The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [25]
Bryce resubmitted his Access to Mountains (Scotland) Bill on an almost annual basis, but it was not actually debated until 4 March 1892, some eight years after its parliamentary debut. He gave his long-awaited introduction to the measure with relish, as he described how difficult getting into and around the Highlands was at that time for the hiker, artist or scientist. So assiduous are the landowners in protecting their vast estates (which, at their peak, accounted for around 6,000 square miles, a fifth of Scotland), he said, that ‘one is obliged to stalk ghillies as the ghillies stalk the deer.’ Tory members opposite could not take him, or the idea, seriously. After Bryce claimed he had ‘climbed mountains in almost every country’, some buffoon shouted ‘Holland?’, to loud guffaws. Incidentally, even that was an ill-informed heckle: Holland has some fairly significant hills in its south-eastern corner around Maastricht, with Mount Vaals top-ping a thousand feet (321m). The micro-states of Monaco and Vatican City excepted, Europe’s flattest country is, by some distance, Denmark, where three ‘peaks’ scrap it out for national supremacy. They are all around 170 metres high, but, since 1998, have been topped by a new, man-made loftiest point in the country, the towers of the Great Belt suspension bridge between the islands of Funen and Zealand, each more than 80 metres taller. If we’re being really pedantic, there’s a TV mast even higher.
In his opening speech, Bryce stated that ideally, the measure he proposed would cover the whole of the United Kingdom, but that for now, he felt it necessary to concentrate on Scotland. He gave honourable members a history lesson, reminding them that the problem of access to the Highlands ‘is practically a new grievance. Eighty years ago everybody could go freely wherever he desired over the mountains and moors of Scotland. Eighty years ago was the time when Scott made Highland scenery familiar to the world, the time when Wordsworth displayed the effect of his sympathetic studies of nature, and it was just at that time when Scott and Wordsworth’s poems exercised such powerful spiritual and moral influences on the people that the policy of debarring people from the search after the truths of nature and intercourse with nature began to be pursued.’
‘I cannot help remarking,’ he continued, ‘that the exclusion of the people from the enjoyment of the mountains of Scotland began just at the time when the love of nature and of the sciences of nature had been most widely and fully developed. The scenery of our country has been filched away from us just when we have begun to prize it more than ever before. It coincided with the greatest change that has ever passed over our people – the growth of huge cities and dense populations in many places outside those cities – and this change has made far greater than before the need for the opportunity of enjoying nature and places where health may be regained by bracing air and exercise, and where the jaded mind can rest in silence and in solitude. It is at this very time when these needs are so deeply felt, that the thoughtlessness or selfishness of the few has debarred the lover of scenery and science from those enjoyments and pleasures they desire.’
The Bill’s seconder, Dr Robert Farquharson, the member for Bryce’s neighbouring constituency of Aberdeenshire West, eloquently echoed the point. ‘Light and air are two of the greatest necessaries of life. Light was taxed at one period of our history; there has been no attempt to tax air, because the process would be so difficult. If it were possible to reduce the air we breathe to a commercial commodity, we should soon have joint stock companies to deal with it, as in gas and water, and paying dividends more or less large – generally large’. In reply, the Solicitor General for Scotland, Andrew Graham Murray, the Conservative Unionist member