The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [18]
Looking at the way different anniversaries of 1932 have been celebrated, there’s an undoubted sense that, the further it retreats into history, the more bloated the myth becomes. Now that all of the protagonists have died, the anchor of reality has been cut loose and the story is free to float where it wants. We need Kinder Scout as a totem, a crystal-clear symbol of good versus evil, and everyone – with the possible exception, it seems, of the footpath professionals of the north-west – is keen to make it their own. On a website about the protest, you can find videos of the 75th anniversary rally, held in April 2007 in New Mills. Inevitably compèred by Mike Harding, the keynote address was given by David Miliband, then the Secretary of State for the Environment. His bug-eyed enthusiasm to appropriate the mass trespass as the kind of thing the New Labour government admired and encouraged is received in near stunned silence, save for a solitary cry of ‘Bollocks!’ from somewhere off-camera. In a not untypical piece of statistical mangling, he also manages to inflate the number of trespassers to 4,000, ten times the actual figure. Even that, though, doesn’t quite reach the level of awkwardness achieved by Harding’s rousing singalong of ‘The Manchester Rambler’ as the zenith of the celebration. Harding himself does a fine enough job, but it’s ruined by the sight of Lord (Roy) Hattersley slumped in a too-small chair behind him, silent and immobile, imperiously unwilling to join in and with his arms folded across his ample bosom, looking for all the world like Les Dawson’s gossipy housewife.
Leaving New Mills station, my first path on a day of many was exhilarating. The town’s Millennium Walkway is a 175-yard-long steel trajectory, pinned to a massive embankment wall some 20 feet above the churning waters of the River Goyt. This is a path that gives a perspective never available before, and it 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