Читать книгу Between the Sunset and the Sea: A View of 16 British Mountains - Simon Ingram - Страница 11

It was May, and southern Britain was drowning. Winter had been hard, and spring hesitant to commit in its wake. The last six weeks had seen new lambs arrive along with the first, anaemic, blush of colour to the landscape; both were soon buried in snowdrifts. For mountain climbing, this didn’t bode well. Whilst such seasonal false starts were happening so dramatically in the valleys, the weather on the tops would be even more alarmingly fickle.

Six months after I returned from Torridon the thaw finally came – and with it rain, on a seemingly biblical scale. It was in between two of these May downpours that I went out to the garage to resume packing the bag I intended to take on the journey of sorts that, with the albeit damp foundations of spring firmly bedded, could now begin.

One of the most important aspects of this journey was my desire to see the mountains at their most wild, and experience their most extreme and dynamic moods. Happily, these conditions occurred every 24 hours without fail, and twice: sunrise and sunset. To really know a mountain you need to see it in all shades of the day and, preferably, at night – and in the high places of Britain contrasts are magnified far more than at sea level. A mountain feels intense and quite different in the dark. My plan, therefore, was to climb as many as I could at the frayed ends of the day, the time when the mountains lose the little civility they tolerate during the daylight and return to the wild. Where I could I’d sleep on them, drink from their streams, seek shelter amongst them and walk in all weathers. And whilst I’m not saying that I didn’t want to do the living-off-the-land thing and wander in with a stick, a cloak and a big knife (well, maybe I am), I was going in to enjoy the mountains, not survive them. But that still meant that a certain amount of kit was necessary.

It started out as a small bag; just the ascetic essentials for safety and warmth, crammed into a small rucksack that was light enough not to be an onerous burden, but fortified with enough to see me through any blip in the notoriously shifty mountain weather. I wanted it to be there, ready and packed – something I could stash in the car boot for deployment at any opportunity. As time passed, however, and I watched all manner of winter weather scrape by the window, additions inevitably began to creep in: another jacket, an extra pair of gloves, a second hat, my spare compass, the emergency map. There was, when walking at the extreme ends of the day, always the possibility of becoming cold or lost: and, as wild camping was on the cards, a tent – or bivvy bag, if I was feeling intrepid – a sleeping bag and a roll-mat needed to go in there, too. Now there was far too much for a little rucksack and so a larger rucksack was needed. And so on.

It’s easy to get excited about outdoor kit. The shops that sell it are little pieces of the mountains dropped into urbania; boutiques filled with shiny, purposefully robust equipment destined to become muddy and tarnished. It’s no problem at all to disappear into these places for ages. Inside, you can appraisingly touch the latest waterproof fabrics, assess the tents packed into tight nylon sausages for weight, gaze at the newest boots, and wonder what it might be like to have it all at your disposal. You’ll recoil at the price tag, but over the coming weeks you’ll come to realise that you not only want this piece of equipment but categorically need it. Every hobby has its own infectiously fetishistic side, and climbing mountains is no different. There’s something slightly gladiatorial about it; layering up with stiff, rugged fabrics and packing everything on your back that you need to self-sustain in a wild environment is a pleasing feeling. But aside from the pomp, drastic financial outlays and painful colour clashes, dressing properly is also absolutely necessary. You need to not only be warm and dry, but comfortable under considerable physical strain. It gets pretty tough out there.

I was fairly sure I was in possession of everything I needed for whatever I was about to face; the problem with our seesawing climate was knowing exactly what that was likely to be. Eventually I gave up on trying to pack the perfect bag and instead lugged the now considerable pile of clothing and kit in various states of garage-induced mustiness to the car boot. Most of it would remain there for almost a year and less than half of it would get used. But as I packed the last pieces in, it was empowering to think that I’d be comprehensively covered should I be seized at any moment by the notion to turn north in search of mountains. You can choose your cliché. To get away from it all. Escape the rat race. To get some headspace. For many who habitually head for the high, wild places, this idea of space, of solitude, is a key part of the appeal. For many, it’s the whole point.

Of the many things you get used to hearing when you live in Britain – the moans about the weather, the speed at which the government of the day is sending the country to hell on a skillet and the fact that petrol isn’t as cheap as it used to be – one gripe that’s particularly difficult to escape is how hopelessly, intolerably crowded the country is. It would be easy for an outsider to visualise Britain as a kind of unstable skiff of disgruntled, over-jostled passengers that at any moment will crack loudly and spectacularly discharge its contents into the North Atlantic. But in practice this preconception is really complete nonsense.

