Wanderlust: A History of Walking (24 page)

Everywhere but Britain, organized walking seems to become hiking, then camping, and eventually something as nebulous as, in contemporary terminology,
outdoor recreation or wilderness adventure. The clubs are “walking and” organizations: walking and climbing and environment activism, walking and socialism and folk songs, walking and adolescent dreaming and nationalism. Only in Britain has walking remained the focus all along, even if the word
rambling
is often used to describe it. Walking has a resonance, a cultural weight, there that it does nowhere else. On summer Sundays, more than eighteen million Britons head for the country, and ten million say they walk for recreation. In most British bookstores walking guides occupy a lot of shelf space, and the genre is so well established that there are classics and subversive texts—among the former, Alfred Wainwright's handwritten, illustrated guides to the wilder parts of the country, and among the latter the Sheffield land-rights activist Terry Howard's itinerary of walks that are all trespasses. The American magazine
Walking
is nothing but a health and fitness publication aimed at women—walking appears there as just another exercise program—but Britain has half a dozen outdoor magazines in which walking is about the beauty of landscape rather than the body. “Almost a spiritual thing,” the outdoor writer Roly Smith told me, “a religion almost. A lot of people walk for the social aspects—there are no barriers on the moors and you say hello to everyone—overcome our damn British reserve. Walking is classless, one of the few sports that is classless.”

But accessing the land has been something of a class war. For a thousand years, landowners have been sequestering more and more of the island for themselves, and for the past hundred and fifty, landless people have been fighting back. When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they set aside huge deer parks for hunting, and ever since, the penalties for poaching and interfering with hunting land have been fierce—castration, deportation, and execution were some of the punishments meted out over the centuries (after 1723, for example, taking rabbits or fish, let alone deer, was an offense punishable by death). The commons were usually privately owned land to which locals retained rights to gather wood and graze animals, while the traditional rights-of-way—footpaths across the fields and woods that the public had the right to walk no matter whose property they traversed—were necessary for work and travel. In Scotland, common land was abolished by an act of Parliament in 1695, and in England enclosure acts and unauthorized but fiercely enforced seizures of hitherto common land accelerated in the eighteenth century.

Corollaries of the glorious open gardens of the era, the lucrative enclosures
were vast areas fenced off and filled with sheep or farmed by a single large landowner, and they were often created by shutting landworkers out from agricultural and common land. In the nineteenth century, an upper-class mania for hunting inspired many more landowners to sequester public land that formerly supported many people. The Highland Clearances of 1780–1855 in Scotland were particularly brutal, displacing quantities of people, many of whom emigrated to North America, while some were driven to the coast, where they eked out a bare survival on small farms. Hunting grouse, pheasant, and deer for a few weeks annually has become the excuse for denying access to thousands of miles of Britain's wildest countryside year-round, and while hunting in the United States is sometimes a source of food for poor, rural, and indigenous people, hunting in Britain is an elite sport. Armies of gamekeepers patrolled and patrol such land, and some have used extreme measures to keep people out: spring guns and mantraps, dogs, brandished guns and shots fired overhead, assault with sticks or fists, threats, and usually, the support of local law enforcement.

When Britain was still a rural economy of landworkers, the struggle over access was about economics. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, half the nation's population lived in cities and towns, and nowadays more than 90 percent does. The cities they moved to, particularly the new industrial cities, were often bleak. Densely built, without adequate fresh water, sewers, or garbage collection systems and with a constant pall of soot in the air from the coal-burning mills and homes, the English cities of the nineteenth century were foul places, and the poor lived in the foulest. It's a chicken-and-egg question as to whether the taste for the rural or the awfulness of the cities came first, but the British have always sworn allegiance to footpaths, not boulevards. People wanted to get out of the cities whenever they could, and many of these cities were still compact enough that one could walk out of them into the country. During this period, the conflict over the commons and the rights-of-way stopped being about economic survival and became about psychic survival—about a reprieve from the city.

