The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (4 page)

Monotonous as it may be, there is something strangely comforting in walking it too. The only views you get are those through the bars (on the railway side) or the mesh (on the golf course side), but it’s all very familiar, ubiquitous even. There are a million paths just like it all over the land, those that duck along the bottom of people’s gardens, run atop rubbish-strewn railway banks, squeeze down alleyways between 1960s houses, get caked in the footprints and fag ends of persons unknown. The Bottoms is Everypath, and that seems entirely fitting.

Leaving sleek little Flixton, I was hungry for some proper Lancastrian blood and strife, a slab of red meat, under the red flag in this, the red rose county. Clarke Rogerson at the busy HQ of the PNFS had mentioned a couple of important footpath battles that had taken place on the moors above Bolton and Darwen, old mill towns to the north of Manchester. To him, they were of far greater significance than the showpiece mass trespass at Kinder Scout, and considerably earlier to boot. The Bolton struggle, which culminated in a series of mass trespasses in September 1896, was the most noteworthy. It had centred on access to Winter Hill, a swollen moor to the north of the town, and was an archetype of the kind of struggles so lovingly eulogised in Lancastrian socialist memory.

At Winter Hill, there was the full cast of goodies and baddies. In the boo-hiss corner was Colonel Richard Ainsworth, lord of Smithills Hall and boss of a huge bleaching works. With all the nearby cotton mills, there was mucho brass in bleach, especially for the company that pioneered the use of chlorine in the process. People who breathed in a daily diet of chlorine and smog were understandably keen to get a little of the fresh stuff come the weekend, and Winter Hill had long been a popular place for Boltonians to do just that. The early- to mid-Victorian period had seen a flowering of working-class interest in outdoor life, and not just among ramblers. Societies of amateur botanists, birders, geologists and naturalists were booming in all the northern industrial towns; they gathered libraries, specimens, collections and herbaria, wrote authoritative textbooks and papers. Elizabeth Gaskell, in her 1848 novel
Mary Barton
, described the

‘. . . weavers, common hand-loom weavers, who throw the shuttle with unceasing sound, though Newton’s
Principia
lies open on the loom, to be snatched at in work hours, but revelled over in meal times, or at night . . . There are botanists among them, equally familiar with either the Linnaean or the Natural system, who know the name and habitat of every plant within a day’s walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower . . .’

Ainsworth had taken over the Hall and the family firm in 1865. Fiercely anti-socialist and anti-union, he adored the trappings of the gentleman’s life, none more than pointing a gun at a grouse. On his favourite shooting ground of Winter Hill, part of his Smithills estate, he built a shooting hut and decided to close an old track, known as Coalpit Lane, that led across it. A gate was placed across the track further back towards town, employees were placed around the moor’s perimeter to warn people off and numerous ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ signs appeared.

Within days, word had spread and Bolton was seething. Together, the Bolton Socialist Party (BSP) and the town’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF), a Marxist outfit, decided to organise a mass trespass across Winter Hill, and advertised it for the next Sunday, 6 September 1896. Much to their amazement, over 10,000 people came. A small band of policemen and gamekeepers was quickly overwhelmed, and with great excitement, the crowds charged through the now broken gate, tramped over the hill and down the other side to the village of Belmont, giving the landlord of the Wright’s Arms a day he’d never forget.

The protest electrified Bolton, and the tiny revolutionary groupings of the BSP and SDF could scarcely believe their luck. They had located a deep nerve amongst the people, had hit it with pinpoint precision and were now ready to take it up a gear. Capitalism was trembling! Today a footpath across a Lancashire moor, tomorrow the world! It was decided to repeat the mass trespass on the following Sunday. Despite pouring rain, even more people came this time, around 12,000. A few tooled-up lads came looking for a dust-up with the law, but the law wisely decided to step aside before it came to that. More euphoria, Defence Committees, feverish chat, public meetings, the letters’ pages in the local papers raging one way and the other.

