Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain

Sinclair McKay

Ramble On

The Story of our Love for Walking Britain

DEDICATION

To my mother Helen and father Peter

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Edale to Kinder Scout: The Peak District and the First Modern Rambling Battle

Chapter 2

Rannoch to Corrour Shooting Lodge in a Howling storm: An investigation of the Lure of Wilderness, and the Earliest Days of Organised Rambling

Chapter 3

Dorking to Box Hill: Introducing Jane Austen, and the Subsequent Rise of the Victorian Walking Club

Chapter 4

A Swift Detour: To Briefly Examine Walkers as Deviants, Outcasts and Fugitives – and as Doomed, Wandering Souls

Chapter 5

A Day Out Among The Tors and Mires of Dartmoor: The Prototype National Park

Chapter 6

Seatoller to Haystacks, Underskiddaw to Dodd Point: The Lake District and the Cults of Wordsworth, Wainwright and Withnail

Chapter 7

Rhossili to Llanrhidian: In the Gower Peninsula to Consider the Surprisingly Long History of Walking Gear – While Wearing Quite Unsuitable Clothes

Chapter 8

Higham to Cooling: The Hoo Peninsula, North Kent, in Search of Beauty in Ugliness

Chapter 9

A Brief Detour into the Lures and Attractions of Walking at Night

Chapter 10

Exploring the Preternatural Forest of Dean and Woodland Legends – While Examining the Beguiling History of Youth Hostels and B & Bs

Chapter 11

A Quick Detour Through Regenerated Cities and the Art of Urban Rambling

Chapter 12

In the Steps of Tom Stephenson Along Britain’s Many Ways – and Paying Tribute to Generations of Self-Taught Botanists

Chapter 13

Wendover to Princes Risborough: Chilterns and the History of Trespass, Via Some Very Private Property

Chapter 14

Warminster to Battlebury Fort, Salisbury Plain – an Effort to Reach England’s Inland Atlantis

Chapter 15

A Diversionary Walk on the Weird Side: A Brief Flit from Ley Lines to Stone Circles to Pan

Chapter 16

Exploring the Lures of Solitude and Dodging The Grey Man of Ben Macdhui

Chapter 17

A Day Out in Brontë Country – What Happens When Much-Treasured Walking Landscapes Become Theme Parks

Chapter 18

Recent Furious Countryside Battles: The Patches of Forbidden Land that Remain and an Unsuccessful Attempt on the River Path at Windsor

Chapter 19

From Chilham to Canterbury along the North Downs Way: The Future of Walking and of the Countryside Rolled into one Ancient Pilgrimage

Endnotes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Other Books by Sinclair McKay

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

You are not long out of the railway station before you catch the desired view: the enchanting old windmills – one white, one black – on the crest of the hill, like odd little boats with bright wooden sails riding a giant green wave. A map is scarcely necessary, your destination can be in no doubt. The authorities have fallen over themselves to pepper the road with brown signs that point insistently. They gesture to the ‘South Downs’, as if to say: ‘Well – why else would you be here?’

The initial stretch of railway-hugging concrete pathway is slightly urinous in smell, but bordered on the other side by delicate woodlands, throbbing with bluebells on this sunny spring day. It is a trifling nuisance, this blistered tarmac cut-through that discreetly ushers you out of the Sussex town of Hassocks; a tiny price to pay for the goal that lies ahead. A mile later, you look right up again, at the green hill with its white skeleton of chalk beneath. You rejoin the ‘South Downs’ path, with more of those signs urging you on; you gaze up at that distant ridge, and the sky above that with all its pale blue promise. No one who considers themselves to be any kind of a walker could conceivably hold back.

