In 1951, Dartmoor received its National Park designation, after the Peak District and Snowdonia. Now, out of all of them, it’s the one that still carries that 1950s tang of jolly yomping and packed lunches wrapped in brown paper.
The atmosphere is simply psychologically different from that, say, of the Cheviot Hills in Northumbria. There, you are aware of a certain hardness, both of prospects and of people. The chill wind biting in from the North Sea adds to an intangible sense of inhospitality. Clearly, the weather on Dartmoor can be brutish, and there are times of the year – when the frost has gouged ruts into the solid soil – that walking is uncomfortable and hard. Yet there is an underlying feeling of friendliness, somehow. Of all the wild regions in England, Dartmoor has historically also been the most welcoming to ramblers. In fact, the history of this landscape, and that of the ramblers’ movement, is knitted closely together. In the late-nineteenth century, Dartmoor was in some senses almost a prototype national park.
I am cheating slightly by coming here in the warm mellowing light of the late summer. This particular rich, mossy stretch of Dartmoor – the dignified pale grey boulders carved by the wind and the rain into fascinatingly contoured shapes, the white spume of fast rushing streams, bright against the green fern – takes me back to a primary school field trip in 1978. We were staying in the absurdly cute Devon seaside town of Dawlish for a week, and every day a coach would come and take us eleven-year-olds off into the wild open countryside. We had wellington boots, but I had rather grown out of mine – still I happily squeezed my feet into them. Then off we set on a breezy, cheery walk near Buckfastleigh.
By the end of it, I was neither breezy not cheery, for my feet, from toes to heels, were pulsing with pain. I didn’t make a fuss, because you didn’t want to be sent back to the coach, but as a Dartmoor mist swooped in, the teacher couldn’t help notice me limping. Back at Dawlish, she advised me to paddle in the salt water of the sea, to ease the blisters. Sound advice. The next day, and in better footwear, I was back out charging around on the moors. There is something about this part of the world that encourages Blue Peter-ish enthusiasm. And it has done for a very long time. Dartmoor is the emblem of heartiness in England: it is where you go if you want to get a Duke of Edinburgh award; it is where serious-minded teenagers embark upon character-building all-night hikes. Dartmoor has a sort of fresh-faced, nicely brought-up virtue written all over it.
The story of how it came to be free to all walkers is also the story of the development of another side of the pastime: the newfound ease of travel. The century of steam saw railway routes spreading right across the country in the mid-nineteenth century – the detailed train maps depicting the new lines like veins. Dartmoor became a favoured destination for the equally new mass phenomenon of walking tourists.
In the 1840s, Brunel’s Great Western Railway had stretched from Bristol to London, and was now reaching out to envelop the south of Devon, and devour the smaller rail operators. For nature enthusiasts, this was a tremendous boon, especially as it was not too long before the railways were reaching ever further round the edges of the moor, into Okehampton. But the real breakthrough came rather later, in 1911, when even longer distance day excursions by rail from London – specifically aimed at walkers – were introduced. For ordinary Londoners, this would have opened up hitherto unimagined opportunities. After an early start, they could find themselves climbing and exploring this strange and beautiful and faintly alien landscape before lunchtime.
This feat of travel made a whole new world possible to walkers, and it also marked a profound philosophical shift. Once, if you wanted to travel to the other side of the country, you would need not only a great deal of money, but also a great deal of time. For most classes of people, on meagre wages, with no holidays to speak of other than the holy days themselves, such journeys were beyond possibility. With the railways, however, a destination such as Dartmoor became possible to reach from London in the space of a morning; and could be returned from the very same day. The Great Western Railway extended this extraordinary opportunity to London’s working classes by means of extremely reasonable fares. The poor could now enjoy the same exhilarating landscapes as the upper classes.
To this day, holiday-making walkers get off the train in their multitudes at Newton Abbot in south Devon; just a few miles up the road stands Hay Tor, an impressive formation of granite that also marks the very start of the moor. This place has a walkers’ information centre. But there is rather more to it all than that. To reach Hay Tor, you must walk up a long, steep grassy hill, and when you do so, you realise – along with the scores of other people, all here to do the same thing – that you are approaching this rock as though it was some kind of sacred monument.
