Distance: 11 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: Hard
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps
Walk up and around the western edge of the Kinder Scout plateau, retracing the route taken by Benny Rothman and several hundred other Manchester walker activists associated with the CPGB’s British Workers’ Sports Federation, as part of a defiant mass trespass asserting to right of walkers to access upland spaces.
This walk is preceeded by an extended article exploring the background to the trespass, the events of the day, its immediate ramifications, and its long-term importance to the cause of establishing National Parks and the right to roam.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
Kinder Scout for Everybody all of the Time
Kinder Scout
Standing proud 636 metres at its tallest point, Kinder Scout near the western edge of the Peak District National Park, is definitively the tallest peak in the East Midlands.
The existence of The Black Hill (640 metres) and Twyn Llech (703 metres, hard on the Welsh border in Herefordshire, pip it to the title of tallest point in the midlands. However, as the highest and most dramatic of the gritstone plateaus in Derbyshire’s High Peak District, Kinder Scout has an undeniable cachet to it.
A visit to the top compounds that. Bounded by steep edges, with several hundred metre drops to the pastoral landscape below, Kinder Scout is an unusual, ethereal, even mystical place. It has none of the gentle, romantic cragginess, dells and dales of the White Peak, rather it is a dark, hulking slice of northern grit stone marking the point where the Midlands and Northern England meet.
Hayfield, the name of the nearest settlement of any size to the mountain, is a quintessential modernisation of plain Old English. Kinder Scout by contrast is definitely and unchangingly Norse.
Its human history (the rocks of course are hundreds of millions of years old) stretches much further than the Vikings. People definitely lived, and later farmed there during the stone age. Roman and Medieval people alike mined and quarried Kinder Scout for its mineral wealth, and continued to farm it. The plateau’s unusual, remote and windswept landscape, towering above other imposing hills nearby, made it a place of religious significance for all of the region’s faiths up until the Reformation.
Like many of the UK’s upland areas, Kinder Scout and the neighbouring peaks were commonland. Those who lived nearby had rights to be able to graze their animals, dig for peat, quarry gritstone, cross, or just wander the plateau if they wished too.
Enclosure
In 1840, the thousands of years of continuously evolving tradition of the area being held in common, came to an end. The plateau and its surrounding slopes and peaks were enclosed. It became a shooting estate for the Duke of Devonshire (whose primary Derbyshire gaff is Chatsworth House), who generally used it for the sport of hunting moorland birds like grouse, 12 days a year.
Whilst the guests of the Dukes of Devonshire were occasionally blasting birds out of the sky on Kinder Scout, on the edge of the Peak District in towns like Glossop, New Mills and Hadfield, and on a far vaster scale further afield in the emerging cities of Manchester, Salford and Sheffield, the world was drastically changing. The industrial revolution concentrated the production of textiles, metals, minerals and other goods into vast factories, linked by efficient almost constantly working lines of communication like canals and railways. The increase in production was exponential and previously unimaginable. A new class of people, different in terms of their outlook, material conditions, and practices, but united upon being dependent upon cash wages representing a fraction of the value of what they produced, was created to operate, administer and provide the interpersonal care underpinning this system: the working class.
From the beginning, the working class demanded from the people who owned the factories, mines, offices, transport networks and other places where they had to toil during most of their waking hours for 6 days a week, more money and less time at work.
In time they began to make some small progress in winning those demands. Aided from the 1870s by a series of laws which legalised trade unions and granted a limited right to strike. The hours of the working day shrank, wages saw some real term increases, and new categories of workers such as adult education teachers, journalists and all manner of entertaining popular intellectuals, emerged to make the working class better informed and to help them enjoy their time off work. As Ewan MacColl sang, “I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I’m a free man on Sundays”.
