that location was convenient, and that on that particular day, that direction seemed more attractive than the alternatives. No grand plan at all.

And when I think about it now I'm not actually sure that the famous trespass is such a great thing to commemorate anyway. To suggest that is, of course, heresy in the walking community, but I was born to question things, and that's often a recipe for being branded a heretic.

That mass trespass of 1932 was supposed to establish that anybody could walk anywhere in the countryside that they wanted to. It was supposed to fight against the restrictions that landowners would place on access to the land. It was supposed to ensure that the poor working classes of Manchester and Sheffield could use what little free time they had to take advantage of the beautiful scenery that was so close and yet, through access restrictions, denied to them.

What the traditional story doesn't really emphasize is that the trespass was driven by the local communist party, and while I'm sure they wanted it to achieve the goals already stated, the c-word should make you realize that they may have had a not-very-ulterior agenda in annoying the land-owners.

Still, mixed motives don't always prevent good outcomes, and goodness knows that pure motives are rare indeed. So perhaps it's best to judge the event by its outcomes.

Okay, at this point I have to plead ignorance. I don't understand the precise subtleties of what land was accessible before and what land is now accessible under recent legislation that is supposed to grant what the trespassers were pushing for decades before. But if you walk around that area one thing will become obvious to you - the pennine way, and the erosion caused by an awful lot of people walking in the same area. That was one of the landowners' defences at the time - let all the hoi polloi out onto the hills and the landscape will be damaged. A pathetic ploy, no doubt, and just an excuse to defend what they really wanted to keep for themselves. But they were right despite that - there is a lot of erosion that is due to the large number of people walking there, and I can't pretend I didn't contribute my little bit to it.

And, moreover, who are the people out walking on the hills where they wouldn't otherwise have been allowed? Is it really the impoverished working classes from the local metropolises? Or is it the rather less impoverished middle classes from all over the country? I wish it weren't so, but the answer seems pretty clear, and whenever I think about this I hear Jarvis Cocker's painful but accurate words "My favourite parks are car parks, grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag". It's a nice dream to think of all those poor workers in the cotton mills sweating from dawn to dusk six days a week but, on their day off, being able to head out to the Peak District, climb some hills and enjoy the views. But it's a deluded middle-class fantasy. Those workers in the 30s would have had a genetic memory of the countryside as being the place their family sweated their brows off trying to earn a living from farming. It wasn't the "great outdoors" - it was the hell they were escaping from with their nice dry factory job. And as that genetic memory faded, they didn't buy into that middle class dream, they bought into a very different sort of escapism as Pulp document very well.

Personally I'm glad I had the opportunity to walk on Kinder Scout. But let's be honest and admit that the mass trespass achieved a lot for only a few. There are many more barriers to those at the bottom of the social ladders than just selfish landowners.