The tor is the size of three or four houses, and the grey wrinkled rock brings out a sort of delighted awe. People clamber on it; people walk around it, their hands trailing on its surface; people sit with their backs to it, comforted by the shelter it gives from the wind. It is almost as if the rock itself is imbued with a sort of benevolent identity. It has some quality that makes people want to touch it. Additionally, the view from here is quite wonderful: the hazy blue of the distant sea, plus the valleys of the Teign river.
Beyond the tor lies the moor; on this breezy summer day, it is very much more colourful than you would ever expect. The purple heather is out as are the bright yellow flowers of gorse. These are jumbled in with the rich green fern. The result, I have to say, is startlingly vulgar. The clashing purple and yellow give the area an oddly jarring, 1970s feel. None the less, there is something immensely cheering about the old granite railway tracks (along which the quarried stone was conveyed in the nineteenth century to the river); the deep valleys, which act as the most amazing echo chamber (I can hear several fishermen by the side of the river about quarter of a mile away); and the playful goats, locking horns on a narrow tor ledge and doing their best to push one another off.
The fact is that Dartmoor has been a totemic walking attraction for a very long time, so it seems completely natural that it should also have been such a pivotal part of the post-Second World War settlement that established the ordinary person’s right to walk across such wild and remote places. The moor was rather more populous in centuries past, and the land was richer. Even so, by the nineteenth century, the idea of this moor and similar West Country locales was capturing the imagination of popular writers. The turn of the century saw the publication of the moorland ur-text, the work that would bring walkers to Dartmoor not merely from British cities, but from around the world: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Over the great Grimpen Mire there hung a dense white fog. It was drifting slowly in our direction and banked itself up like a wall on that side of us, low, but thick and well defined. The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of distant tors and rocks borne upon its surface. Holmes’s face was turned towards it and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift … rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour in our faces, while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-high into the dark, quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet.
Away from lurid romance, yet nonetheless still rather lurid, the moor’s greatest chronicler, William Crossing, traversed it ceaselessly in the late nineteenth century. His widely-selling book A Guide to Dartmoor (1909) added much to its allure. An evocative passage in a subsequent volume, The Land of Stream and Tor, conjured up a juicy scene that could have been scored by Mussorgsky:
First a pattering of big rain drops, and then, apparently at no great distance above our heads, a tremendous peal of thunder. The old moor seemed to tremble beneath the shock, and the hills around echoed and re-echoed the deep roar. Vivid flashes of lightning darted out from the inky clouds, and appeared to strike the dark crags which towered near us, and a drenching rain descended with a loud hissing noise. There was no cessation to the roar of the thunder. Peal after peal crashed out from the heavens, all nature seeming as if in the throes of some tremendous struggle. The storm was most appalling in its severity, and there was no place to which we could turn to shelter from its pitiless fury.1
Even today, these sudden storms can create real emergencies. A recent Ten Tors challenge – involving young people hiking over the moor – had to be abandoned, and the youngsters evacuated by helicopter when conditions got too rough: streams and rivers swelled to monstrous cataracts that threatened to burst their banks. Mires are one thing, but a howling supernatural beast is another. The Baskerville hound tapped into something a little older, and something that those keen to yomp across Dartmoor would have been subconsciously keen on: the idea that somehow, wild creatures still roamed these wild places.
There are outbreaks of such wish-fulfilment today; every summer brings newspaper headlines concerning ‘the Beast of Bodmin’ and ‘big cat sightings’ in regions as diverse as Cornwall, Gloucestershire and Derbyshire. Sometimes such creatures are seen by farmers; other times, though, it is walkers who are witness to the astonishing sights. An ordinary, cheerful ramble is suddenly transfigured by a glimpse of something alien and utterly unknowable. The entire notion of familiar woodland trails and moorland footpaths is completely overturned by these fleeting, darting incursions of the dangerously exotic.
