The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths Read online

  To understand the place of the path in our national make-up, a visit to the north-west is essential. It is not just a casual visit, however, some light Sunday afternoon stroll, topped off with a cup of tea you could trot a mouse across. To go to the northwest seeking answers to the many questions about our relationship with paths and landscape is to embark upon nothing short of a pilgrimage, a search for some kind of holy grail that can only possibly be found here. This is where paths become no less than stairways to heaven, and I was genuinely excited by the prospect of seeing the paths soaked in the blood and sweat of those who’d fought for the right to walk them.

  The starting point of my north-west pilgrimage had to be the very right of way that’s generally accepted as the birthplace of the modern footpath preservation movement. I’d like to report that, as would befit its historical stature, it’s a glorious hilltop track clambering up to a panorama of eight counties, or, failing that, at least a stony path inching its way up through the mist alongside a peaty burn. It’s neither. In fact, it’s a gentle trot across a golf course, sandwiched between two other golf courses, in one of those outer parts of Greater Manchester that would far prefer to call itself Cheshire. The story, as is the case with nearly all tales of footpath derring-do in this part of the world, is indeed a tale of class war, but not the brawny, horny-handed version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – it’s much more Keeping Up Appearances.

  For this is Flixton, in the true-blue borough of Trafford, a gin’n’Jag suburb of smart semis, Tudorbethan piles, tanning salons and the languid air of somewhere that doesn’t have to fret itself overly much, except perhaps about a broken nail extension. Slap in the heart of this leafiest of suburbs are the 218 acres of Flixton Park, once common land threaded by numerous well-walked paths and tracks. Today it’s a golf course and public park, its primroses and pansies mathematically spaced and much enjoyed by strolling families and smiling couples. Even the gangs of hoodies are polite and quiet. Yet between these two incarnations as public property, Flixton Park closed in on itself, shut itself away and inadvertently created the hydra-headed monster of the rights of way protest movement.

  The Flixton Footpath Battle hissed and spat for three years, from 1824 to 1827. Ralph ‘Vegetable’ Wright provoked it, after making big money in agriculture and ploughing it into the creation of a small stately home, Flixton House, in the first few years of the nineteenth century. This flat, fertile plain southwest of Manchester, a world away from the mills and smokestacks, was already dotted with medieval mansions: Flixton House, and Wright himself, were the Johnny-come-lately neighbours to Shaw Hall (dating from 1305), Davyhulme Hall (c.1150), Newcroft Hall (c.1270) and Urmston Hall (c.1350). Flush with his fine new house and bulging bank balance, Wright fully expected to be welcomed into their drawing rooms, but it was not to be. Old money, as ever, peered imperiously down on new money, and Wright grew increasingly bellicose as their doors continued to remain shut to him. Every Sunday, the big house families would sweep past him stuck in his pew at the back of Flixton’s twelfth-century parish church, as they made their stately progress up to their ancient family boxes at the front. ‘Vegetable’ Wright sat and stewed in the cheap seats, dreaming up ways of getting his revenge.

  The parish church, in whose graveyard Wright lies buried within the most massive mausoleum of all, had already acted as the cauldron for Flixton’s petit bourgeois tensions. In 1804, a public appeal was launched to recast the church’s four bells, but such was the urge amongst the local gentry to outdo – and, more importantly, to be seen to outdo – each other, the appeal raised way more than was needed, and it was decided to have eight brand new bells cast for the church instead, at a cost of over £750 (around £60,000 at today’s prices). ‘Vegetable’ Wright ostentatiously paid for the biggest bell of the lot, setting him back £101 12/6. No-one had thought to check that the fabric of the church could take such weighty munificence and, seven years later, the walls fell in. Less than a decade after they were rebuilt, the tower threatened to collapse. It was partially rebuilt, and then declared unsafe again in 1863. This time, it was obvious that the overly heavy bells were the culprit, and they were silenced until 1888, by which time a new and reinforced tower had been built from scratch.

  After the first rebuilding of 1814, a row erupted about a stove that had been placed in the church’s chancel for ‘the accommodation of the congregation generally, and the scholars attending Sunday school in particular’. One prominent parishioner, a Mr Norris, objected, but nothing was done, so he persuaded a friend, Conyers Bale, to attempt to prove legal ownership of the chancel by dint of the fact that he was a parish lay rector. This was ignored, so Norris and Bale employed a gang to rip the stove out. The churchwardens sued at the Police Court for trespass and ‘wilful spoil’, and won. Norris and Bale appealed to the Sessions, who overturned the decision, which was then subject to an appeal by the other side and finally settled, nine expensive years later, at the Lancaster Assizes, Bale having turned the charge of trespass back on to the churchwarden for installing the stove in the first place. The great Church Stove Battle, chased through every court and getting a lot of people in a fierce palaver about – quite literally – a lot of hot air, was a prescient pointer to the footpath struggle ahead, for it was evidently the Flixton way of doing things. Looking at the place today, I suspect that little has changed.