The old children’s story formulation ‘over the hills and far away’ is one of the most evocative phrases in the English language. It expresses that impossibly ancient curiosity and yearning for adventure; there is also, somehow, the possibility of transformation. Any rambler will also know that the phrase has a physical truth; that when one is walking across a great plain towards hills, the urge to see beyond them becomes magnetic, instinctive. To stop, to turn, to go back requires a powerful exertion of will. So here I am, after a short, rigorous climb, by those old windmills called Jack and Jill, but gazing at yet more green ridges above. This is the South Downs Way, in the South Downs National Park. It is the most recent of such Parks, having attained this special status in 2009. This path is a superb and beautiful tribute to a movement that has been campaigning not merely for decades – but centuries.

On a day such as this, with a refreshing but subtle breeze, and the sun dazzling down, the obvious weekend destination for urban fugitives is not here. It is about five miles to the south: the huge majority of the people crammed – standing room only – on to the train out of London were heading for the beach at Brighton. But we who are up on this ridge – and there are a good many of us – have a purer purpose in mind. And as we pass one another, on that path that is now snaking around towards Ditchling Beacon, we recognise each other through clothing conventions.

There are the big beige sunhats, with a hint of floppy foppishness; the baggy shorts of indeterminable synthetic fibre; the sturdy boots, laces wrapped around like thick spaghetti. For some, there is also a map, worn around the neck on a lanyard. And having made the effort of getting up this hill – as we will see, there is always this Calvinist question of effort – we happy few are richly rewarded. This is a ridge of cattle-nibbled grassland – the grass is crew-cut, military neat – spotted with cakes of sun-dried dung. For those with the eyes and the experience to see, here is ribwort plantain, squinancywort and Devil’s bit scabious. Meanwhile, dancing and being hurled in random directions by puffs of breeze, are rare butterflies such as the Adonis blue and the Chalkhill blue. Come the summer, there will be the shy, secretive magenta of retiring pyramidal orchids.

This path – bright with white chalk – is on a gentler upward gradient now, and sweeping across the ridge to Ditchling Beacon. As you walk along this handsome escarpment some 800 feet up, the woods and green fields of Sussex are laid out beneath you, sharp and neat and crisply three-dimensional in the bright sunshine. There are churches and old windmills and manor houses and playing fields; there are also intimations of distant post-industrial warehousing and offices. You are looking at the past and the present simultaneously. Meanwhile, small birds compete in the blowy skies above. The attentive might see linnets, or yellowhammers, or skylarks. There is one elderly couple here with binoculars, lurking by the bushes of bitter-yellow gorse. One assumes they are here for avian reasons, as opposed to human surveillance. You always think the best of your fellow walkers. When seen from a great distance – in our walking gear, on hillsides, or marching along the edges of fields – we ramblers ourselves look like tiny colourful butterflies milling around on green plant-life. There we go: processing up slopes, in lines, like fluorescent ants. We are the very image of unabashed enthusiasm. Sometimes, the more adverse the conditions, the better. Such dedicated walkers will look out upon stinging rain whipping across bare moorland, take a deep breath of pleasure, then stride forwards – and upwards, into the raging storm.

Daniel Defoe, who made a tour of the nation in the 1700s, would have regarded such walkers with some mystification. In the eighteenth century, the only people to be seen tramping across such a landscape either worked it, owned it, or were trespassing on it. The idea that ordinary men and women would simply walk upon it for pleasure and recreation would have struck him as insane. As it was, he was already quite rude enough about those before him who had professed to have seen the beauty in landscapes such as this.

But fashions changed – quite soon after Defoe passed away, in fact. In the 1700s, the stern mountains and valleys began to draw poets and painters who were freshly alive to the more sublime aspects of nature. The echoes of their enthusiasm are still heard now. Whether we know it or not, we continue to be influenced by their passions, even if we consider our own regular rambles to be happily quotidian. These days, for a huge number of people, any satisfactory weekend should ideally include a drive out into the country, a loading up of the knapsack with refreshments ready for a good few hours of walking. The ostensible reasons all overlap: the need for some exercise and fresh air after a week sitting in an office, staring at a computer; the desire to see a wider horizon, one not interrupted by houses, tower blocks, or out-of-town supermarkets; and then perhaps the slightly more spiritual sense that it is important to keep in touch with the land itself – that by planting our feet on grass and soil, we are reasserting our true, organic natures. Yes, those reasons are certainly part of it. But it goes rather deeper than that.