Such ‘big cat’ stories may not just be the emanations of fevered summer tabloids. I have been told by an extremely reliable and rather well-known source – whose identity I mean to protect – that there really is something in it. My source owns land in the West Country, not very far from Dartmoor. There have been local sightings of a black puma; indeed, rather more sightings than ever make it to the newspapers. My source’s wife was coming along their drive one day when she saw what she thought was their black labrador in the garden. She was annoyed, as the dog at that time was supposed to be kept indoors. As her car drew closer, the ‘dog’ suddenly leapt gracefully on to a wall, looked back, and then ran off at breathtaking speed. On top of this and countless other sightings, says my source, the body of one of these beautiful creatures was once found. It was decided among the local farmers and landowners to keep it quiet. As my source said: ‘Why not just leave the poor buggers alone? They’re not doing any harm.’ But how did the pumas get into these places at all? Private menageries, says my source. When such things were made illegal in the 1970s, a surprising number of exotic animal owners turfed their beasts out. And clearly some had breeding pairs. Whatever happens, these particular pumas are apparently extremely wary of human company. So why not simply let them enjoy their lives on the open moors? For that reason, everyone in the local community has agreed never to let on to the media.
The idea alone is thrilling. This walker, for instance, daydreams about being confronted with something inexpressibly atavistic, and staring into unfathomable yellow eyes. I am not alone in this. Every few months, we hear voices in Scotland calling for the reintroduction of the wolf – a species that was hunted out back in the seventeenth century.
However, at this moment – rather bathetically – I ought to counter all my swaggering talk of wanting to walk with pumas and confess to a moment of completely shaming cowardice on my Dartmoor trail. It came when, descending from a tor, I had to make my way through a tiny herd of Dartmoor ponies. These are short, fat, brown little Thelwell creatures, munching moor grass; but in one moment, they all looked up at me suddenly, trotted forward, and I leaped sideways off the path out of their way. Yes, they can bite: but not quite as effectively as a puma.
In historical terms, unlike the moors and the valleys of the north country, where struggles with local landowners and their game-keepers seemed illimitable, Dartmoor was freer simply because the bleak wastes seemed to have been abandoned to the winds. The eerie landscape was marked only with the occasional abandoned tin mine building. Not that there weren’t interested parties intent on finding some other use for these vast tracts of heathery wildness. The Duchy of Cornwall seemed ceaselessly interested in afforestation; timber of course was very big business. But a social tide was assuredly on the turn. This found a voice of sorts in 1912 with the forming of the Society for the Preservation of Nature Reserves. To many landowners and businessmen, the very idea of such a body would have been regarded as pure socialism. Whoever owned the land owned its resources, and was free to use it as they pleased. For a body with political backing such as this to begin lobbying for special preservation was a new sort of pressure.
But this was only the beginning. Such middle-class committees, seeking to secure ever larger tracts of lands for the ordinary walker to enjoy, were to proliferate over the next few years. There was an intriguingly prophetic moment from the novelist Arthur Ransome, who wrote an essay for The Worker in 1908 concerning areas such as Dartmoor, as well as the great aristocratic estates:
Instead of the hereditary owner, I imagined the People. Instead of a private park, I imagined I was walking through and enjoying a National park, a kind of English ‘Yosemite’. Why not? If we, under our present miserable economic system, can afford to allow one man to own and use such a park, surely the People who owned all the land, nationally and not individually, could afford to indulge in such a luxury.
After the First World War came the creation of the Forestry Commission. In 1926 there followed the even more influential Council for the Preservation of Rural England. The very word ‘preservation’ carried a charge of anxiety; that the land needed saving. The cloying industrial vapours of the nineteenth century had drifted thickly over into the twentieth. From a belt across the Midlands, and then further north from Manchester to Leeds, the towns were uniformly smirched, the grand Gothic municipal buildings blackened and a blue sky only ever appearing on those days when the manufactories closed. Otherwise the heavy cloud, all those chemicals and all that ash, was unmoving. On top of this there had been the filthy 1914–18 war of trenches and squalor; the men returning from that conflict had been promised better lives, yet the cities were just as noxious as before.
