The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker

absolutely enchanted me, even more so because this audacious piece of civic bling sweeps through the middle of staggering post-industrial putrefaction. As I continued through the town, it became clear that this kind of vertiginous engineering was no new thing, for houses and factories teetered on top of cliffs, sheer rockfaces sprouted chimneys and windows like strange plants, tunnels vanished into the gloom while viaducts swooped overhead. It seemed that meaty buttresses and bolts were holding the whole place together.
    The old railway line to Hayfield is now a path, so it was an easy, flattish canter to breakfast. There was, it seemed, plenty of choice: pubs, cafés and hotels all with ‘RAMBLERS WELCOME’ displayed prominently on their signs. It was a very different picture back on the day of the mass trespass, when legions of police filled the town and bristled up against the gathering hundreds intending to reach the peak above them. Reports from the day suggest that nearly all the residents of Hayfield shut themselves indoors, terrified of trouble.
    The Peak and Northern might be a little standoffish about the whole Kinder protest, but they weren’t missing a trick in terms of potential recruitment at this ramblers’ holy grail, for their lovely cast-iron signs were everywhere up the Kinder Road. As I climbed, I started to recognise landmarks from the photographs taken in 1932. On rounding a corner, a stab of déjà-vu announced the Bowden Bridge quarry, where perhaps the most famous Kinder photo of all was taken, of an improbably youthful Benny Rothman addressing his troops from atop a rock before they set off up to the moor. Apart from the fact that it now acts as a car park, the quarry really hasn’t changed much, and I lingered for a good fifteen minutes, soaking up the atmosphere that, in my charged state, was beginning to feel almost sacred. Thankfully, another piece of rubbish Kinder art was on hand to break the spell, in the shape of some excruciating doggerel inscribed proudly on a bench:
As I trudge through the peat at a pace so slow
There is time to remember the debt we owe
To the ‘Kinder Trespass’ and the rights they did seek
Allowing us freely to ramble the Dark Peak.
     
    On that Saturday nearly 80 years ago, the protestors could not, in their wildest fantasies, have imagined that their little adventure would be so massively, passionately remembered. The idea had first germinated a few weeks earlier, when a youth camp organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF) had taken place at Rowarth, a couple of miles north-west of Hayfield. Some of the campers had gone for a walk up to Bleaklow and had got into an argument with a gamekeeper. Back at camp, discussing the event, the idea of a well-publicised mass trespass on Kinder Scout was floated, and enthusiastically adopted. The date was set, and Benny Rothman, a 20-year-old unemployed mechanic, used his considerable flair for publicity to ensure that knowledge of the event was spread to the winds. To that end, he wrote and distributed leaflets, organised posters, inscribed chalk advertisements on pavements and went to visit the offices of the Manchester Evening News , who duly obliged with a sensationalist spread about the bust-up to come.
    After the rally in the old quarry, the trespassers marched up past Kinder Reservoir, which was being heavily patrolled by officials of the water corporation, and thence into open country, along a rising valley called the William Clough. This was the disputed territory: once open to all, but through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gradually closed off for grouse shooting. The grouse are still there today, and as you walk through, they squawk and fly off suddenly, but soon return unperturbed to their original spot. They are not, as gamekeepers and landowners have so stridently claimed over the years, much bothered by ramblers. In the William Clough, the first skirmishes took place with