Trespass
Some of the workers began to use their time off to explore the countryside near where they lived, the more wild and dramatic the better. The famous fell walker and guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright, who worked in the rapidly expanding (in the 19th and early 20th Centuries) field of local government in a white collar job, is a case in point. They were aided in this by the Victorian expansion of railways and tram networks into the countryside, the invention of cheap bicycles in the 1890s, and from the dawn of the 20th Century by growing networks of petrol and diesel powered buses which served even the most remote hamlets. Prior to his move to what is now Cumbria, Alfred Wainwright used to travel to and from his home in Blackburn for a day’s walking.
Outside the cities and towns where they lived however, these walkers could find themselves at risk. Whilst there were active campaigns for the creation of public footpaths across land throughout the 19th Century, like the first proposed right to roam law which was put before Parliament in 1884, during Victorian times and up until the middle of the 20th Century the general public had very few rights to access most of the UK’s landmass.
In 1872 the Manchester Guardian reported the story of a rambler on Kinder Scout who had been seized and beaten by the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers, and such stories were far from uncommon. Half a century later in 1923, Manchester newspapers carried an advert placed by the Devonshire estate which included a photograph of a walker taken by gamekeepers on Kinder Scout and the promise of a five pound reward (roughly £500 in today’s money), payable to anyone who provided information that enabled them to identify the man who had accessed the plateau.
Much as the workers of 19th and early 20th Century Britain created trade unions to advance their rights at work, co-ops to secure better value better quality food and goods, and mutual insurance companies to safeguard against illness and unemployment, so walkers and cyclists created groups to go out and explore the countryside. This was largely for companionship. Groups were formed by people who worked or prayed together, as well as by people with shared political outlooks. However, it also served a protective function in case of accidents, or altercations with farmers or the lackeys of absent landlords.
Understandably many of these groups had connections to left-wing politics. Initially these were to the Liberal Party and early craft trade unions, but from the 1880s and 1890s, the newer larger unions which sought to organise all workers, and explicitly socialist political parties such as the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party. Later, following the First World War when trade membership had extended to a significant minority of the working population, and left-wing politics came to be consolidated nationwide in the broadly socialist Labour Party and the explicitly anti-capitalist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), all had walking and other outdoor pursuits groups for members of their organisations. Other groups in Pre-World War II Britain such as the Clarion Club (more of a cycling thing, but also connected to walking) were explicitly socialist and orientated towards the radical left, but independent of any formal political organisation.
In line with the – undoubtedly uneven – growth of worker organisation and defiance, some of these walking groups rooted in left-wing politics began to undertake protest actions aimed at asserting their right to access the land.
Standing at 456 metres, Winter Hill just above Bolton is a significant peak in its area, as well as a natural local beauty spot. Wishing to keep it for himself and his guests, by 1896 landowner Colonel Ainsworth had erected fences and gates to stop workers out walking accessing the hill. On the 6th September 1896 thousands of Boltonians organised by local trade unionists and socialist politician Joe Shufflebotham, and radical journalist Solomons Partington descended on the hill, ripped up the gates and fences and marched to the top. Colonel Ainsworth, his gamekeepers, and a small detachment from Lancashire County Police, were powerless to stop the people on the march. It was the largest mass trespass in British history to date.
Of course, in due course Colonel Ainsworth sued Joe Shufflebotham and Solomons Partington for trespass. Despite representation by one of Manchester’s leading radical lawyers Richard Pankhurst (husband of Emmeline) Colonel inevitably won his case. Winter Hill remained closed to the general public until the 1980s.
Kinder Scout Mass Trespass
One weekend at the start of April 1932 a group from Manchester Young Communists League were out walking on Bleaklow, a similar, slightly lower, gritstone plateau lying to the north of Kinder Scout. Partway through their walk they were met by a party of gamekeepers who turfed them off the land forcing them to go back the way they came.