So these committees to do with land use, and with ensuring that green spaces remained green, were far from being filled with delicate aesthetes. This was to do with the well-being of the population; a sense that everyone had a right to have some form of access to the open air, and to be able to roam and ramble across certain wide open areas with minimum hindrance or obstacle.
Although far from any sites of industrial blight, Dartmoor faced its own threats over the years; not merely that of a huge amount of afforestation, but the sequestering of the land by the military, plus pressure from the water companies to set up huge and terrifically unsightly dams that could in turn provide hydro-electric power. By the turn of the century, the ever-expanding military had been a hindrance to local walkers for some time, as attested by the Edwardian Dartmoor historian Sabine Baring-Gould. There was a case in Belstone, near Steeperton Tor, that attracted his attention. He wrote:
The military authorities coveted this tract for artillery practice … They set up butts, but woman intervened (sic). A very determined lady marched up to them, although the warning red flags fluttered, and planted herself in front of a target, took out of her reticule a packet of ham sandwiches and a flask of cold tea, and declared her intention of spending the day there. In vain did the military protest, entreat, remonstrate; she proceeded to nibble at her sandwiches and defied them to fire. She carried the day.2
The moor had long been a special case and had its own group of specialised devotees: the Dartmoor Preservation Association, which had been formed in 1883. By the 1920s, when ramblers were beginning to coalesce into something approaching a national movement, there was the beginning of interest at government level in the idea of certain tracts of land being essentially nationalised – that is, set aside as free spaces for everyone’s use. Common lands on an epic scale, upon which there would be no restrictions of access.
In 1929, Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald set up a parliamentary committee ‘to consider and report,’ as he directed, ‘whether it is desirable and feasible to establish one or more national parks in Great Britain with a view to the preservation of the natural characteristics, including flora and fauna, and to the improvement of recreational facilities for the people; and to advise generally and in particular as to the areas, if any, that are most suitable to purpose.’
As all these encouraging political developments were taking place in Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster, 1931 was a key moment elsewhere for all walkers: the formation of the National Council of Ramblers’ Federations. This consisted of selected members from walking groups up and down the country, and in 1935 was renamed as the altogether slicker-sounding Ramblers’ Association. The rancorous aftermath of the Kinder Scout trespass of 1932 had broadly captured the public imagination, and had brought support for walkers, as well as an upswing in enthusiasm for walking generally. A great many people were clearly in need of an organisation – a club, really – to belong to. Whether to receive advice, or to find other people in one’s area to walk with, or to campaign alongside when it came to opening up blocked paths, the new and progressive Ramblers’ Association presented the inclusive face of the walking movement.
The aims of the Association obviously appealed more to left-leaning voters than others, but it was not about political gestures. Unlike the brilliant Benny Rothman and his colleagues, the members of the Ramblers’ Association were not overtly communist. The ultimate aim of the Association was very simple and straightforward: the opening of vast expanses of empty uncultivated land that were out of bounds to over 99 per cent of the population.
It tapped into a new popular appetite for the outdoors. In the mid 1930s, the hugely popular and influential writer J. B. Priestley was moved to nostalgia for his own turn-of-the-century boyhood rambles in Yorkshire; rather freer and easier, we note, than those to be had in Derbyshire. ‘The Bradford folk have always gone streaming out to the moors,’ he wrote, ‘in the old days, when I was a boy there, this enthusiasm for the … country had bred a race of mighty pedestrians. Everybody went for enormous walks. I have known men who thought nothing of tramping between 30 or 40 miles every Sunday. In those days, the farmhouses would give you a sevenpenny tea, and there was always more on the table than you could eat. Everybody was knowledgeable about the Dales and their walks, and would spend hours discussing the minutest details of these.’3
Not everyone was keen. In 1937, philosopher C. E. M. Joad noted sourly of the rambling craze: ‘There are fat girls in shorts, youths in gaudy ties and plus fours … and a café on top of every hill for their accommodation.’ Down south, Dartmoor was even more popular with walkers by the mid 1930s, because it had become de-populated, and because the old industries and farmsteads, which had been part of the moor since the thirteenth century, were quietly dying off. By the time Holmes and Watson got there, much of the working moor had disappeared. Conan Doyle had been on hand to turn it into a sort of Gothic playground. The 1939 Hollywood version of the Hound tale, with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, perhaps might have sharpened appetites even further.