As more and more people chose to spend their spare time walking, more and more of the traditional rights-of-way were closed to them. In 1815 Parliament passed an act allowing magistrates to close any path they considered unnecessary (and throughout these land wars, the administration of rural Britain has been largely in the hand of landowners and their associates). In 1824 the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths was formed near York, and in 1826 a
Manchester association of the same name was formed. The Scottish Rights of Way Society, formed in 1845, is the oldest surviving such society, but the Commons, Open Spaces, and Footpath Preservation Society, founded in 1865, is still active as the Open Space Society. It fought and won the war of Epping Forest near London. In 1793 the forest was a 9,000-acre expanse used by the public; by 1848 it had been reduced to 7,000 acres, and a decade later it was fenced off. Three laborers who cut wood there were given harsh sentences, and in protest of the sentences and the fences—which had been ordered removed by a court order—five to six thousand people came out to exercise their right to be there. In 1884 the Forest Ramblers' Club was formed by London businessmen to “walk through Epping Forest and report obstructions we have seen.” Countless other walking clubs were formed in these years.

The conflict is over two ways of imagining the landscape. Imagine the countryside as a vast body. Ownership pictures it divided into economic units like internal organs, or like a cow divided into cuts of meat, and certainly such division is one way to organize a food-producing landscape, but it doesn't explain why moors, mountains, and forests should be similarly fenced and divided. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property.

Certainly one of the pleasures of walking in England is this sense of cohabitation right-of-way paths create—of crossing stiles into sheep fields and skirting the edges of crops on land that is both utilitarian and aesthetic. American land, without such rights-of-way, is rigidly divided into production and pleasure zones, which may be one of the reasons why there is little appreciation for or awareness of the immense agricultural expanses of the country. British rights-of-way are not impressive compared to those of other European countries—Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Spain—where citizens retain much wider rights of access to open space. But rights-of-way do preserve an alternate vision of the land in which ownership doesn't necessarily convey absolute rights and paths are as significant a principle as boundaries. Nearly 90 percent of Britain is privately
owned, so gaining access to the countryside means gaining access to private land, while in the United States a lot of land remains public—if not always conveniently located for Sunday strolls. Thus the Sierra Club fought for boundaries, while British walking activists fight against them, but the boundaries laid down in America are to keep the land public, wild, and indivisible, to keep private enterprise out, while in Britain they kept the public out.

When I went to see the great garden of Stowe, I ran into a docent who told me that the gardens were built by destroying the village around the church and relocating “the dirty little people” a mile or so away. She added that these people were not allowed back in unless they wore smocks that made them picturesque. Three hours later I ran into this subversive, charming docent near that church, now hidden behind trees and shrubs, and we fell to talking again. About right of access, she said that as a little girl she lived near a farmer whose signs said, “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.” She believed this meant they would be executed and used to wonder how a man who would chop people's heads off had the temerity to show himself in church. Later in life, she lived in Russia with her diplomat husband, and there and many other places, she said, trespassing was hardly a concept. Most of the British people I spoke with had a sense that the landscape was their heritage and they had a right to be there. Private property is a lot more absolute in the United States, and the existence of vast tracts of public land serves to justify this, as does an ideology in which the rights of the individual are more often upheld than the good of the community.

So I was thrilled when I got to England and discovered a culture in which trespassing is a mass movement and the extent of property rights is open to question. If walking sews together the land that ownership tears apart, then trespassing does so as a political statement. The Liberal member of Parliament James Bryce, who introduced an unsuccessful bill to allow access to privately held moors and mountains in 1884, declared a few years later, “Land is not property for our unlimited and unqualified use. Land is necessary so that we may live upon it and from it, and that people may enjoy it in a variety of ways; and I deny therefore, that there exists or is recognized by our law or in natural justice, such a thing as an unlimited power of exclusion.” This position is widely held by British moderates as well as radicals. The author of a pleasant guidebook to Derbyshire remarks of the Peak District, “It is the one thing that is unpleasant, this watchful herding of holiday-makers, where in a space so wide all must keep to a path a few
paces across. I have thought: what an incitement to any who believe in the public ownership of all land.” Unfortunately even the rights-of-way “a few paces across” are limited, and though it is legal to travel on them, sitting, picnicking, and straying may be illegal. Most footpaths were established for practical purposes and don't go through some of the wildest and most spectacular parts of Britain.

