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for access, but I felt that I’d seen and walked the most important, and that, in themselves, they represented a fine cross-section both of the issues and the landscapes involved. The trip had been superb, as much for the warm-hearted humour and easy-going chattiness of the locals as the imposing scenery. The umbilical link between the people of the north-west and their wild places had inspired me hugely, and it is as strong now as it ever has been. I had to admit that the bolshie buggers are quite within their rights to go on about it.

Chapter 3

BLAZING THE TRAIL

Follow the beige brick road on Mam Tor, Peak District

Pub-quiz time: which UK number one record included quotations from Noam Chomsky, William Ewart Gladstone and Albert Camus? A clue – it wasn’t by Westlife, but you probably guessed that. It did, however, storm straight in at number one and knock out the little Irish poppets, who’d been there for the previous four weeks with yet another damp ballad. It was the first new number one of the twenty-first century; over a decade on, it still pounds through you like a blast of amphetamines.

You know, I’m sure. Who else but the shamelessly precocious Manic Street Preachers, Gwent’s finest in eyeliner, would attempt to weave words by such an unlikely triumvirate into a massive hit record? Gladstone gave it its title (‘All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes’), Camus its coda (‘A slave begins by demanding justice, and ends by wanting to wear a crown’), whined out at the dying fall by lead singer James Dean Bradfield, but it was the words of Chomsky that grab you by the throat at the very outset, and launched us into the new millennium on a surge of pure adrenaline.

‘The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority – and so it remains,’ intones Chomsky, before the guitars and drums storm in and speed us into submission. It’s a great line, and one that the linguist-philosopher-guru expands upon on his web-site, saying, ‘American democracy was founded on the principle, stressed by James Madison in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, that the primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority [his italics]. Thus he warned that in England, the only quasi-democratic model of the day, if the general population were allowed a say in public affairs, they would implement agrarian reform or other atrocities, and that the American system must be carefully crafted to avoid such crimes against the rights of property, which must be defended (in fact, must prevail).’

Strong stuff, but look at the agonised history of legislation around the issue of access to our hills and paths, and it’s hard to disagree with any of it. Inspired by my trip to the north-west, I wanted to read up on the turbulent background that had sparked the fights at Flixton, Bolton, Darwen and Kinder, especially how they had been conducted within the political discourse of the day. It was an illuminating, and not terribly inspiring, search.

Since huge tracts of the countryside were enclosed, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of massive industrial expansion and concomitant urbanisation of the population, public rights of access have only ever been grudgingly returned, and only in the most piecemeal of ways. Scores of pieces of legislation, each one chipping just a fragment off the granite block of our obsessions with property and privacy, have occupied Parliament for months at a time. Helped perhaps by listening to ‘The Masses Against the Classes’ at full volume, reading up on this interminable struggle was a fine way of making the sludgy blood of a lapsed lefty fizz once more through my veins.

The bottom line is that, had it been left to the Conservative Party, we’d still be peering through the gates. Every single advance in our rights of access has come about because of the dogged persistence of campaigners, their willingness to break the law and their often few friends in Parliament. Such