On the third day of my walk from Sheffield to Manchester, I opted to remain in Thornsett and undertake something of a personal pilgrimage.
On the 24th April this year, 90 years will have elapsed since the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in 1932.
This event saw around 400* young people from Manchester and the surrounding area attempt to reach the summit of Kinder Scout having assembled at a quarry on the outskirts of Hayfield.
This walking party were mostly young members of the Communist Party and fellow travellers. Escaping for a day from grim jobs, and un or underemployed in the depths of the Great Depression they sought to put their politics into action and claim Kinder Scout for themselves.
At the time Kinder Scout (like large sections of Pennine moorland remains to this day) was a private shooting estate.
Access to the plateau, which understandablely was considered a holy place by ancient people, right up to the reformation was prohibited.
In the 1930s this was actually quite a recent state of affairs. Kinder Scout had only been fully “enclosed”, kicking “commoners” off an sticking up private property signs in the 19th Century.
What the young Communist hikers and their allies wanted to prove was that everybody should be entitled to freely access and wander one of the Peak District’s crowning glories.
Ahead of the 90th anniversary I wanted to retrace their route. Having not visited before, and experiencing how spectacular Kinder Scout is, I could quite see why they thought everybody should be able to visit it freely.
At Ashop Head, near the northern beginning of Kinder Scout the main body of the Trespassers (planned with military precision the Trespassers were split into 3 detachments, each advancing from a different starting point to converge on the summit of Kinder Socut) the landowner’s gamekeepers were first encountered. The gamekeepers resisted the Trespassers and some kind of fight ensued. But the Trespassers prevailed and they continued, occasionally squaring off against the gamekeepers to the summit.
From near the top you get an incredible view to the west, out over Manchester and its surrounding towns to Winter Hill the site of an earlier mass trespass in 1896, and as far as the Welsh mountains.
What a view that must have been for many of the Trespassers. At the time – if you were in work – then a 6 day working week was pretty normal. 6 days a week bashing out or folding widgets, minding the spinning machines which proletarianised your ancestors in the late 18th and early 19th Century, filing and franking until you got RSI. Then on the 7th day you are able to head out. Out by train or bus to the moorside where you can walk, and talk, and laugh with friends who feel the same way about the current set-up, experience the same situations you do, and have similar ideas about how best to change it in your favour.
After 3 or more hours of walking you reach the trig point close to the summit.
How is it right that this is reserved for just one aristocrat? Him and his guests who are invited up here to shoot at birds with him? Birds which live in a habitat that is not a natural creation, but designed to make breeding and killing them easier.
After the summit you start the descent.
Edale in the heart of the Peak District stretches out beneath you.
These days the Pennine Way runs up from Edale village where it commences. Climbing the formidable Jacob’s Ladder. In 1932 this was still more than 30 years away.
Participants in the Mass Trespass and their defenders, like Tom Stephenson who was a Daily Herald journalist (not a Communist but on the left of the Labour Party), were key to setting up the Pennine Way, which opened in 1965.
But in 1932 that is a generation away.
On the descent. Perhaps close to the cliff face at the end of the Kinder Scout plataeu, or maybe further down on the carefully farmed hillsides beneath it, 5 organiser’s of the Trespass were arrested by officers from Derbyshire County Police.
The prison sentences when they were handed down, were for between 2 and 6 months. The Derbyshire bench looked down on a bunch of dole recipients, factory hands and clerical workers presuming that they could just walk across the Peak District if they felt like it.
Posterity as is often the case has been rather kinder. Today the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass is rightly recognised as a crucial moment in the fight for everyone in Britian to be able to freely access the country. National Parks, Areas of Oustanding Natural Beauty, national trails like the Pennine Way and the 2000 law which grants a limited “right to roam” are all its offspring.
A decent result for a group of hobnail booted Young Communists, many hardly out of their teens. The future would be kind to them. Many participants went on to become worthy and respected figures in their communities. With many decades of service on local councils, in trade unions and just generally in campaign and interest groups to improve life for people in Greater Manchester.
They well deserve their memorial in the quarry outside Hayfield from which they set off.
Today, when our right to protest, let alone our right to access and enjoy land is being threatened by an overweening government their example is needed more than ever.
*As is quite normal for protests the numbers participating are hotly disputed. The court case against the organisers said “l00 people” Participated. The organisers in later life claimed “600-800′. Ewans McColl – the singer song writer – who was there, claimed “3,000” turned out (this is impossibly unlikely). As such the Manchester Guardian’s figure of “400” is generally taken to be broadly correct.