The next time you find yourself travelling long distance across the country, allow yourself for a moment to be struck by just how physically empty much of Britain is. We’re not talking boundless, unmolested wilderness exactly; just space. Leave London by car in most directions and minutes after you’re outside the M25, the number of buildings falls away and you’re amidst the most bewitching countryside. Even in the industrial north – where, if maps were to be believed, cities seem to spill into each other in an arc that starts at Liverpool and doesn’t really stop until Leeds – there are huge expanses of not an awful lot. There doesn’t seem to be anything sizeable at all between Lancaster and Whitby (the span of the entire country) except high, savage moorland; ditto between Carlisle and Berwick, and Newcastle and Penrith. Of course this is difficult to appreciate from King’s Cross or central Birmingham. And on the face of it, the numbers do disagree.

According to the 2011 census, 56,075,912 people live in England and Wales. This equates to just under 371 souls packed into every one of a combined 151,174 square kilometres. That’s a lot. But that’s also presuming they’re spread uniformly, which of course they’re not. The 70 most populous towns and cities in England and Wales cover a total of 7,781 square kilometres – around 5 per cent of the two countries’ total area. Into that a staggering 60 per cent of the population is shoehorned. A total of 33,899,733 people live in one of these built-up areas, which means the average population density of the remaining 95 per cent of the country exhales to a rather more spacious 154 people per square kilometre. This is a third of England and Wales’ ‘official’ population-density figure, but again in practice this is a rather misleading measure as the remaining population is also by no means evenly spread, being instead compartmentalised even more by the many thousand smaller clumps of population: big towns, small towns, villages and so on.

Scotland belongs in a different class altogether. Covering 78,387 square kilometres and home to 5,313,600 people, its average population density of 67 people per square kilometre drops to a decidedly thin 37 when the ten largest settlements – which cover just 769 square kilometres, or a fraction under 0.9 per cent of Scotland’s total area – are disregarded. So really, when you think about it, Britain consists of a small amount of space in which a huge amount of people live, and quite a lot of space where relatively few people live.

Mountains are the unconquerables. They are, in every sense, the last frontier of Britain – and its emptiest places. By their very nature, they will be the last bulwarks to be overcome by the rising flood of population and development that the gloom-mongers tell us is relentlessly on its way. Inhospitable and extreme, they’ll become refuges for those seeking escape; pointy little islands of silence and space, too awkward to be developed, too inconvenient to be home.

Of course, for those who crave calm, said solitude and escape from the very real crowding of cities, the mountains are refuges already. They’re the greatest empty spaces in a country of otherwise relatively lean dimensions. Consequently, I was keen to find a mountain that might demonstrate exactly this, a wilderness close to something, but bare of anything; a kind of accessible antithesis to claustrophobia.

I spent some time trying to find it. It needed to be a place where you could feel like the only person in existence, where the landscape around you is so limitless and free of human meddling it has the potential to redefine perspective and blow any sense of claustrophobia or overcrowding out of the system. The trouble was – and this was a happy dilemma – there seemed to be too many places to choose from.

Arthur’s Seat, standing above the spired city of Edinburgh like a spook over a child’s bed, stood at one extreme, given its striking juxtaposition of the brimming and the barren. Such is the intimacy with which the city and the peak nuzzle up against each other you could honk a horn or even open a tub of particularly delicious soup in the city and someone up on Arthur’s Seat would notice. Not just that, the visual contrast was particularly unsubtle. The roots of a long-dead volcano hewn and squashed into its present form by glaciation during the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago, its bold profile grinning with crags made for a strikingly bare companion to the twinkly steeples and townhouses of Edinburgh. But at 251 metres it’s tiny even by British standards, and didn’t so much offer an escape from civilisation as stand proud as a podium amidst it – somewhere to gaze from a pleasing point of observation down upon the city, but never to feel truly removed from it.

