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All the same, I was inexplicably excited to be tackling Kinder for the first time, and to see in the dark flesh a part of the world that I’d often gazed at on the map. Despite never having been there, I’d always been intrigued, even slightly intimidated, by the look of the High Peak on my Ordnance Surveys. The summit of Kinder is a vast, almost contour-free plateau 2,000 feet up and in the rough, elongated triangle shape of a primitive arrowhead (or, if you prefer, as seventeenth-century poet Charles Cotton had it, ‘nature’s pudenda’). Technically, of course, it does have an absolute summit (636m), but that’s just a slight swelling of elevation over the neighbouring ground and with little difference discernible between that and the plateau’s three scattered trig points, at 624, 633 and 590 metres, an obvious fact that make Tom Stephenson’s sneer about them not having reached the summit look unnecessarily bitchy. The trig points delineate the outer edge of the summit plateau, almost as if they were guarding it; the miles of moor in between, an elevated void of very little indeed.

Look on the larger-scale Explorer map, however (number OL1, appropriately enough, for this has long been the biggest seller of all OS paper maps), and a whole load of new detail leaps out. Dozens of tiny peaty brooks fan out like the capillaries on a wino’s nose, followed by a few contours that look like the marks made by mould as it sneaks its lacy way up a damp wall. Pretty, but kind of downbeat, and that was how I imagined the area itself to be. All around the flat arrowhead summit, contours tumbled down to the farms and settlements below. The outer limits of the plateau looked thrillingly sharp, and with suitably crisp names: Blackden Edge, Seal Edge, and across the northern perimeter, simply The Edge. Other names to chew on like old-fashioned blocks of toffee – Cluther Rocks, Kinder Downfall, Fairbrook Naze, Grindslow Knoll, Madwoman’s Rocks – were scattered around this bizarre, extraordinary-looking mountain.

My plan was to camp the night in Edale, then take the train to New Mills the following morning and walk back over the Kinder plateau, following the route of the trespass. I’d wanted to go to the Vale of Edale, tucked down below the south-eastern edge of Kinder, for decades, again all thanks to the map. No main roads pass through, but there’s still a railway, the high route between Sheffield and Manchester, and a village station. Viewpoints and campsites are dotted liberally amongst the contours, and of course, Edale is the starting point of the Pennine Way, its deeply scored route striding west out of the village and up on to Kinder. That would be my way back off the mountain in a day that would have me touch the soul of what walking means to the British.

If the glorious myth of the mass trespass has rather overtaken the reality, then so has the status of Kinder Scout itself. When I mentioned to various people locally that I was going to walk across Kinder, with thick snow still visible against the black peat of its top, the same reaction came almost every time. ‘Tha’s walkin’ oop Kinder? A’this time uh yur? Dear God, tha wants to be curful, tha knows – thur’s feet o’snow still on top. Can change in’n instant oop thur. Mek sure tha’s got plenty o’provisions, wurterproofs, torch, whistle, map, coompuss – eeh, be curful, lad.’ They made it sound like the Eiger, and it got me very excited indeed.

The train journey to New Mills took just 15 minutes, and getting off, the near-holy status of the Kinder mass trespass loomed large, in the shape of a mural at the station depicting a romantic tableau of the events of Saturday, 24 April 1932. It was the visual equivalent of a book that I’d happily devoured the previous evening, Fay Sampson’s A Free Man on Sunday, her imaginative reworking of the event into a children’s story. In it, she invents a sixth trespasser who was imprisoned, and gives him a back story that mainly revolves around a feisty little daughter who loves nowt more than to dubbin her dad’s boots and accompany him on his moorland