Amongst the group was Benny Rothman, a 21 year old from Cheetham Hill who was part of a Jewish family who had migrated from Romania to the UK. He was a precariously employed mechanical engineer, forced to leave school early due to his family’s poverty, he had discovered Marxism whilst a teenager through reading books on history and economics that he borrowed from the library or older workmates. Through his reading, political contacts and his involvement in trade unionism in the factories where we worked he joined the CPGB. This did not enhance his employment prospects during North Western England’s relatively lean years for manufacturing during the 1920s, and they worsened precipitously during the slump that followed the Wall Street Crash.
During a spell of unemployment, whether caused by his political activities or the general crisis of capitalism is uncertain, Benny Rothman acquired a bike and began going off for days out cycling in North Wales and the Peak District. From here he joined the CPGB aligned British Workers’ Sports Federation, and began participating in the group’s walking and cycling expeditions.
Incised by he and his comrades being turned back by the gamekeepers on Bleaklow, Benny Rothman decided to utilise the tactic of the mass trespass used at Winter Hill and which had antecedents going as far back as the emergence of private property itself, to return to the Peak District in force and scale the grandest peak of them all: Kinder Scout.
Whilst never having many more than 50,000 members, and only ever possessing a couple of MPs and a few redoubts in local government (mostly in the Scottish and Welsh coalfields) between the 1920s and the 1950s the CPGB had an enviable reputation for its ability to mobilise, organise, and the energy and dedication of its activists. The historian Raphael Samuel wrote a collection of essays called The Lost World of British Communism which vividly illustrates how the CPGB, and the struggle for the party’s vision of communism was present in every facet of its member’s lives. His sometime colleague and intellectual sparring partner, Edward Thompson, meanwhile grumbled that the student radicals of the post-1968 generation could learn something “by spending some time in a really disciplined organisation like the British army, or the British communist party”. My own Grandpa (neither a communist nor a Communist) caught the tail end of this, before the 1956-57 haemorrhaging of members, as a student at Cambridge and LSE in the early 1950s, he used to sometimes say how the CPGB had a “terrific” ability to be organised and effective.
Benny Rothman brought this machinery into gear. He declared that the British Workers’ Sports Federation, Young Communists from both sides of the Peak District and fellow travellers, would return to Derbyshire on the 24th April 1932 to ascend Kinder Scout. There was nothing that the Duke of Devonshire, who was a former Secretary of State for the Colonies, and a politician in the Conservative Party who were then providing the bulk of the government, could do about it.
On the morning of the 24th April, at least 400 Young Communists and sympathisers assembled at Bowden Quarry immediately below William Clough, one of the most direct routes to the western ridge of the Kinder Scout Plateau. Some of them were very seasoned walkers, others maybe less so. One handbill given out in Eccles advertising the direct action promised “the best day out you have ever had”. Though readers who had it thrust upon them without an enthusiasm for walking and a commitment to radical left-wing politics, might have thought that given it advertised a trip to rural Derbyshire, with a side order of the possibility of violent confrontation with people quite possibly carrying guns, that that section of the leaflet’s claims was hyperbole.
Many of those setting off from places like Ecceles will have had biographies similar to Benny Rothman’s. Impoverished childhoods, members of minoritised communities, struggling to get and keep decent work during the worst slump of the Great Depression. Those who were not on the dole, like the character in the Ewan MacColl lyric quoted earlier, were condemned to exchange their time and energy for cash, spending 5 or 6 days a week machining, tending textile machines, filing, franking, or working long hours in a shop. On their days off they wanted to go off for long days walking, exploring, talking and just being, with people like them, of similar ages, with similar life experiences and a shared sense of what was wrong with the world and how to fix it. Like communists and others on the radical left throughout time, they knew that the best way to secure access to the commons and create a free and equal society, is to come together with others and live and act as if you already live in a time and place where everything is for everybody all of the time.
So, they set off to claim perhaps the greatest of the northern English Midlands’ natural landmarks. By all accounts it was one of those events not unlike the Sex Pistols concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976. There was not an enormous number of people there that day, but of those that did, many of them went on to do impressive things in whatever they dedicated their life to. Ewan MacColl himself was there, as supposedly was the historian A.J.P. Taylor, and the composer Michael Tippett.
