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On a chilly March Sunday morning, Paul met me at Belmont, the end of the protest route, and ferried me back to its start, at the disputed gate on Coalpit Lane. He had to rush off, but pointed me on my way up to the soggy, still-snowbound peak of Winter Hill. Not that you could miss it: a cluster of massive telecommunications masts occupies the summit now, making it even more desolate than nature alone has managed. There is something powerfully gloomy about the place: famous for a gruesome murder in 1838, regular sightings of UFOs and a litany of plane crashes. In the worst one, on a grim winter’s day in 1958, a flight from the Isle of Man mistook its position and smacked into the hillside, killing 35. The impact was only 350 yards from the summit transmitter station, yet so severe was the weather that the men working there didn’t even realise that there had been a crash.

If you’re blessed with a clear day on Winter Hill, and mercifully my cold March morning was one such, it’s the view that stuns, all the way over the whole of Greater Manchester. A few silent chimneys are the only reminder that, not so long ago, this would have been a view over Hades itself, a seething, smoking cauldron of humanity crammed into every crevice. Now, the most obvious landmark, glittering Teutonically in the cold sunlight, sits right over the other side of Manchester: the Chill Factor indoor ski slope, next to the candy domes of the Trafford Centre.

Walking down the other side to Belmont, I couldn’t shake from my head the chorus of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Manchester Rambler’, a song written from his personal experience of the Kinder protest. Checking there was no-one within earshot, I even bellowed it out a couple of times, swelling to a climax on the immortal chorus, ‘I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday.’ It felt brilliant to be high up on the Lancashire moors on a bright, blustery Sunday morning, and I was far from alone. Since first thing, I’d been aware of ramblers everywhere, alone, in couples and in joyful groups of all ages. It was particularly thrilling to see so many kids and teenagers along with their parents and grandparents, and none of them looked grumpy or bored. Perhaps, though, if I’d been near enough, I might have heard ‘Graaaan, next time can we go to t’Chill Factor? Pleeeeeease.’

By that strange law of universal coincidence, on the very day of the first Winter Hill trespass, Sunday, 6 September 1896, another hill just up the road was witnessing its precise antithesis. The people of Darwen, a smaller mill town less than ten miles north, were celebrating the end of a long access battle with a procession, mayor, corporation, brass bands, banners and all, up on to the moor above the town. There too, generations of locals had been used to walking, but had suddenly found that it was ruled off-limits by the landowner, in this case a vicar who rarely even made it to Darwen, as his parish was in Dorset. Two years later, another procession headed up the hill, this time to open a viewing tower that looks to be the very epitome of the Victorian age – dark, severe, yet lofty and ambitious, and built to celebrate its apogee, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Nominally, that is. The florid plaques on the tower’s base all celebrate the Queen’s longevity and list the aldermen who shuffled up the hill to applaud the dignitaries on that day in September 1898, but a more recent addition gives the game away. That is a plain crest that celebrates the 1996 centenary of the victory for the townspeople in gaining access to the moor that glowers above their streets.

It may have taken nearly a century to get the real reason for the Darwen Tower inscribed on its side, but the ambition was explicit from the start. Letters in the local press supported the idea of a Jubilee Tower, but as long as it also served as a celebration of the townsfolk’s victory over their absentee landlord, the Rev. William Arthur Duckworth. With sweet irony, it was Duckworth