For walkers all over the country, 1939 also brought a curiously regressive parliamentary step, on the very eve of the Second World War. It was a revival of the Access to Mountains Act, the essence of which had first been pushed by James Bryce MP. Ostensibly this should have been a bit of a triumph for the new-born Ramblers’ Association – the first legislation that would enable such walkers as the Kinder Scout enthusiasts to stroll across specially designated wild land with impunity. But there were built-in clauses, at the insistence of landowning interests, that actually made it rather hostile to ramblers.
The debate on the subject of access had been hotting up in the national press. The novelist H. G. Wells, in a piece headlined: ‘On War Aims – The Rights of Man’, in The Times in 1939, had this to say:
Every man, without distinction of race or colour, is entitled to nourishment, housing, covering, medical care and … the right to roam over any kind of country, moorland, mountain, farm, great garden or what not, where his presence will not be destructive of it, its special use, not dangerous to himself, nor seriously inconvenient to his fellow citizens.
The phrase ‘right to roam’ was to acquire a special resonance in the decades to come. But in parliament, the 1939 Access to Mountains Bill provoked (largely Conservative) opposition, chiefly in the form of Captain Frank Hughes (Hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk) and Col. R. S. Clarke (MP for East Grinstead). Their view was that ‘the Bill attacked the whole principle of owning land … it would mean the owner no longer had the right to enjoy his property.’ They then went on to defend privately-owned grouse moors, on the grounds that they were beneficial to a wider section of the economy than might appear at first glance: ‘Grouse moors provide employment worth £3,500,000 a year … 20–30,000 gamekeepers … cartridge makers and gun-makers.’
Even more importantly to the Conservative landowners was the idea of damage; that townsfolk wandering all over the land could harm crops or nesting sites, leave litter or start fires. ‘The individual who owned lands designated in the Bill,’ said Col. Clarke, ‘would lose the protection the law gave him against trespass.’4 More than this, it was felt important to assert that there was still such a thing as trespass; if a landowner wanted to keep his land free of all other people, then it was his perfect right to do so. It is not too difficult to hear the class subtext here, for one still hears echoes of it in rambling conflicts to this day. In a pleasingly satirical inversion of this, on the coast of south Wales, a community of travellers has recently objected to a path running past their site on the grounds that ramblers are not to be trusted, and that you can never tell ‘what sort of people might come walking along.’
Class loathing was certainly what veteran rambler John Bunting and his friends from Sheffield experienced in the 1930s. It wasn’t just for reasons of grouse-spooking that the Duke of Rutland didn’t want these lads on his moors; it was the very fact, as he would have seen it, of steel worker apprentices, with their rough language and ways, being on the moors without permission, and liable to indulge in the sort of malicious mischief the working classes were famous for that made the idea untenable. Thus the Access to Mountains Act of 1939 at the last minute had a trespass clause built into it. Any act of intentional trespass, it stated, could carry a fine of 40 shillings (or £2 – a very heavy whack back then). It also made trespass a criminal offence, for the first time, unless it could be proved that the trespass in question was completely inadvertent. There has been speculation over the years about why trespass wasn’t a criminal offence before. Recently, High Court judge and author Stephen Sedley wrote:
The answer, I suspect, is hunting. It was – for that matter, it still is – one thing for the hunt to hand out compensation to a smallholder who has just had his kitchen garden trashed by a horde of domesticated quadrupeds in pursuit of a feral one. It is another to let the smallholder or the police put the master of foxhounds in the dock and have him fined, eventually giving him more form than the local flasher.5
Obviously the Access to Mountains Act was meant to be some sort of compromise, to make up for the grave inconvenience caused to landowners by having their acres opened up. The penalty applied especially to those who disregarded restrictions laid down in lambing time, the nesting season, and the shooting season. The response to this among walking enthusiasts was bitter. In the magazine Progressive Rambler, there was a writer, Phil Barnes, who went under the pseudonym ‘Kinder’. In September 1940 – just as the Battle of Britain was giving way to the Blitz – he wrote this:
The lesson to be learned was that we cannot hope for any real progress towards access to mountains until we have a people’s government prepared to place the aspirations of the people before the claims of any vested interests by the rich and powerful. The inescapable conclusion was that the access to mountains was a political issue, and ramblers should not shrink from accepting this unpalatable fact.