  When Flixton House was finished in 1806, ‘Vegetable’ Wright acquired, in various parcels, some 15 or 16 acres to go with it. Flushed with the notion that he needed to hone it into a parkland befitting his newly acquired status of gentleman, he sealed his land piece by piece, despite the fact that it was crisscrossed by a network of old paths. Some were little missed, but one in particular, known as the Bottoms, was the only dry path to church for people of all classes on the regular occasions that the nearby River Mersey flooded. The Highways Act of 1815 ruled that a path could only be extinguished by the signed order of two magistrates, but this proved no problem for Wright, who was also on the bench. The odd dinner for fellow JPs (church-stove battler and inveterate litigant Mr Norris being a regular) was held in Flixton House’s gaudy dining room, before some fine port and a footpath closure order slipped in to follow. Oftentimes, he barely even bothered with that perfunctory process, shutting up the paths, even ploughing and planting them with oats, before any official decision had been made.

  This was just the opportunity that Wright’s many enemies needed, and when the Manchester Society for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths was founded in 1826 in direct response to the Flixton case, virtually every local bigwig queued up to join. Although a similar organisation had been founded for comparable reasons two years earlier in York, the Manchester one continues to this day. Its considerable funds were used as the basis for the foundation of the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society in 1894, making it by far the oldest extant footpath campaigning group in the world.

  The newly formed Society eagerly took on ‘Vegetable’ Wright. Court cases galore ensued, many of Wright’s witnesses being bribed or plied with drink to get them to attend. He tried to raise the spectre that enemies of footpaths always fall back on, namely that the Bottoms path was a hotbed of immorality. To that end he persuaded the governor of Flixton workhouse, William Eccles, to give evidence, which proved perhaps less than helpful to his cause. ‘I think use of the Bottoms encourages vice,’ simpered Eccles in court. ‘I only see disorderly ones going that way.’ He paused, and continued: ‘I once saw Mr Stephenson the clergyman going that way to church.’

  After huge legal costs had been racked up on both sides, the ultimate result was defeat for Wright. A delighted party broke into his parkland and walked the paths that had been off-limits for two years. Archibald Prentice, proprietor of the Manchester Gazette and a committee member of the Society, arrived to witness the end of the celebrations. Although he wrote that he had been sad to miss the moment when the fences were smashed through and the paths walked once again, he was moved to say tha
t ‘I experienced a higher pleasure in observing the fresh marks of the saw, the little two-feet wide opening, and the newly made track through the tall grass, than such sights might be thought capable of giving.’ So intoxicated was Prentice by the result that he published a 60-page victory pamphlet on the Flixton Footpath Battle, and gave it away with copies of the Gazette.

  Wright had reaped a tailwind of trouble, but perhaps not quite all of it of his own making. The industrial towns of the north-west had ballooned in size in recent decades (Manchester’s population had risen sevenfold to 150,000 in just 50 years), but the endless boom and expansion had hit its first set of buffers, and times were fearsomely tough. The Napoleonic Wars were fresh in every mind, especially those of the nervous authorities. Manchester was still simmering from the brutal attack of August 1819 that became known as the Peterloo Massacre. A massive crowd, estimated to be around 70,000 people, had gathered in St Peter’s Field in the city centre to hear radical firebrand Henry Hunt speak in favour of sweeping political reform. A jittery set of city magistrates – Ralph Wright amongst them – unleashed the militia on the unarmed demonstrators, whom they scythed through mercilessly. Between ten and twenty people were slain, and hundreds injured. It was a defining moment in British history and, overlain with the lacy snobbery of Flixton society, made for a toxic cocktail.

  Despite being blessed with an advanced sense of the melodramatic, even I couldn’t whip up much emotion from the Flixton footpaths as they stand today, however historic their significance. In my head, I imagined a Soviet-style monument to the victory of common access, but instead there’s a very modest little plaque, placed by the PNFS, half-way up a lamp-post, halfway along the Bottoms path. This is the track that caused the kerfuffle in the first place, although the building of the railway from Manchester to Warrington in the early 1870s necessitated its slight straightening. The railway, and the golf course on the other side, have hemmed the path right in. Each side is policed by a massive fence, with the footpath low between them, just wide enough for two people to pass if they angle themselves correctly (if they don’t, Mr Eccles at the workhouse might just have had a point). Walking it, you feel as if you’re in the perimeter noman’s-land of a high-security prison.

  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.