Thus came the great trespasses and walks that changed the face of the English countryside. They took place in the Peak District, where the laborers of the industrial north converged by foot, bicycle, and train during their time off. In the south of England, Leslie Stephen got by with “a little judicious trespassing,” and his gentlemanly Sunday Tramps could and did intimidate the gamekeepers they met, while for serious expeditions there were always the Alps. “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in all parts of urban Britain, especially the industrial towns, the people's rambling movement was emerging, and gradually they began to take over the leadership of the struggle for access,” writes Howard Hill. “The major reason for this was the growing popularity of the Swiss mountains which, being completely free to walk and climb on, drew the gentlemen ramblers and climbers away from Britain.” The YMCA was one early sponsor of walking clubs, and in the 1880s members of the Manchester YMCA Rambling Club would walk seventy miles between Saturday afternoon, when work ended, and Sunday evening. In 1888 the Polytechnic Club of London was founded as a walking club; in 1892 the West of Scotland Ramblers' Alliance was organized; in 1894 women teachers formed the Midlands Institute of Ramblers; in 1900 the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers—a socialist organization—was founded by G. B. H. Ward; in 1905 a London Federation of Rambling Clubs was formed; in 1907 came the Manchester Rambling Club; in 1928 the nationwide British Workers Sports Federation—the BWSF; and in 1930 the Youth Hostels Association began to provide, like the Naturfreunde, lodging for young and poor travelers (the YHA had its beginnings in Germany in 1907; among the rules in Britain in early years was one that no one could arrive in an automobile). So many went out walking in the first three or four decades of the twentieth century that some speak of it as a movement. As historian Raphael Samuels put it, “Hiking was a major, if unofficial, component of the socialist lifestyle.” Laborers had developed—or retained from their peasant parents and grandparents—a passion for the land, and a whole culture of working-class botanists and naturalists emerged, as did a legion of
walkers. Walking in groups was partly a matter of safety—there were the gamekeepers, and one Sheffield rambler reported “a genuine hatred of ramblers by countryfolk who sometimes ‘beat up' those they found walking alone.”

Before the industrial revolution, the Peak District was a major tourist destination: the Wordsworths went there, and so did Carl Moritz, and Jane Austen sent the heroine of
Pride and Prejudice
to scenic spots there. Afterward it became an anomaly, a forty-mile-wide open space wedged between the great manufacturing cities of Manchester and Sheffield, much loved by its locals. The Peak District encompasses every variety of terrain, from the luxurious grounds of Chatsworth, landscaped by Capability Brown, to gentle Dove Dale, to the rough moors with their superb gritstone rock-climbing areas (in which two Manchester plumbers, Joe Brown and Don Whillens, carried out “the working class revolution in climbing” in the 1950s, taking the art to new levels of difficulty). In between Chatsworth's gardens and the gritstone climbs is Kinder Scout, focus of the most famous battle for access. The highest and wildest point in the Peak District, it was “king's land”—that is, public land—until 1836, when an enclosure act divided the land up among the adjacent landowners, giving the lion's share to the duke of Devonshire, owner of Chatsworth. The fifteen square miles of Kinder Scout became completely inaccessible to the public, for no footpath went near its summit. Walkers called it “the forbidden mountain.” An old Roman road across the base had been the main way of traversing the region, but in 1821 this right-of-way—Doctor's Gate, it was called—was illegally closed by the land's owner, Lord Howard. At the end of the nineteenth century, negotiations to open it began, and the rambling clubs of Manchester and Sheffield began to take direct action. In 1909 the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers walked the length of Doctor's Gate, and the Manchester Ramblers “defiantly” walked it for five years. The lord continued posting No Road signs, wiring up the gate at one end, padlocking the way, but he finally lost. Today Doctor's Gate is, with a few minor changes of route, the public route it had been for nearly two millennia before.