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History repeats itself for 80th anniversary of Kinder Mass Trespass

Week-long celebration begins with re-enactment of the 1932 Peak District protest that gave Britons the right to roam

Martin Wainwright

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 April 2012 15.42 BST


Ramblers take to the tracks across Kinder Scout in the Peak District, Derbyshire. Photograph: Don Mcphee

It's an event best seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old child who looked round the vast bowl of hills around Kinder Scout on Tuesday and couldn't conceive of a time when it was forbidden ground.

"It's so green and so beautiful, we get up there whenever we can," she said, peeping out from behind one of the hand-coloured masks of grouse and curlews made by Edale primary school for this year's 80th anniversary of the Kinder Mass Trespass.

Her comment rolled back the years for Elsie Gaskell, who was 10 in April 1932, when word spread around Manchester, Sheffield and the smaller Pennine industrial towns that the landlords and gamekeepers on the high moors were to be defied in strength.

"A mass trespass! I'd never heard of one and I was so excited," Gaskell said. "And so disappointed when my dad, who was in the Manchester Federation of Ramblers, said, sorry Elsie, I'm not taking you because there may be trouble."

Trouble there was, though only a skirmish that left one keeper with a broken leg and a handful of the invading alliance of ramblers, Young Communists and local factory workers nursing bruises and cuts. It was a very small tussle to trigger a momentous campaign, which led to the UK's national parks, and eventually the right to roam.

On Wednesday, there will be a major re-enactment of the marchers' pincer movement from Hayfield and Edale, meeting up by the Kinder Downfall waterfall to roar out the Red Flag. The launch event, starting a week of talks, walks and a "trespass-themed ceilidh" was a quieter chance for veterans to reminisce.

"I used my first wage packet from the steelworks when I was 14 to buy a bike to get out here," said 94-year-old John Bunting from Sheffield. "The aristocracy wanted to keep us out, but they were only using the land for murdering animals."

Stuart Maconie, the writer and broadcaster, picked up the theme: "The country was run in those days by the rich landed gentry," he said. "So different from the way things are today," he added to applause.

Present day dangers were highlighted by Kate Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society, who told the launch: "We cannot be complacent and treat Kinder as mere history. The threats which the trespassers fought are still very much with us, but in a different guise.

"We do not know the future of the public forest estate, we have no indication from the government when the coastal-access law will be fully implemented, new planning laws threaten green spaces, and a law change could threaten our ability to register land as village greens.

"Our countryside and our urban spaces and paths are being privatised: landowners erect intimidating gates and CCTV cameras next to public paths, public land is being sold; local authorities make gating orders on urban paths."

Derbyshire police, whose mild handling of the original trespass was noted at the time by the Manchester Guardian's reporter, benignly supervised car parking to avoid the village of Edale getting swamped. In the local pub The Rambler, the quip was that Wednesday's re-enactment wouldn't be as "mass" as the original, because health and safety rules were much more intimidating than any 1930s gamekeeper.

That was only a rumour; but the National Trust raised eyebrows last year with plans to fence off part of Kinder to allow erosion caused by visitors to heal. And the launch attracted its own polite but determined protest, from members of the Peak District trail bikers' club whose noisy machines are banned from much of the park.

"Our share of access is going down from 5% to 3%, while these people have got 90% now," said Alan Gilmore, before heading home with the posse on his mud-spattered machine. "We don't want to break the law or spoil anyone else's enjoyment, but it's right that we should have a share of the countryside too."

Prof Harry Rothman, whose father Benny was the good-natured but determined communist organiser crucial to the trespass and its aftermath, took the point. He said: "I have mixed feelings. In an area as quiet and pristine as this, I don't think people would want to see motorbikes on the green ways. But there must be other places. Who are we to say that other users of the countryside can't follow their enthusiasms and be happy?"

Section of the Ordnance Survey map of Great Britain showing the Gray's/Thurrock area.

I've recently splashed out on two Ordnance Survey maps of the Brecon Beacons (Powys, Mid-Wales) where I'm hoping to take a week's holiday.

Book One of Wainwright's beautifully drawn Guides to the Lake District.

