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| 22 Apr 2008 10:53:43 am |
 Anniversary of the Mass Trespass, April 24th, 1932 |
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I came across this today as its anniversary is coming up.
On April 24th 1932, between 500-600 ramblers walked from Hayfield in Derbyshire to Kinder Scout, a high plateau in the Peak District, roughly halfway between Manchester and Sheffield.
The great issue which motivated the protesters was access. Their area, the Peak District, composed of moorland and mountains, was bad farming land and used mostly to graze sheep or to keep game birds. Kinder Scout itself was used to hold grouse for local landlords. These gentry only occasionally went shooting and Kinder Scout was worked only around 12 days a year. The rest of the time the land was essentially deserted, and walkers were not allowed.
The trespassers demanded change: the landowners should open a public path through Kinder Scout, allowing local walkers to ramble through when the land was not in use. But behind this demand there were deeper questions. By the 1920s and 1930s most ramblers were working class. With so many unemployed, rambling grew in popularity. Tens of thousands of workers used their Sundays to go walking. By 1932 it is estimated that 15,000 working class ramblers left Manchester every Sunday.
Motivated by Socialist ideals, as they marched they sang the "Red Flag" and the "International." The trespass proceeded to the plateau of Kinder Scout, where there were violent scuffles with gamekeepers. The ramblers were able to reach their destination and meet with another group. On the return, the protest was met by a strength of the Derbyshire constabulary and five ramblers were arrested, with another detained earlier.
The 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass caused a national outcry and the campaign for a right to roam on open countryside was placed firmly in the public eye. The mountain was 'nationalised' in 1949, under the National Parks Access To Countryside Act, and there is a plaque at its foot celebrating the Mass Trespass. Ironically the mountain is suffering acute erosion due to its popularity with walkers today.
Original article from the Guardian, April 25th, 1932: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1932/apr/25/1
An account in The Socialist Review, April 1999: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr229/renton.htm
Erosion on Kinder Scout today, from the Guardian, April 21st, 2008: http://www.friendsoftheirishenvironment.net/paperstoday/index.php?do=paperstoday&action=view&id=11700 |
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Category : walking
| Posted By : Gareth |  Comments[358] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 01 Nov 2007 03:55:28 pm |
| still walking |
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Thinking about the removal from official use of townland names in Northern Ireland in the 1970s led me to think about the different senses of place garnered through walking and driving. During the debate following the county councils’ decision to accede to the Post Office’s request to instate house numbers, road names and post codes in Northern Ireland, the Federation for Ulster Local Studies referred to ‘the pattern of knowledge associated with the townland system’, a subtle delineation of the issues in spatial versus linear terms, where ‘spatial’ connotes abundance of detail and ‘linear’ connotes sparsity. The objections voiced in varied ways by those involved with the Townlands Campaign seem to extend far beneath the innocuous surfaces of replacing one system of rural addressing with another, more administratively convenient one. I think what is being contested is, at some levels, the meaning of place. As Brian Turner puts it in the most recent publication associated with the Campaign:
we intend to assert a view of our landscapes as spaces which give us life, rather than as blanknesses to be crossed in getting to somewhere else.
As road names become the principal identifying element of place in rural areas, the underlying intricate network of spatial identification fades from use and view; from a rich conglomeration of meaningful spaces, the countryside turns into an undifferentiated surface crossed by lines which merely facilitate travel through, rather than engagement with, places. Although I am well aware of the social necessity for cars in rural Ireland, the disconnection with the details of place entailed by car travel arguably is problematic. Patrick Loughrey writes:
the network of townlands fitted into the more pedestrian local world up to the 1950s and 60s, when people cycled or walked, or plodded on horse cart through the landscape. The local geography of townland matched such a local scale of movement . . . Nowadays cars sweep past and have little connection with the texture of this local world.
Mourning for a localised pedestrian world made obsolete by car travel may be both foolishly nostalgic and futile. However, what seems to be an old-fashioned and impractical desire for fewer cars and more pedestrians on roads is given contemporary resonance in the United States, where concerns are being voiced over the phasing out of the very possibility of walking. Rebecca Solnit warns:
what was once public space is designed to accommodate the privacy of automobiles; malls replace main streets; streets have no sidewalks; buildings are entered through their garages; city halls have no plazas . . . Fear has created a whole style of architecture and urban design, notably in southern California, where to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion in many of the subdivisions and gated “communities”.
Writing of a friend whose vehicle was stolen, Solnit offers a counterpoint to the grim situation outlined above:
there was a joy, she said, to finding that her body was adequate to get her where she was going, and it was a gift to develop a more tangible, concrete relationship to her neighborhood and its residents. We talked about the more stately sense of time one has afoot . . . where things must be planned and scheduled beforehand . . . and about the sense of place that can only be gained on foot . . . On foot everything stays connected.
These reflections arose in urban and suburban contexts, and the sense of place and community discovered by Solnit in the act of walking is closely tied to modest ambitions and needs for everyday travel which may be feasible only in towns and cities. The possibility of living and making a living in rural Leitrim depends almost entirely on access to a car. However, it is worth considering and valuing the relationship developed through a walking knowledge of place, which encourages close attention to the textures and details of any given locality. The questions of how and why walking takes place, and how and whether more walking should be encouraged, remain.
REFERENCES:
Federation for Ulster Local Studies, ‘Federation News: Secretary’s Report 1976-1977’, pp23-26 in Ulster Local Studies, vol.3 no.1, November 1977, p24;
Brian Turner, ‘Introduction’, pp5-7 in Brian Turner (ed.) The Heart’s Townland: Marking Boundaries in Ulster, Downpatrick, Ulster Local History Trust in association with the Cavan-Monaghan Rural Development Co-operative Society, 2004, p5;
Patrick Loughrey, ‘The Heart’s Townland’, pp9-17 in Turner (ed.) The Heart’s Townland, p22;
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: a History of Walking, New York, Viking, 2000, pp11 and 9. |
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Category : walking
| Posted By : Bryonie | Comments[36] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 29 Oct 2007 05:33:57 pm |
| walking |
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| For a number of years I have been thinking about walking as a means of acquainting oneself with place in physically specific ways. Walking as a meditative and exploratory practice engages the body and the mind, and offers a reminder of the physical ‘thereness’ of landforms, waterways, flora and fauna, implicitly negating a wholly abstract understanding of place as text. The tangibility of the environment in which one walks, including the feel of the surfaces under the feet, wind, rain, sunshine and the scents of earth, grass, leaves, flowers or water encourage awareness both of the body itself and the otherness of what may be termed landscape, which manifests itself both bluntly and subtly. Bodily responses to the activity of walking, ranging from sensuous pleasure to tiredness, will affect the intellectual and emotional experience of walking and of the surrounding landscape; in this way, landscape asserts itself as an active partner in the process of human engagement with it and understanding of it. |
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Category : walking
| Posted By : Bryonie | Comments[34] | Trackbacks [0] |
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