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for Buteshire, could not see what all the fuss was about. It was quite possible, he loftily stated, for anyone to walk in the deer forests ‘if only they ask permission and are accompanied by a forester’. He turned his sights on the motives of some supporters of Bryce’s bill, stating that ‘members who know anything of Scotland will be aware that there is a certain class of questioner whose desire to put a candidate at a difficulty is greater than his thirst for information. I am afraid the honourable gentleman’s Access to Mountains Resolution has become part of the stock-in-trade of the ordinary and unimaginative heckler. It is put forward by that class of person because they think that an unqualified answer in the negative would savour not at all of that platform generosity which gives away with lavish hand everything in the world save that which belongs to the speaker himself.’

Now, I’ve read that dozens of times, and I still don’t have a clue quite what he was on about in that final rambling sentence. It’s almost as if he’s lost in some bitter, private memory; a public meeting somewhere in Buteshire, perhaps, where the Honourable Andrew Graham Murray was made to look like a complete idiot by some gobby constituent. It doesn’t sound as if it would have been too hard to wind the old buffer up (actually, quite young buffer; he was only 42 at the time), and he probably didn’t meet real members of the general public very often, so the chances of an epic culture clash would have been high indeed on such occasions. I miss Tories like that. Now that they have learned how to impersonate members of the human race, it’s quite difficult to nail the bastards down. Old-school Tories were so palpably, radiantly condescending and pompous. They still are, of course, but apart from the occasional misfired tweet, they know now to keep it behind closed doors.

It had taken James Bryce eight years to get his bill even debated in the House of Commons, though in the meanwhile, another attempt, this time to open up land in Wales, had briefly flickered into life in 1888. The protagonist was another brilliant and highly individual Liberal MP, Tom Ellis, the member for his native Merionethshire in north Wales. In moving the Mountains Rivers and Pathways (Wales) Bill, he said that ‘the object of it was to secure public right of access to the mountains and waste lands in Wales, and also to the rivers, lakes, and streams. It provided that any pathway that had been used for any five successive years during the last 49 years should be again used by the public.’ Ellis conjured up ancient Welsh custom and law in support of his proposal, but this was denounced as ‘simple fancy’ by the veteran Tory MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, Edmund Swetenham. Swetenham fulminated at length against Ellis’s proposal, eventually talking the bill out under the 12 o’clock rule, whereby debate is automatically adjourned as midnight strikes. It never returned.

James Bryce, and then his younger brother John Annan Bryce, the Liberal MP for Inverness Burghs, continued to present the Scottish Bill to Parliament, but to no avail. It was also presented, covering the whole of Britain, in 1908 by another renegade Liberal firebrand, Charles Trevelyan, the young member for Elland, West Yorkshire. His rhetorical introduction to the debate has become something of a poster slogan and rallying cri de coeur for British ramblers: ‘Who has ever been forbidden to wander over an Alp? Who has ever been threatened with an interdict in the Apennines? Who has ever been warned off the rocks of the Tyrol? Who has ever been prosecuted for trespassing among Norwegian mountains?’

A little prone to earnest high-mindedness they may be, but the Trevelyan family are a fine example of the kind of dippy Liberal gentry who have forged and steered our national relationship with the land. True to his upstanding words, Charles was an enthusiastic vice-president of the Ramblers’ Association and, when he inherited the family pile of Wallington Hall near Newcastle, set up Northumberland’s first youth hostel in a stable