At least one person brought a camera with them and there are several pictures from the day. They capture a column of determined looking young men, and more than a few young women, most of them barely out of their teens, few older than 30, heading out to climb Kinder Scout, leaping across drystone walls.
In true CPGB fashion the mass trespass had been organised with near military precision. In addition to the Manchester group assembled at Bowden Quarry a group from Sheffield was setting out from Edale to climb Jacob’s Ladder. A third group was also advancing on the plateau from another direction the aim being to catch any gamekeepers or others in a pincer movement which they could not repel.
When the party reached the Duke of Devonshire’s hunting estate the gamekeepers did attempt to force them back. A few scuffles broke out between gamekeepers and trespassers. According to Benny Rothman years after the event, several gamekeepers had their sticks seized by the trespassing party, snapped into pieces, and handed back to them.
The sheer force of numbers proved too much for the estate’s gamekeepers who could at best only keep pace with the crowd. The Mancunian CPGB activists and fellow travellers reached the ridge and marched along it triumphantly, rendezvousing with the groups from Sheffield and elsewhere.
Bang to Rights
Having successfully stormed Kinder Scout the group began their descent. On the way down however, they encountered Derbyshire County Police out in force. Six arrests were made including that of Benny Rothman.
The trespassers were brought before Derby Assizes charged with “riotous assembly”. A grand jury consisting of two brigadier generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains, two Derby City County Aldermen and eleven country landlords decided what to do with the case. After their trials, five of the six defendants (including Benny Rothman who received four months) were handed prison sentences of between two and six months to all but one of the defendants.
Despite outrage from across the left of the political spectrum, a rally in support of the imprisoned organisers at Winnats Pass which attracted 10,000 attendees, and defiance by those who took part, it looked as if the landowners and landlords had won the day yet again.
Un-Enclosed
Today, far from being a place where specific birds are bred for slaughter, Kinder Scout is a recognised National Nature Reserve and home to dozens of rare species of animals. The Earl of Devonshire’s stone shooting lodges have crumbled into vague but blatantly human created heaps, indistinguishable from the ruins of a stone age bothy, a medieval anchorite’s hut, or the dozens of cairns created by the thousands of walkers who now traverse the edges of Kinder Scout every year.
Since 1951 Kinder Scout has been part of the Peak District National Park. Under the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, agreements with landowners were reached in the 1950s and 1960s which enabled the public to access the land provided they treated it responsibly. Later laws piecemeal extended a “right to roam” to areas like the Peak District. Gradually the area has been purchased by public and quasi public organisations like the National Trust. In 1982, half a century after the Mass Trespass, Kinder Scout passed out of the hands of the Devonshire family and to the National Trust. They allow access to everybody, whilst ensuring that the plateau’s special environment and the wildlife which live there are taken care of.
The Pennine Way which runs up the northern half of England begins at the base of Jacob’s Ladder. Opened in 1965 by the radical journalist Tom Stephenson, who was a redoubtable campaigner on behalf of the imprisoned Mass Trespassers in 1932, as well as a lifelong right to roam activist. As if triumphant, the first upland crossed by the Pennine Way is Kinder Scout.
Of course, there are challenges, very clearly visible when you visit the plateau, of managing its ecology in the face of so many visitors. However, much like those who used Kinder Scout in the millennia before the Devonshire’s enclosed it, most who traverse the plateau or walk the ridge are very careful. Meaning that Kinder Scout can be everything to everybody all of the time.
As to Benny Rothman his short spell in prison did him no long term harm, though it did affect his immediate employment prospects. He went on to have a successful career as a skilled machinist at Metro-Vickers, and became an important local figure in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, as well as a campaigner for other causes close to his heart such as access to the countryside and nature conservation. The biographies of many other trespassers are similar. Arguably thanks to its long term impact on enhancing British people’s access to the land and the facilities and provisions made for walking and other outdoor pursuits, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass represents one of the great historical achievements of the CPGB and British communism more widely.