Then Ainsworth bit back. On the morning of the third demonstration – the next Saturday this time, to appease Sunday worshippers – his land agent trotted around Bolton in a hansom cab, doling out writs against ten named men from the first trespass. Nervousness about getting nabbed, combined with the inevitable tailing off of interest by some and another day of terrible weather, reduced the numbers to around 5,000. Another 32 writs were served, which only made the central core of organisers dig in deeper, returning to Winter Hill the very next day to do it all again. Joseph Shufflebotham, a leading light of the SDF and one of the original ten pursued by Ainsworth, was scathing in his assessment of his fair-weather comrades: ‘On Sunday I took my wife and three children . . . but about 200 were afraid of losing their names, and turned back – but of course, they were not socialists. No socialist can be afraid of paper warnings.’

Winter Hill, and the impending trial of those Ainsworth had named as the agitators, became a
cause célèbre
in northwestern socialist circles. National names came to the town to speak, and
Justice
, the journal of the tiny SDF, could barely contain its excitement: ‘Bolton is now an A1 Lancashire town for socialist propaganda . . . hurrah for the revolution!’ You’ve got to love the eternal optimism of the hardcore left in the face of all the evidence – and still it goes on. Every demo I’ve ever been on has been full of excitable activists from the Socialist Workers’ Party and other even tinier Trotskyist off-shoots, convinced that this rally against the poll tax, the Iraq war, government cuts, tuition fees or whatever is the start of the revolution. Meanwhile, the demonstrators happily accept the free placards, and just tear off the words ‘
Socialist Worker
’ from the top.

The trial of the original ten protagonists began in Manchester on 9 March 1897, Ainsworth’s aim being to prevent them ‘trespassing’ on his estate, the moor in particular, at any point in the future. The 44 witnesses for the defence were largely older locals who recalled using the path unhindered across Winter Hill in their youth; the 33 witnesses for the prosecution were almost all employees of Ainsworth. Nonetheless, it went his way. The ten men had injunctions served against them, and the two who were seen as ringleaders were ordered to pay costs of over £600.

Having been such a bright flash in the pan, the Winter Hill protests – amongst the largest access demonstrations ever seen in Britain – soon faded from memory, and it wasn’t until 1982 that local activist and historian Paul Salveson unearthed the story from a brief paragraph in Allen Clarke’s book
Moorlands and Memories
. By this time, far smaller protests – most notably at Kinder Scout in 1932 – had reached near mythological status, and there was much feeling in Bolton that they should claim their proud place in the saga of the ongoing march towards open access to our moors and mountains. Meetings were held, talks given, a play written and performed outside the Wimpy Bar in Bolton town centre, and a commemorative march planned for the first weekend of September, the ‘Winter Hill 1896 Trespass Anniversary’ as the leading banner had it. True, though unusual to make such a splash for the 86th anniversary.

Paul Salveson expected a couple of hundred to come on the march, but in the event nearly 2,000 made it, confirming Bolton’s historic ability to mobilise numbers when needs be. Benny Rothman, the public face of the Kinder protest, came along, as did Labour MP Andrew Bennett, a brass band and Mike Harding, comedian, folk singer, soon-to-be President of the Ramblers’ Association and all-round professional Lancashire Lad (the title of his first album). Further celebrations were held in 1996, the centenary of the mass trespass, including the long-awaited dedication by the local council of Coalpit Lane as an official right of way. Having been so strangely forgotten, Winter Hill 1896 is now firmly etched in the folklore of both Bolton and the access movement.

On a chilly March Sunday morning, Paul met me at Belmont, the end of the protest route, and ferried me back to its start, at the disputed gate on Coalpit Lane. He had to rush off, but pointed me on my way up to the soggy, still-snowbound peak of Winter Hill. Not that you could miss it: a cluster of massive telecommunications masts occupies the summit now, making it even more desolate than nature alone has managed. There is something powerfully gloomy about the place: famous for a gruesome murder in 1838, regular sightings of UFOs and a litany of plane crashes. In the worst one, on a grim winter’s day in 1958, a flight from the Isle of Man mistook its position and smacked into the hillside, killing 35. The impact was only 350 yards from the summit transmitter station, yet so severe was the weather that the men working there didn’t even realise that there had been a crash.