Despite the war – or perhaps, more pertinently, because of it – an increasing amount of thought was being given to this question of access to the wilder areas, once the conflict was over. The subject was brooded over by junior ministers and civil servants, as well as the more stalwart members of the walking movement. Walkers could taste the change in the air. ‘The meeting produced the following policy statement,’ said a Ramblers’ Association memo in May 1943. ‘The war had profoundly improved the prospects of achieving access to mountains, along with many other socially desirable aims, provided that in the case of access, full advantage was taken of this opportunity by the Ramblers’ Association … the Ramblers’ Association should insist that the freedom to roam on moors and mountains was an elementary right of citizenship which a properly planned society should recognise.’
The wording is so redolent of the time: and prophetic too, in a wider sense. For after the war, a new generation of the young middle-classes did indeed try to create this properly planned society – from health to education to town layouts. It was precisely these J. B. Priestley-readers who would go on to sit on government committees.
In 1946, a year after the war ended, the Ramsay MacDonald notion of national parks was picked up again. The extraordinarily colourful wording of a White Paper that would form the basis of the 1949 Access to the Countryside Act illustrates how this passion had seized even the Civil Service. The White Paper concluded,
If our proposals are accepted, and pass into law, they will confer upon the public a precious gift of greater rights and privileges. They will protect and preserve more simply and yet more adequately than in the past, the footpath engraved upon the face of the land by the footsteps of our ancestors. They will provide long-distance footpaths which may be followed for many miles away from the din and danger of busy motor roads.
In the wilder parts of the country, our recommendations will provide for the greatest freedom of rambling access consistent with other claims in the land. They will enable active people of all ages to wander harmlessly over moor and mountain, over heath and down, and along cliffs and shores, and to discover for themselves the wild and lonely places, and the solace and inspiration they can give to men who have been ‘long in city pent’.
This was not merely laying the foundation for a new sort of relationship between landowners and walkers, it was also setting down the principles by which the first national parks could come into existence. There was still stubborn opposition from the landowning side, though. When it came to the 1949 parliamentary debate over access, and its reading in the House of Lords, ‘the Duke of Rutland made a curious contribution,’ noted Tom Stephenson:
As the owner of property in the Peak District, he claimed to know that area fairly well and, he said, ‘I know of no farmer, or landowner for that matter, who is not prepared to permit ramblers over his land in those areas where it is unlikely that they can do any harm, and provided they behave themselves.’ Sheffield ramblers of the day … would have had no difficulty in listing numerous areas where no such liberty existed.
The Duke of Rutland’s speech continued thus: ‘I would like to ask the noble lord who will be replying what sort of people he envisages will be asked to serve on the National Parks Commission (NPC). It is important that the NPC should be impartial and should be representative of all interests concerned. I sincerely hope that it will not consist only of members of the Trades Union Congress and the Workers Rambling Association.’
A parliamentary agent summed up the fears of the vested interests much more plainly when he declared: ‘Have the landowners no rights? This is not Russia you know.’6 Walkers faced opposition not merely from Dukes, but also from the water boards. Some of the most vexatious disputes over access to land took place near reservoirs high up in moorland. Various water boards wanted to make such land off-limits for fear of the damage that the urban working class could wreak. There was the apprehension that these people might somehow infect the reservoir water with typhoid; or indeed foul it with excreta. It was necessary to call in grown-up scientific opinion to demonstrate that even if some typhoid-ravaged factory worker had swum in a reservoir to his heart’s content, it would be pretty much impossible for the typhus organism to survive any length of time in the freezing cold waters.