- If you would like to find out more about the events before, during and after the Trespass, I recommend the Working Class Movement Library website, and the website put together by the Hayfield Kinder Trespass History Group.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps
In compiling this walk I am heavily indebted to the creators of the “Kinder Scout Mass Trespass Walk” (the National Trust, Peak District National Park Authority and High Peak Borough Council, and numerous walkers, historians and activists), from whom I picked up the core outline of the route to take up and around the plateau.
Also, a word of warning. Kinder Scout is reasonably safe to visit, but is height and remote location has to be recognised and respected. This walk is more strenuous than many on this site, and walking boots are advised. As are a good coat, a hat and gloves. Even on quite sunny days it is far, far colder at 600 metres above sea level than it is on the ground!
This walk tracing the footsteps of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespassers in 1932 begins from Hayfield Bus Station. Fittingly this was the site of Hayfield’s Railway Station, where the core group of Trespassers coming across from Manchester disembarked to walk to their Bowden Quarry muster point on the 24th April 1932.
These days the railway station is a distant memory. A sculpture of a steam train, rendered in a style which recalls Quentin Blake’s work as an illustrator, stands mockingly in the middle of the car park next to the bus stop. Given how much I paid one of the local bus operators for a return – covering the 2.5 mile journey – from New Mills to Hayfield I fondly imagine the Trespassers engaging in a spot of autoréduction in the face of such tolls to access the hills…
Setting off from the bus stop you turn right and walk in the direction of Hayfield’s tall, thin, rectangular church tower.
Before you reach it there are a set of traffic lights across the main road around the centre of the village.
On the other side of the road carry on walking down a road past the village’s Conservative Club, and past the church.
Just after the church you emerge from the lane you have been walking along on a larger road.
Turn left here and cross a bridge over the small stream that runs through the village.
Once on the other side of the stream you approach a t-junction.
At the junction opposite you stands a pharmacy which retains its snazzy, pop modernist “Chemist” sign.
Here turn right and follow the road uphill towards the outskirts of the village.
Today Hayfield has a quietly affluent feel. It is just outside the Peak District National Park but fringed by it on three sides, making it a popular location for homeworkers, occasional commuters, retirees and holiday lets. Prior to the Second World War however, it was a mill and quarrying town, as well as a centre for the rural hamlets and little farmsteads surrounding it.
On your left up a snicket running uphill you pass a tiny plaque commemorating the arrest of the leaders of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in 1932. When I passed by on a Sunday morning in early April 2022, a small cluster of Duke of Edinburgh students had paused for their teacher to tell them a version of the story of the Trespass and its importance for the right to access the countryside.
Continuing up the road you pass steadily thinning ranks of cottages.
You pass the white painted Sportsman Inn, a nod to the area’s past as home to aristocratic shooting estates, on your left.
By now you are following the road along a wooded hillside.
Some distance after passing the pub you come to Bowden Quarry on your left.
It’s worth pausing here for a few moments to scout out the muster point for the Mass Trespass, and also to see the thoughtful memorial affixed to the quarry’s wall, which was unveiled by Benny Rothman on the occasion of the Mass Trespasses’ fiftieth Anniversary in 1982.
Today the quarry is a car park for Kinder Scout, maintained by the National Trust and the Peak District National Park Authority.
After the quarry, keep on the road for some further distance.
Presently you approach a wall, where the road is partly obscured by a gate, which marks the entrance to the land surrounding Kinder Reservoir.
There is a short stretch of road after this entrance.
However, soon you approach two gates. The footgate on your left leads onto the footpath towards Kinder Scout, so take this one.
Here you follow a steep, narrow stone path uphill a short distance.
It soon levels out.
Enabling you to get your first views of the plateau above you unencumbered by trees.
Follow the path along for some distance with the Reservoir stretching in front of you.