It is estimated that some 18 million Britons enjoy regular country walks. Less casually, the Ramblers’ Association has over half a million members. Think of all these people, taking off on Sunday mornings, eager to stride across meadows, and to survey grand views. Think how, just a few generations ago, so many of these people would have been spending Sunday morning in church. Walking is sometimes a form of religious practice in itself; a meditation or even prayer, but at a steady pace. The very idea that there should be an official association for those who enjoy walking is in itself telling. We spend colossal quantities of money on our desire to get mud on our boots. Mud that our forebears would have strenuously tried to keep off theirs.

Despite the peaceful, even meditative nature of the pursuit, the story of rambling, as we shall see, is actually a story of constant bitter conflict. It is grand country aristocrats pitted against town-dwelling working class men and women. It is farmers with spring-guns and bone-shattering man-traps dedicating themselves to thwarting those who wish to tread ancient rights of way. It is municipal water boards, hysterically convinced that walkers could infect reservoirs with TB, and doing everything in their power to close off all the land around. It is game-keepers in tweed with heavy sticks neurotically certain that the slightest suggestion of footsteps on the moor would disturb the partridges and plovers. The story of rambling is, in one sense, a prism through which we can view the ebbs and flows of social conflict in Britain, from the Reformation right up to the present day.

Nor is the story entirely about the pursuit of innocent, wholesome pleasure. There are darker reasons for walking, too. Again, reaching back through history, we find that walking has sometimes been a symptom of depression, even madness. The compulsion that leads the hearty rambler on to the hills is not too far away from the compulsion that has led poets onto long, long walks on which they lost their minds. Sometimes the walker is a tired fugitive; often they are outsiders. These figures move around at the very edge of popular imagination and they are always there.

So it is unsurprising that walking is also threaded through British literature, like a network of well-trodden paths. Celebrated trampers include Wordsworth and Coleridge, the countryman poet John Clare; Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen; Charles Dickens and W. G. Sebald. In many cases, walking is integral to their poetry and their fictions. It brings to the fore far wider truths about human nature. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the space of a single day in Dublin in 1904, Leopold Bloom seems to be constantly walking – from Dignam’s funeral to the newspaper office; from pub to beach to brothel. Yet although he is at the centre of the narrative, Bloom is also the novel’s great, profoundly moving outsider: it is the others who watch him, as he walks alone.

Walking also carries an element of enlightenment. For instance, many weavers and mill-workers in the nineteenth century educated themselves through their rambles across the land. They became greatly knowledgeable about geology and botany, to the extent that some went on to attain academic posts. Walking, for these men and women, provided intellectual liberation from the grim fetters of urban or domestic life. In the twentieth century, one of the rambling movement’s most influential figures was an entirely self-taught man who had left school at thirteen to become a calico printer.

The other curious thing about the story of rambling is that this struggle over forbidden land, the furious conflict over incursion, is an almost uniquely British struggle, certainly in the European context. By contrast, walking throughout Continental Europe – from the experiences of Jean Jacques Rousseau to the film director Werner Herzog – has always been, and still is, relatively free and easy. Over here, the phrase ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ is practically stamped upon the national psyche. Or it was. In the last decade or so, though, there has been a quiet revolution in Britain. The balance has invisibly, miraculously, shifted. And now, the sheer acreage of land that we can stroll across with impunity is one that would have surprised our grandparents.

