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Leaving sleek little Flixton, I was hungry for some proper Lancastrian blood and strife, a slab of red meat, under the red flag in this, the red rose county. Clarke Rogerson at the busy HQ of the PNFS had mentioned a couple of important footpath battles that had taken place on the moors above Bolton and Darwen, old mill towns to the north of Manchester. To him, they were of far greater significance than the showpiece mass trespass at Kinder Scout, and considerably earlier to boot. The Bolton struggle, which culminated in a series of mass trespasses in September 1896, was the most noteworthy. It had centred on access to Winter Hill, a swollen moor to the north of the town, and was an archetype of the kind of struggles so lovingly eulogised in Lancastrian socialist memory.

At Winter Hill, there was the full cast of goodies and baddies. In the boo-hiss corner was Colonel Richard Ainsworth, lord of Smithills Hall and boss of a huge bleaching works. With all the nearby cotton mills, there was mucho brass in bleach, especially for the company that pioneered the use of chlorine in the process. People who breathed in a daily diet of chlorine and smog were understandably keen to get a little of the fresh stuff come the weekend, and Winter Hill had long been a popular place for Boltonians to do just that. The early- to mid-Victorian period had seen a flowering of working-class interest in outdoor life, and not just among ramblers. Societies of amateur botanists, birders, geologists and naturalists were booming in all the northern industrial towns; they gathered libraries, specimens, collections and herbaria, wrote authoritative textbooks and papers. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her 1848 novel Mary Barton, described the

‘. . . weavers, common hand-loom weavers, who throw the shuttle with unceasing sound, though Newton’s Principia lies open on the loom, to be snatched at in work hours, but revelled over in meal times, or at night . . . There are botanists among them, equally familiar with either the Linnaean or the Natural system, who know the name and habitat of every plant within a day’s walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower . . .’

Ainsworth had taken over the Hall and the family firm in 1865. Fiercely anti-socialist and anti-union, he adored the trappings of the gentleman’s life, none more than pointing a gun at a grouse. On his favourite shooting ground of Winter Hill, part of his Smithills estate, he built a shooting hut and decided to close an old track, known as Coalpit Lane, that led across it. A gate was placed across the track further back towards town, employees were placed around the moor’s perimeter to warn people off and numerous ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ signs appeared.

Within days, word had spread and Bolton was seething. Together, the Bolton Socialist Party (BSP) and the town’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF), a Marxist outfit, decided to organise a mass trespass across Winter Hill, and advertised it for the next Sunday, 6 September 1896. Much to their amazement, over 10,000 people came. A small band of policemen and gamekeepers was quickly overwhelmed, and with great excitement, the crowds charged through the now broken gate, tramped over the hill and down the other side to the village of Belmont, giving the landlord of the Wright’s Arms a day he’d never forget.

The protest electrified Bolton, and the tiny revolutionary groupings of the BSP and SDF could scarcely believe their luck. They had located a deep nerve amongst the people, had hit it with pinpoint precision and were now ready to take it up a gear. Capitalism was trembling! Today a footpath across a Lancashire moor, tomorrow the world! It was decided to repeat the mass trespass on the following Sunday. Despite pouring rain, even more people came this time, around 12,000. A few tooled-up lads came looking for a dust-up with the law, but the law wisely decided to step aside before it came to that. More euphoria, Defence Committees,