It’s worth having a look back from time-to-time to check out the view behind you as well.
Soon you come to a wooden gate on your left.
Having passed through it the path runs down to near the side of the Reservoir.
You then follow a relatively easy path along the line of the Reservoir for some distance.
Presently you come to another gateway near the end of the Reservoir.
Once through it you rapidly enter into altogether wilder and ungoverned terrain.
After crossing a small stream by a wooden bridge (or if you are in walking boots you can wade through, it’s not deep, or at least wasn’t when I passed by) you come to a path running uphill to your left marked by a metal National Trust sign.
Head up this gentle seeming path a short way.
This is the entrance to William Clough, one of the few routes by which it is possible to access the Kinder Scout plateau, and the one nearest to Manchester, hence why the party led by Benny Rothman and co. choose it. Apparently it takes its name from a cutler who used to ply his trade in the narrow sloping dale.
William Clough’s initial gentleness is deceptive. Soon you are engaged in a rocky scramble, partly in the brook which runs downhill.
Needless to say it is possible to make steady, if often slow and a bit strenuous progress uphill.
When you are able to take a break from clambering, there are some seriously impressive views behind you back down William Clough.
Near the top a set of cut stone steps begins.
Once over the brow you are near the top of Ashop Head, which at 544 metres above sea level, is a pretty substantial summit in its own right.
The way you have walked so far, was in fact opened up by the local footpath association in the 1890s. An early victory for the more “constitutional” wing of the access to the land movement.
As such it was here at the top of the steep William Clough that the most decisive clash with the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers took place. According to later accounts from the trespassers a lone walker was making his way (legally) down the path which crosses Ashop Head. The line of gamekeepers saw the Trespassers waving to him fraternally and made the assumption that he was part of their group. This led the gamekeepers to descend on the man, tackle him and start beating him with their sticks. This led some of the Trespassers to run over to assist the man who was being assaulted which caused some of the incidents which led to the charges of “riotous assembly”.
Whatever did happen at this point in the day, once the Trespassers had reached the top of William Clough by their strength of numbers they were able to push past the gamekeepers and head left from the top of the revetment, walking along what is now a stone paved section of the Pennine Way.
Above you looms the top of the Kinder Scout Plateau.
To get onto it properly you have to climb a steep and dizzying set of stone steps.
There are some spectacular views from the sides both out into North West England, and back towards the centre of the Peak District National Park.
Once at the top of the stone steps follow the very clear path to your right.
It is relatively hard to get lost on Kinder Scout, provided you follow the clear paths, and always head right. The sharp edge of the line of the plateau guides you.
You follow the path hugging quite close to the edge, for a substantial distance.
On the way, besides the striking view to your right, it is possible to get a sense of the spectacular landscape of peat, gorse and intriguing rock formations all around you.
After several miles of walking you come to a deep inwards gash into the rock, where the plateau’s rock has been jaggedly worn away.
This heralds that you are about to encounter the channel which carries the nascent River Kinder to the Kinder Downfall waterfall. With a 30 metre drop it is one of the most spectacular of the plateau’s features, and is the most impressive waterfall in the Peak District.
There are apparently excellent views on both sides of the river channel of the waterfall. However, I don’t have enough of a head for heights to get that close to a pretty sheer cliff edge, so I decided to forgo it and pressed on.
The next section is similar in length to that which leads up to Kinder Downfall. Though in many ways it is even craggier.
Here there is a bit more of a choice of paths, but generally they all lead to the same place. Kinder Low Trig Point. This is not the highest point of Kinder Scout – that lies somewhere in the interior of the plateau – but with its sturdy, white painted Ordnance Survey trig point and impressive views on both sides, it suffices at the top of the mountain for most people.
There are some excellent views back towards Great Manchester at that point. You can imagine how it must have felt for the Trespassers, like modern day walkers passing this way, to put their everyday lives in perspective. You can also see as far as Winter Hill, site of an enormous earlier mass trespass in 1896.
