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would never have given them in the eighteenth century.’ He continued: ‘Surely so fundamental an alteration in the law of England as this ought not to be slipped in as a final Amendment into a Private Member’s Bill as a result of some compromise arrived at, not upstairs, but mainly between the various landowners’ associations and the Commons and Footpaths Preservation Society (CFPS). This is an Amendment which we ought not to pass.’ Here was a nod to the internecine battle that was also raging within the rambling movement at the time. It was widely held by many, particularly in the Ramblers’ Association, that the CFPS, as the main negotiating organisation with the government, had sold them all out with their acceptance of the reworked bill. The CFPS is now the Open Spaces Society, and there are many diehard ramblers who have still not forgiven them.

The amendment to nullify the trespass clause was narrowly defeated, and the Access to Mountains Act – the title was pretty much the only thing that had survived intact – became law on New Year’s Day 1940, by which time the country was at war and not much thinking about a Sunday stroll. Amongst those on the losing side were many who, five and a half years later, would find themselves as Cabinet ministers following Labour’s post-war landslide election victory. They too would neither forgive, nor forget.

To my generation, it’s all too tempting to imagine that the country marched in solidarity into a bright new dawn with the 1945–51 Labour government. In truth, following Attlee’s thumping victory, public enthusiasm for their new masters ebbed away with alarming rapidity. Rations became ever tighter, the economy was in tatters and life failed to improve at all for the vast majority of people. Even landmark legislation such as the creation of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of the mines and the railways was beset with unforeseen difficulty. Britain was broke, knackered, cold, hungry and deeply gloomy (quite literally; power supplies were restricted and countless overseas visitors remarked on how ill-lit and smoggy were the streets of our major cities). The worst winter of the twentieth century crippled the country even further in early 1947, leading to death threats aimed at Mannie Shinwell, the Minister of Power. The Labour government was desperately in need of some feelgood headlines, and these they hoped to get from the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Bill, outlined in the King’s Speech of 26 October 1948. The thrust of it was to create 12 National Parks, an unspecified number of Areas of Natural Beauty (AONBs) and Britain’s first official Long Distance Paths (LDPs). It also aimed to tidy up the chaos around footpath law, by making every local authority draw up a definitive map of its rights of way network. Included within it too was the repeal of the much-hated 1939 Act.

The tone of the debate, starting on 31 March 1949, was a world away from that of a decade earlier. There was no doubting that real change was going to happen, and for a Commons more used to dealing with an apparently never-ending sequence of hardship and difficulty, much underscored by vicious class and political rivalry, the degree of consensus around the topic, and the feeling that it was good news all round, produced something of a carnival atmosphere in the chamber.

The bill was introduced by the Minister of Town & Country Planning, Lewis Silkin, who attempted to turn the bleak national mood to its advantage, in stating that ‘with the increasing nervous strain of life, it makes it all the more necessary that we should be able to enjoy the peace and spiritual refreshment which only contact with nature can give.’ There was none of the circumscribed language of earlier debates, when access campaigners had had to tiptoe deftly around the Sir Bufton Tuftons on the Tory benches. Silkin rose to unaccustomed powers of oratory in summing up what the bill meant: ‘Now at last we shall be able to see that the mountains of Snowdonia, the Lakes, and the waters of the Broads, the moors