Dartmoor, in the south-west of England, seemed to offer almost limitless desolation with a pleasingly eerie footnote, thick as it is with folk legend and weird, gaunt tors. Much of it sits at around 500 metres above sea level, making it surprisingly elevated for a moor; look north from its highest point at 621 metres and the next comparably lofty ground in England doesn’t crop up until Derbyshire. But a quarter of the national park – and around half of the area you would call the ‘high’ moor – is used by the Ministry of Defence, who, for a few hours most days bounce around on it in jeeps and shoot at each other with rocket launchers and other noisy things entirely unfavourable to tranquillity. To give them their due, the military look after the moor rather well in the moments they aren’t using it as a kind of Devonshire Ypres. But to me, the process of having to check access times on a website to avoid the slim possibility of being shot – or inadvertently stepping on something that might cause me to be returned home in a carrier bag – sort of defeated the object.

My search area was beginning to spiral northwards again when a news story caught my eye. Suddenly the answer was obvious, and a decision was quickly made. And fortuitously enough, the solution to this quest for space came in the form of space – albeit space of a quite different kind.

Whilst the most obvious menace with the potential to collectively rob us of quality elbow room and the balm of tranquillity is hustle and bustle, cars, noise and overcrowding, it appears there’s another, more insidious, space thief at work in Britain. Disruptions of migrating birds, erratic breeding patterns of animals, falling populations of insects and even serious health conditions in humans are being blamed on it. I learned all of this one morning in February during a discussion on the news centred on an area of South Wales that had just become the fifth area in the world to be selected as an International Dark Sky Reserve. What this meant was that the quality of the night sky above this particular area was of such superior clarity, free of the sickly orange bleed of large population centres and their streetlights, that it not only warranted recognition, but also protection. The area was the National Park of the Brecon Beacons. The Brecon Beacons are mountains.

It made perfect sense. Where there are people there’s light, and therefore where there’s light, you can never truly be away from people or their influences. But there’s also light where there are only people some of the time: roads, warehouses, industry, infrastructure. Subtle though it is, understanding this relationship between human-manufactured light and the night sky will lead you to the emptiest parts of Britain.

During idle moments over the next few weeks I learned some interesting things about light pollution. I learned that light that falls away from the area where it’s needed or wanted is called ‘stray light’ and an unwanted invasion of this – be it a washed-out night sky with stars lost to the amber haze of a nearby town or the clumsily angled floodlight on your neighbours’ wall that lights up your bedroom like an atomic flash every time a cat walks under it – is given the apt term ‘light trespass’. Lighting used to throw dramatic illumination on a building or object is called ‘accent lighting’, and I also learned that all of these are in general bad news to lovers of dark skies and given the neat collective term ‘night blight’. One of the worst-afflicted places on the planet is Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong, where the level of light has over 1,200 times the value defined as the international standard for a dark sky.* The facility where this is measured is, with unfortunate irony, the Space Museum. I also learned – thanks to a charming organisation called the International Dark Sky Association – that an unspoiled sky is visually packed with stars right down to the horizon and the starlight is strong enough to cast noticeable shadows on land. In such conditions, picking out individual constellations is almost impossible to the untrained eye given their sheer abundance above.

I also learned that, perhaps surprisingly, Britain has some of the largest areas of dark sky in Europe. This was illustrated by a natty map of the United Kingdom as if seen from space, with clumps of heat-signature colour spread over the country like an outbreak of digital pox. The largest population centres – London, Liverpool and Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow – were coloured an angry red, surrounded by a scab of yellow, gradually fading into pale blue. The areas of least pollution were deep navy, tonally seamless with the sea. On land, the places where these were darkest and most extensive were the mountains. Scotland blended with the sea just north of Stirling. The Pennines, the Southern Uplands of Scotland, the moors of the south-west, and the Lake District were all dark – as were blanket swathes of Wales.

The population-density maps had been one thing, but I hadn’t seen anything quite so starkly illustrative of this idea of mountain ranges as islands – or voids – amidst British civilisation. This map cut through the intricate camouflage of daylight, highlighting human intrusion like phosphorescence in a murky lake: a true map of British space. And a week into May, with my eye on the weather I picked the best of a bad bunch of moonless days and headed for South Wales, to spend the night on top of the mountain – all being well – that lay beneath some of the darkest, most spacious skies on the continent.

The mountains of the Brecon Beacons – like most British mountains – are totally unique. The name rather evocatively comes from the signal fires once lit on their summits to warn of approaching English raiders. But whilst many other mountains wear the suffix of ‘Beacon’ across the land, none is quite like the Beacons of Brecon. None is even a bit like them.

Such is the ancient, much-brutalised geology of the British Isles, that every bit of land sticking its neck up has been battered by a particular something, in a particular manner, at a particular point on its long journey, marking it as different to mountains not that distant from it. That’s why British mountains have long been of interest to geologists: they are some of the most scrawled-on and kicked-about creations nature has ever sculpted, and they wear these signatures like scars.