This stretch initially has a significant moorland feel to it.
Then as you approach the trig point you pass some impressive gritstone rock formations.
Along the way there is a good chance that in season you will hear, and maybe see, some of the rare species of bird which make Kinder Scout there home.
Eventually you round a corner and see the trig point ahead of you.
It’s well worth pausing for a while once you reach it, clambering up onto some of the stones near to the trig point, and gazing out at the view on both sides, victorious.
After Kinder Low trig point you continue heading straight to your right across a fairly flat part of the plateau.
Having walked a fairly short distance you reach a prominent rock formation.
From here there are great views on your left into the interior of the plateau.
It is here that you begin your descent and enter into the final sections of the walk.
Here the path, paved once more, slopes gently, but steadily downhill.
To your left there are spectacular views of Edale, leading into the heart of the Peak District.
Its possible make good time alone the stone paving, which forms part of the Pennine Way.
You pass over a craggy section known as Swine’s Back, and down a steeper section.
As you head down, out to your left you can see the first seriously uphill section of the Pennine Way stretching up to meet you, climbing up the steep Jacob’s Ladder from Edale.
Soon you are back on flatter ground.
Here to your right there is a cut across just before you reach the point where the Pennine Way climbing Jacob’s Ladder reaches the foothills of Kinder Scout.
Turn down this cut through to your right heading towards a drystone wall.
At the drystone wall turn right again.
Here you encounter a gate which you head through.
On the other side you are at the top of an old drover’s track or packhorse route. Follow it downhill.
Follow this track for some distance.
Presently on your right there is a style leading onto a well worn footpath.
Cross over the style then turn left down the path.
It leads around the side of the Kinder Scout plateau.
The path steadily runs to the right, and gently downhill bringing the pastoral, sheep farming lower slopes of Kinder Scout ever closer.
Keep on the path making for the line of a drystone wall immediately ahead of you in the distance, instead of following the tracks leading downhill off to your left.
Eventually you reach the drystone wall and the gate set within it.
Here you can look back to the rock formation above you. The impressive, hard face of Kinderlow End. This is officially the southern end of the plateau.
On the other side of the gate you find yourself at the top of pastoral, sheep farming land. The short green grass is a little bit of a surprise after the peaty, gritstone moorland, you have walked across for hours. You are back amidst parcelled up, well governed countryside, neatly divided up by walls and fences once more.
Turn left here and walk through a gap in the drystone wall.
Keep heading left following the path down a slope as it heads steady to the right.
Despite having left the Kinder Scout plateau you are still quite high up.
Presently you come to a style.
Having crossed the style, carry on down the hill across the field in front of you.
Pass through a gate and cross the field beyond that as well.
Here you come to a further style, cross this as well.
Then follow the path downhill towards some farm buildings beneath you.
Cross over one final style.
This leads onto a short track leading down towards the farm buildings.
Follow the track around the farm buildings.
Then as it curves around a valley and steadily downhill.
Soon it reaches a public road on the valley floor.
Turn right here and follow the road as it runs towards the River Kinder, now several miles away from its source near Kinder Downfall, hundreds of metres above you.
At the River you turn left.
This leads a short distance towards a toilet block and a campsite (on your left) and a bridge (on your right).
On the other side of the bridge stands Bowden Quarry. You have successfully retraced the route of the 24th April 1932 Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout.
From Bowden Quarry it is simply a case of heading left and following the road back down to Hayfield. Along the way there is the option of stopping off at the Sportsman Inn pub. There are also a couple of good pubs in Hayfield, as well as an excellent array of cafes and other establishments, for comrades to frequent.
Getting Back
From Hayfield bus station there are frequent services back towards New Mills and onto Stockport, as well as further north to Glossop. Alternatively New Mills is a relatively unstrenuous two and a half mile walk along the Sett Valley Trail (which uses the trackbed of the railway which took many of the Trespassers in 1932 to and from Hayfield) if you would prefer to walk back.