Nick Hayes - The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

THE BOOK OF TRESPASS

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First published in Great Britain 2020

This electronic edition published 2020

Copyright Nick Hayes, 2020

Illustrations Nick Hayes, 2020

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0469-9; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-0471-2

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for my two mothers,

Cornelia and Cristine,

without whom there would have been

neither nurture nor nature

with love

xx

There have existed men who had the power to hold or to give exclusive possession of portions of the earths surface, but when and where did there exist the human being who had the right?

Henry George, Progress and Poverty

CONTENTS

Fires, tracks, lines and legislation

Any friend of mine walks where he likes in this country, or Ill want to know the reason why

Mr Badger, The Wind in the Willows

On the morning of St Georges Day 1932, a teenager called George Beattie Elliot took the train from his home in Preston. With his climbing ropes and enough supplies for a couple of days camping and roaming, he travelled the sixty miles to the brim of the Peak District and set off on foot.

He was not alone. Every weekend, thousands of men and women would stream from the blackened, industrialised cities of Sheffield, Manchester, Bolton and Preston to catch a breath of fresh air and clean the chimneys of their lungs. Freed from the beat of the working week, they sought scenery and self-determination. They walked twenty miles up and down dale, and then back to the pub on a Sunday night for huzzahs, huzzoohs and a socialist singsong. Rambling, cycling and climbing clubs had spawned across the area, train companies were offering group discounts, and, with the new Youth Hostel Association offering cheap accommodation for the overnighters, the thirty-seven square miles of Bleaklow were a honey pot for the worker bees of the north.

George cut off the busy main paths and, trespassing now, he sneaked across the open moorland. He was heading to the Laddow Rocks, where he would spend the night in a cave halfway down a steep scree slope, a small pocket of secret space, silent and snug beneath the heavens. He slept, and must have woken early, because by mid-afternoon the next day he had already covered thirteen miles, passed Bleaklow, gone through Snake Pass and was ascending the north face of Kinder Scout, the highest point of the Peak District. The cities of Manchester and Bolton rolled beneath him and if the day had been crystal clear he would have been able to see, over a hundred miles away, the white peaks of Snowdonia. The rocks at the summit, silhouetted by the bright sky, ran like the turrets of a ransacked stone fort, and, as he approached them, he heard a commotion from the other side of the peak.

He climbed further and as the hill flattened out he saw a crowd of a few hundred, mostly around his age, singing and shouting, advancing towards a line of a dozen gamekeepers. As soon as the crowd saw George, their shouts inexplicably turned to cheers, they waved their caps at him and urged him on like a sporting hero. The keepers turned and, as several rushed towards him, George saw the broad sticks they were holding. Georges confusion intensified as the keepers circled him, even more so as they began to punch him to the ground. The crowd arrived, the keepers were hauled off him and George was pulled to his feet, slapped on the back and praised for his heroic work for the good old cause. The scene ended as quickly as it had sprung upon him, the crowd moved on and poor George was left, as before, to the silence of the Peaks. Bruised, utterly bemused, stars spiralling around his head, George continued his walk as planned, descending into the Goyt Valley and out of history.

It was only at work on Monday that he would have uncovered the meaning of this bizarre and briefly violent encounter. It was all over the papers. Four hundred ramblers had met at Hayfield, a few miles west of Kinder, and, amid a large police presence, had walked up the William Clough pass to protest for a greater right of access to the moors. Because it was well publicised in advance, the Duke of Devonshires men were ready with their sticks and hired men, and at the precise time George had crested the peak the crowd were beginning to break bounds, spill off the Right of Way and pile up the hill. Only a small proportion of the crowd made it onto the forbidden land, and only by about four hundred metres, before the violence George experienced spread into a tussle with the keepers. Some trespassers had hoiked away the keepers sticks and exchanged a few blows, causing one keeper to fall and break his ankle. The crowd had its climax and merrily they rolled along, singing The Red Flag and The Internationale back to Hayfield. The constabulary emerged from their hiding place in the local picture house, and the plain-clothed bobbies who had accompanied the trespassers pointed out the ringleaders, six of whom were arrested and taken for trial at the Derby assizes. Entirely unwittingly, George had fallen upon one of the most notorious land protests in English history, the Kinder Trespass.

We reach the dell and lay our fire. Scuffing away the black leaves with the toe of my boot, I scrunch a manger of newspaper on the wet earth and balance brittle twigs on top. My friend is off in the distance, crashing around in the bracken, gathering fallen wood. I touch a flame to an edge of the newspaper and a line of blue wriggles along its edge, blackening it, gaining ground like a tiny rising tide. I light the other available corners and begin to pile thicker twigs into a wigwam around the flame, black-tipped ash and brittle pencil twigs from a long-fallen elder.

An owl hoots, cool and spooky, and it suddenly seems much colder. I drop to my knees, hands on the wet earth, and I lay my head alongside the fire and I blow long gentle streams of air into its centre. The twigs glow red like the filament of a bulb, and, as my breath runs out, the flames reappear, stronger than before. I breathe in and blow, breathe and blow, and there is a warm crackling noise as the fire takes. I blow harder and the fire roars, comes alive, and is soon ready to fend for itself. My friend piles on shin-length logs that he has cracked underfoot from the fallen limbs of ash, oak and cherry. We both blow, then step back to watch the flames rise up the wooden scaffold, searing at the rough bark, unlocking decades of stored sunlight into our damp, gloomy dell.