The Beacons are a perfect case in point. From a distance, as you approach from the direction of south-west England, their character is clearly seen. They look like they’ve been finely carved from wood by a carpenter with an eye for nautical lines; all elegant scoops, gorgeously concave faces and wedged prows, a natural symmetry that seems somehow too symmetrical to be natural. These ingredients rise, gently but inexorably steepening towards the 900-metre contour line, whereupon they are abruptly sliced flat, as if by plane and spirit level. Their characteristic form is best demonstrated by the highest massif – the ‘Brecon Beacons’ themselves, the central trio of Pen y Fan, Cribyn and Corn Du – but all of these startling mountains display the same touch. The other visible hallmark is their cladding: these are not cragged and hard-skinned like the mountains of Glen Coe or Torridon, or even Snowdonia. All have coats of horizontally ridged green corduroy, the edges of which catch the first winter snows and hold the last, striping the mountains white. Where paths have worn through, the mountains beneath bleed sandstone a vivid, Martian red. The flat ‘billiard’ tops exhibited by the most distinctive of these mountains are the remnants of ‘plateau beds’ – a much grittier, harder sedimentary layer that has been chewed into the air by weathering, then resisted further attack. If the mountains look as if they’ve been cut flat it’s because, in a manner of speaking, they have.

These central mountains are the most frequently climbed of the Brecon Beacons, and are rewarding and accessible to all. The drops are huge, the views immense, the sense of achievement fulfilling and the aesthetic tremendous. But it wasn’t Pen y Fan I was here to climb. At each of the park’s extremes lie two ranges that confusingly share the promising (promising if you’re in search of a lovely dark night sky, anyway) name of Black Mountain. Well, they almost share it: the Welsh names for each reveal the subtlety lost in their English translation. One lies close to the English border in the east, and is a high but inauspicious collection of moorland summits bearing the collective name the Black Mountains (Y Mynyddoedd Duon). The other, on the park’s spacious western fringes, bears the singular denotation the Black Mountain (Mynydd Du), and this one most definitely earns its chops in the spectacle stakes. Burly and remote, its summits are in fact the hoisted edges of an enormous, wedge-shaped escarpment, tilted into the ocean of moorland like a sinking liner.

The more specific names associated with this mountain and its features are rather bewildering, and you may have to bear with me here. Mountain toponymy – as we will continue to see anon – is not an exact science, and is often inconsistent across a relatively short distance. A summit in South Wales (Fan, Ban, Bannau, Pen) isn’t necessarily a summit in North Wales (Carnedd, Moel), although in both places a llyn does tend to be a lake, cwm a valley, craig a crag, bwlch a pass, and fach and fawr little and large, respectively. The Black Mountain as a massif is Mynydd Du; the long escarpment of the eastern flank is given the name Fan Hir, fan meaning crest. But fan can also mean peak – and there are two of these on the Black Mountain, three if you count Bannau Sir Gaer, which uses the term bannau, which is probably derived from ban, which is in turn the plural of fan. Bannau Sir Gaer means the ‘Carmarthenshire Beacon’, and this is often still known by its mixed translation Carmarthen Van, van being yet another variant of fan. Fan Foel is one summit, probably meaning ‘bald peak’; Fan Brycheiniog is the other, named after the small kingdom to which the mountain belonged in the Middle Ages. Like I said, bewildering. But if you take anything from this, make it simply the following: mountain names can be complicated. And it was remote Fan Brycheiniog – at 802 metres the highest point of the Black Mountain – that was to be my mountain of space.

The weather was, it has to be said, not good at all. The rain held off long enough for me to enjoy the sinuous roads over the border and the tentatively awakening villages and pubs as I approached Brecon. It even stayed clear enough to appreciate the tall, distinctively clipped top of Pen y Fan as I passed Brecon and headed for the empty western part of the national park. A few miles outside a little place called Trecastle, a left turn led into a long valley of arched hillsides and naked, wintered trees. The road dwindled to such a degree that I began to suspect it led nowhere, and indeed it proved more or less to do just this. It first climbed, then dropped into a scraped landscape of wide-open moorland. This was one of the barest landscapes south of Scotland. And to the west, far away across it, there it was.