If you’re blessed with a clear day on Winter Hill, and mercifully my cold March morning was one such, it’s the view that stuns, all the way over the whole of Greater Manchester. A few silent chimneys are the only reminder that, not so long ago, this would have been a view over Hades itself, a seething, smoking cauldron of humanity crammed into every crevice. Now, the most obvious landmark, glittering Teutonically in the cold sunlight, sits right over the other side of Manchester: the Chill Factor indoor ski slope, next to the candy domes of the Trafford Centre.

Walking down the other side to Belmont, I couldn’t shake from my head the chorus of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Manchester Rambler’, a song written from his personal experience of the Kinder protest. Checking there was no-one within earshot, I even bellowed it out a couple of times, swelling to a climax on the immortal chorus, ‘I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday.’ It felt brilliant to be high up on the Lancashire moors on a bright, blustery Sunday morning, and I was far from alone. Since first thing, I’d been aware of ramblers everywhere, alone, in couples and in joyful groups of all ages. It was particularly thrilling to see so many kids and teenagers along with their parents and grandparents, and none of them looked grumpy or bored. Perhaps, though, if I’d been near enough, I might have heard ‘
Graaaan
, next time can we go to t’Chill Factor?
Pleeeeeease
.’

By that strange law of universal coincidence, on the very day of the first Winter Hill trespass, Sunday, 6 September 1896, another hill just up the road was witnessing its precise antithesis. The people of Darwen, a smaller mill town less than ten miles north, were celebrating the end of a long access battle with a procession, mayor, corporation, brass bands, banners and all, up on to the moor above the town. There too, generations of locals had been used to walking, but had suddenly found that it was ruled off-limits by the landowner, in this case a vicar who rarely even made it to Darwen, as his parish was in Dorset. Two years later, another procession headed up the hill, this time to open a viewing tower that looks to be the very epitome of the Victorian age – dark, severe, yet lofty and ambitious, and built to celebrate its apogee, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Nominally, that is. The florid plaques on the tower’s base all celebrate the Queen’s longevity and list the aldermen who shuffled up the hill to applaud the dignitaries on that day in September 1898, but a more recent addition gives the game away. That is a plain crest that celebrates the 1996 centenary of the victory for the townspeople in gaining access to the moor that glowers above their streets.

It may have taken nearly a century to get the real reason for the Darwen Tower inscribed on its side, but the ambition was explicit from the start. Letters in the local press supported the idea of a Jubilee Tower, but as long as it also served as a celebration of the townsfolk’s victory over their absentee landlord, the Rev. William Arthur Duckworth. With sweet irony, it was Duckworth himself, on one of his rare forays north to Darwen, who had to preside over the opening ceremony of the very symbol of his recent defeat. As I walked towards the tower earlier on that windswept Sunday morning, the mist whipping across the moor brought its shape in and out of focus. At a certain stage of semi-visibility, it looked like nothing more than a fat, raised middle finger, quite probably from the people of Darwen to the good reverend. From another angle, and in another stage of atmospheric opacity, there’s something undeniably phallic about it, and that’s probably aimed at him too.

This is hard country. Old snow lay curdled in piles in north-facing clefts and gullies, or packed up against the dry stone walls, sullen lines of dirty sandstone augmented by concrete blocks and broken paving slabs wherever they’d collapsed. It’s a well-worn path, but you have to keep your eyes on the ground, as ankle-turning ruts and rocks litter the way. Wherever I looked, the whole scene appeared to have been painted by an artist with just three colours in his palette: olive green, battleship grey and a mucky ochre. Even calling it olive green gives it a continental raffishness that the month of March over Darwen can never possibly fulfil, but you get the picture.

Around the top of the tower there are optimistic little toposcope plaques, telling you what you might be able to see if only the mist would thin a while. It won’t. Everyone who writes about Darwen Tower mentions not seeing anything. Official boasts claim that, on a clear day, you can see Snowdonia, but someone I read said that he’s been up there dozens of times, and never caught sight of it. The plaque facing Wales has long since been jemmied off the tower, but the other two are still there. I looked out into the fog that was zipping past like a battalion of ghosts, willing myself to see, as promised, the Old Man of Coniston or Kinder Scout, my ultimate destination on this tour of the north-west’s much fought-over footpaths. A couple walking a pair of very fat Labradors loomed out of the mist instead.