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By Root 378 0

to get into the wild places, but over the entire history of the British access movement. Even its name – half chocolate egg, half bob-a-job – seems wholesome and aspirational; it’s hard to imagine that the names of nearby Bleaklow, which suffered even stricter prohibition, or Winter Hill would have galvanised public support quite so effectively, and consistently over the past 80 years and counting. It is the British rambling community’s holy relic, and has inspired dramas, books, school projects, paintings, films, TV and radio programmes, poetry and music. In the proud bastion of the north-west itself, I fully expected to see eyes mist over and voices get a little croaky at the first mention of Kinder. I was very wrong.

Clarke Rogerson at the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society was the first to set me straight. ‘I get a bit peed off with people going on and on about Kinder all the time,’ he declared. ‘It was a small event, and in some ways an ill-conceived event. Certainly, this society was opposed to it at the time, and we weren’t the only ones. The Snake Pass [a path from the north across Kinder], for instance, we got that open through negotiation, not by guerrilla tactics or threats. There are those who say that the Kinder trespass put the whole cause back thirty years, that it did more harm than good. I have mixed feelings about it. Was it the Kinder trespass that changed the law? No it wasn’t. It was hours and days and months and years of toil by lots and lots of people that got our moors open.’ And in answer to my question as to whether the five men imprisoned after the trespass were treated unduly harshly, he has an immediate response: ‘No. Not for what they did at the time.’ Following the success of a 2007 exhibition commemorating the 75th anniversary of the mass trespass, there are plans to establish a permanent museum about the access struggles of the north-west, but it was proving difficult to get people excited about anything other than ‘bloody Kinder’.

Neither was this a bit of modern revisionism. Tom Stephenson (1893–1987), another man carved out of Lancashire grit, was a giant of twentieth-century land-access campaigns. His dogged persistence, encyclopaedic knowledge of the law and socialist drive saw him in the thick of the action from the First World War, when he was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector, to the Thatcher years. Through the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, he led the Ramblers’ Association, and drove the establishment of the Pennine Way, the country’s first official long-distance footpath. In his memoir Forbidden Land, he pulls no punches in assessing the success, and otherwise, of the century’s many access tussles. On the 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, he is unambiguous, describing it as ‘the most dramatic incident in the access to mountains campaign. Yet it contributed little, if anything, to it.’ He goes further, becoming positively snicky when he nicknames Benny Rothman, the highly voluble leader of the trespass, as ‘General’ Rothman, and sneering on numerous occasions that it wasn’t a proper protest, because they didn’t make it to the absolute top of Kinder Scout.

Clarke Rogerson was not understating it when he said that there was little support at the time for the mass trespass amongst more middle-class ramblers. An official of the Manchester & District branch of the Ramblers’ Federation wrote to the press to condemn it before it had even happened, and the organisation very publicly disassociated itself from it in its raucous aftermath. Their successors, the Ramblers’ Association, tend to gloss over that one. To those seeking a more softly-softly approach of polite parliamentary lobbying, the demonstration was pure anathema, and many howled that it had set the cause back, rather than progressed it any. To the young firebrands who organised the trespass, this just proved that they were right, especially when you remember that attempts to lever greater access through Parliament had been a major cause for half a century by then, and yet had delivered precisely nothing.