Stretching even further back, there is an interesting sense of philosophical similarity between today’s walking campaigners and the Diggers – the radical seventeenth-century movement, led by Gerrard Winstanley – which aimed to take over tracts of common or vacant land for cultivation. Winstanley’s stand, a religious one, was to do with the iniquity of huge expanses of open, fertile land being owned by a few rich individuals. The Diggers, working in tiny communities, began moving onto patches of common land from Northamptonshire to Surrey, and distributing crops to local villagers. Grand landowners took fright at this apparent anarchy and sent in hired thugs to expel the Diggers – with violence. Winstanley’s pleas to the authorities for help met with silence. Yet somehow the essence of Winstanley’s short-lived crusade finds a much more fruitful echo in today’s Ramblers’ Association, which believes that cherished English landscapes – even the most secluded – should not merely be at the disposal of a few property owners, but open for all to roam upon.

The shade of Winstanley might look upon the South Downs Way with pleasure. This trail is ministered to by the National Trust, a charity. This path – and countless thousands others around the country – is the result of a burst of idealism that found its fullest flowering during and after the Second World War. But in effect, be it National Trust, Woodland Trust, National Park or just simple privately-owned land, the fact is that there is now remarkably little hindrance anywhere for the dedicated walker. Certain recent Parliamentary Acts have had a bearing, but the momentum has somehow been more philosophical than political.

Whether they know it or not, walkers have, over the decades and centuries, changed our entire national approach to ideas of property and ownership. Boundaries, both physical and mental, have shifted greatly. The relationship between landowner and walker – very often a source of rancour – has changed like the colours of a kaleidoscope. Perhaps the only constant factor between the two is a sense of wariness. In some cases, today’s landowners are warier of walkers than walkers are of them. It wasn’t so long ago that some landowners were still illegally employing steel-jawed traps to deter trespassers. It also wasn’t so very long ago when local county magistrates could be counted on to favour the landowner’s case over that of the walker. Such bias would be relatively unusual to come across now, not least because the relevant laws have changed dramatically even in the space of just the last fifty years or so.

We can drift where we like, within reason. But the other fascinating thing, of course, is why we would wish to do so. Why are we happy to spend so much time yomping across rugged heaths or muddy meadows? That’s not as easily answered as you might think. For walking can be as much an unconscious, abstract activity as one involving concrete decisions and plans. My own walking patterns over the years have been quite random. In common with many other Londoners, for instance, I have been pacing different parts of the city by means of exploration for years. There were all those names on the A–Z map, so redolent of bucolic charm: Arnos Grove, Gospel Oak, Burnt Oak, Belvedere. Once you have walked around such places, the rather less than sylvan reality sinks in (no offence to the good people of Belvedere in south-east London, but can I just say – I was not expecting that).

Yet the urge to walk persists. Often quite randomly, with only the faintest sense of where you want to get to. Like William Blake, I’ve wandered through each chartered street. I have certainly marked many faces of woe. But none of that is the reason for walking. It goes deeper and deeper yet. Of late, that twitch, that desire, has taken me with greater frequency beyond the symbolic boundaries of the M25, that eight-laned border around London. Like many who live in the East End, I had some residual apprehension about the countryside; some sense that it was filled with malevolent cattle, barely rational farmers and tightly regulated footpaths from which one was never allowed to deviate. Then, almost from the start, I found that the freedom out there is rather greater than I had imagined. It is still not quite enough for the Ramblers’ Association – there are still certain areas, both physical and mental, where the barriers are still in place and full access is not possible. In the time that I, a thoroughgoing townie, have been exploring this undiscovered country – this land of sharp hills and deep hidden valleys, of warm gritstone and bright, slightly vulgar foxgloves, of silent woodlands and windy, roaring coasts – my notions of the countryside formed by 1970s Ladybird books, beautifully painted pictures of dairies and deep red tractors, have changed rather sharply.

The only way to understand a land is to walk it. The only way to drink in its real meaning is to keep it firmly beneath one’s feet. In all these years driving up and down motorways, I had no idea about the different sorts of emotional resonance that each individual area has, like a charge of electricity. Drivers can never know this. Only the walker can form the wider view