Prejudices were not easily budged, especially in the north of England, where society seemed so dramatically polarised. As veteran rambler (and in the 1930s, apprentice steel worker) John Bunting observes: ‘Why would we have wanted to cause any damage while walking? The lads who were trouble went to cause their trouble in the towns. Lads from Sheffield who would go up to Hayfield, say, and run around, effing this and that. That type would never be bothered to go walking in the open countryside.’
The issue was a matter of tremendous interest to (primarily) Labour politicians. Mr Bunting remembers going to 1930s ramblers’ rallies which were attended by Hugh Dalton and Barbara Castle. After Labour’s 1945 landslide, Dalton became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and lost none of his enthusiasm for the walking movement. The same is true of the fiery MP Barbara Castle, who recalled of Dalton that he ‘blazed a trail’. These were the politicians who attended so carefully to that 1949 parliamentary debate. They were there to agree when the point was made that in return for freedom, walkers also now had new responsibilities. Lewis Silkin remarked in the House of Commons: ‘The public are being put on their honour not to do anything which would create wilful damage to the farming interest. For the first time in the history of this country, there will be a legal right on the part of the public to wander over people’s land.’ He added, rather inspirationally: ‘Now at last we shall be able to see that the mountains of Snowdonia, the lakes and waters of the Broads, the moors and dales of the Peak, the South Downs and the Tors of the West Country belong to the people as a right and not a concession.’
The 1951 inauguration of the National Parks might be regarded as one of the great triumphs of the walking movement. The country was just emerging from a grinding period of austerity, and while historians always point to London’s Festival of Britain as the focus point of a new optimism, the opening up of vast tracts of land for anyone to enjoy unimpeded must have been the far greater tonic to those who had endured grim city winters. The National Parks illustrate an aspect of the new Atomic Age. On Britain’s coast, alien-looking establishments of white concrete with names like Windscale were springing up to usher in a new, and to many scientifically incomprehensible, era of nuclear energy. Meanwhile, the National Parks were there to boost health and fitness and happiness through the appreciation of nature. Moreover, in a sense, they too were futuristic, for they hinted at a time to come when the land would be there as much for our leisure as to be worked. Leisure was to become one of the keywords of the age; a belief that in a computerised future, we would all have much more time on our hands, much more time to appreciate the great outdoors.
What you hear less of is the element of a quiet class triumph, although it was unquestionably there. As with so much else in that post-war period – from the restructuring of the Welfare State onwards – the middle classes thought radical thoughts to improve the lives of the working classes. And if that meant inconveniencing a much-weakened upper class, then so much the better. Just as the war destroyed the nation’s finances, so too many aristocratic landowners found those immediate post-war years difficult. Not merely was the money tighter, but staff were becoming far harder to recruit. Apart from anything else, why would anyone go into service – with its miserable hours and threadbare pay – when there were far better wages and working conditions to be found in the suddenly plentiful factories making consumer goods? As a result, the old landed estates were becoming very much more difficult to maintain.
Much as many aristocrats were forced to go to the National Trust for help in preserving their homes, so this new policy of access to land might well have been something of a relief to men like the Duke of Rutland and the Duke of Devonshire, who saw parts of the Peak District in essence being nationalised. Access to the public seemed a perfectly reasonable price to pay for the opportunity to hang on, rather than sell up.
For the walking movement, however, this was by no means the end of it. While the National Parks were (and still are) a superb sanctuary for millions of urban dwellers, they were still only a very small proportion of the country. The dedicated walker wanted to explore, to satisfy curiosity – to see what lay over the hills and far away. There was so much of the land still to see, to know, to experience. Walkers wanted greater freedoms yet.
While the terrible depredations of the war had encouraged the belief that British urban populations deserved better – the bombing acting as the catalyst for a wholesale demolition of slum districts up and down the land – so the sleeker modernity of this post-war settlement gradually brought greater material wealth. This in turn brought with it greater ease of travel, by means of the motorcar. The effect this had on one part of the country, the Lake District, can still be felt now. In the 1950s, a bespectacled and rather irascible former town clerk loved these hills so much that he decided to catalogue and record them in a series of beautifully produced little books, which were to become the focus of a vast and curious cult that persists today.