Made a trip to Waterstone's book store in Canary Wharf yesterday to stock up on some holiday reading. Bought this:
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Map of a Nation by Rachel Hewitt – review

An absorbing history of the Ordnance Survey charts the many hurdles map-makers have had to overcome

Ian Thomson

The Observer, Sunday 17 October 2010


Ordnance Survey maps have been sold to the general public since 1801. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

From the hieroglyphs of Aztec Mexico to the red stripe of London's Central line, all maps are idealised representations of the world. A relief map of moorland fells can mesmerise with its geometric language of lines and symbols. Yet even with the world now so thoroughly mapped out by Google, many of us remain carto-illiterate. In the mid-1990s, drivers in Britain were wasting an extraordinary 80m gallons of petrol each year getting lost, according to the AA (one would hope that figure is lower now, thanks to satnav). Those of us with poor visual-spatial skills often find it easier to read road atlases upside down.


Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
by Rachel Hewitt

Maps of all kinds permit a greater understanding of history and the politics of cartography. Nazi map-makers redrew Europe's frontiers in the shadow of the swastika, with an emphasis on "Jew-free" (Judenfrei) areas of conquest. The first surveys of the Scottish Highlands were done to facilitate the crushing of rebel clans in the wake of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. In spite of their political intent, the maps provided a magnificent bird's-eye view of mid-18th-century Scotland. The bunched contour lines and triangulation points marked on modern-day Ordnance Survey maps would not have been possible without the earlier charting of Scotland. In this endlessly absorbing history, Rachel Hewitt narrates the history of our printed maps from King George II's "Scotophobic" cartographies to the three-dimensional computerised elevations of today. A marvel of exactitude and the quantifying imagination, the Ordnance project conjures a "Betjemanesque image" of cycle-touring and jolly tramps through bog and heather. Founded in 1791 as the Trigonometrical Survey, it nevertheless began life as a military venture, merciless to subject peoples.

Herself a keen hiker, Hewitt portrays a heroic enterprise assailed on all sides by professional vanities, lack of funds and other difficulties. In post-Culloden Scotland the map-makers had used a small, tripod-mounted telescope or prototype theodolite to measure sight-lines from landmark to landmark. Inevitably, their arrival in a land pacified by a foreign power aroused fears of continued surveillance. Half a century later, when the first Ordnance Survey map was released to the general public in 1801, the project was still viewed with suspicion. In intricate black-and-white the map revealed Britain's south-easterly corner as a mesh of bridleways, brooks and field boundaries. Few could have guessed at the difficulties involved. As the surveyors scanned the Kent horizon with their telescopes, locals had mistaken them for French spies.

Notoriously, in 1824 government map-makers moved to Ireland. Their presence provoked such levels of suspicion that it seemed the entire British judiciary, church and crown were under threat. The Irish Ordnance Survey became the subject of Brian Friel's play Translations; it remains an incendiary moment in Irish history.

The Irish were not the only people to see maps as instruments of intimidation and control. Hewitt charts the hostility shown to "engineer agents" by Romantic poets and writers. William Wordsworth, for all his avowed interest in the Ordnance project, was critical of those seeking to tame the countryside by means of their boxed precision instruments. The Board of Ordnance may share the enlightened conviction that the pursuit of knowledge was a sovereign good, but they preached a godless, functional clarity. For William Blake, the "ésprit géométrique" that defined the national survey project was nothing short of satanic. Why enslave the human mind to universal laws and the cold hand of rationality?

Triumphantly, the Ordnance Survey has swelled over the years into a cartographical institution that comprises 403 maps in the Explorer series of the British Isles. Each region, no matter how inaccessible, possesses its own "biography" of streams, pre-Christian earth mounds, coach stations and lay-bys. In her lively and informative narrative, Hewitt highlights the Ordnance project's legion of draughtsmen, surveyors, dreamers and eccentrics, and the disagreements that flared among them. Prior to the 18th century, Britain of course had its national maps, but, emblazoned with royalist insignia or overtly patriotic, their function was primarily symbolic. The entire nation is now mapped out in exact and unbiased detail. Something may have been lost by charting every last footpath, boulder and scree slope, but we have become more "map-minded" as a result.

Ian Thomson's The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize 2010