The Black Mountain filled the horizon like a wall. Though it was smudged by cloud, I could just about see the top reaches, for the moment at least. I certainly wasn’t going to be reclining under an umbrella of stars tonight, that was for sure; although I’d brought a tent, my optimism of a clear night out atop the mountain had faded with every squeak of the windscreen wiper. More concerning was the wind; I could feel it whumping into the car as I sat gazing out at the grey landscape, and by the rate the weather was moving across it, things would only get rougher higher up. Trouble was, whilst camping probably wasn’t an option, it would inevitably be night in a few hours. Whether I liked it or not – and regardless of whether the weather improved – I’d definitely be coming down in the dark.

The eastern approach to the Black Mountain involves crossing over a mile of rough, stream-ridden heathland, more moor than mountain. The map says there’s a path here, and there might well be, somewhere – but it’s so indistinct amongst the soggy brown, lumpy grassland that following it would require constant concentration. It certainly didn’t register beneath my boots as I set off into the wind towards the dark cliff ahead.

The place to ascend from this direction is a gentle chink – the Bwlch Giedd – which from this direction dips the escarpment into a shallow ‘M’ shape. This passage is not easy to miss: at its bottom lies the large lake of Llyn y Fan Fawr – ‘Lake of the Big Peak’ – so named for its position directly beneath the highest point of the massif.

Walking into a strong wind filled with rain has little to recommend it other than giving a renewed appreciation for how desperately insignificant and fragile you are versus the elements. Within half an hour of staggering into the south-westerly, the left side of my body was beginning to feel the tendrils of cold moisture pushing through my clothing. The volatile time of year meant the usually insubstantial streams that required crossing on the journey west towards the mountain were thick and fast. The only ways across were by balancing on moss-slicked rocks over which water raced with unbalancing strength. One mis-step, and a lively second or so of spasmic body penduluming almost resulted in a dunking – after which I made a mental note to ensure to pack both a pole and a dry set of clothes were I to do anything this foolish again.

After an hour I very nearly gave up. The wind had grown stronger as I climbed above the sheltering hummocks, and it wasn’t long before it was pretty intolerable. Just walking was becoming hard, and more and more I took to stopping, mouth gaping, with my back against the wind for respite. Cloud was tearing across the vanishing mountainside ahead like billowing smoke, and with the gloom, thickening cloud and my rapidly chilling legs – plus the fact I hadn’t actually set foot on the mountain yet – the outing this was unfolding into bore little resemblance to the evocative plan I’d left home with. Just as I was considering abandoning it for another day and squelching back to the car the mist briefly moved, and I saw the shore and grey water of Llyn y Fan Fawr close by. I was practically at the base of the escarpment; it would be rude not to go and have a look at it. As I climbed towards the grey bulk of the mountain, a frayed path joined from the left. This was the Beacons Way, which climbed the escarpment of Fan Hir at precisely the point I was aiming for. Soon the red soil of the path was joined by a more established, slabby path, and as I followed it into the curl of the cliff, the wind – blocked by the fold into which the path was beginning to climb – fell away.

Suddenly it was quiet. I could hear my own whistly breathing, and my clothing – having spent the last hour energetically flapping – settled heavily against my skin. I was soaked.

The escarpment of Fan Hir isn’t a huge climb. In fact, given the relative tallness of the Black Mountain’s highest point, Fan Brycheiniog – at 802 metres the fourth-highest point in Britain south of Snowdonia – it isn’t much of a climb at all; from the shore of the lake to the top of Bwlch Giedd requires less than 150 metres of vertical ascent – vertical ascent being the typical measure hillwalkers use to anticipate the likely exhaustion of an objective. I’d parked the car at close to 400 metres above sea level; most of the rest had been gathered gently on the blustery walk in.

I stopped for a few minutes in the lee of the cliff, enjoying the calm and considering my options. Cloud was coming down and the darkness was deepening, robbing the distance of detail. From the top of the escarpment, the route to the highest point of the Black Mountain – the trig point of Fan Brycheiniog – was less than 500 metres away. I was wet as hell. Stupidly I’d neglected to pack waterproof trousers; although the ones I wore were supposedly robustly resistant, seven years of more or less constant use had evidently depleted their ability to withstand torrential rain and wind, and everything from my hips to my ankles on my left side was numb. I’d spare warm layers in my rucksack, but they were for emergencies. What’s more, I knew that once out of this sheltered fold in the escarpment, I’d be exposed to the full temper of the bludgeoning wind – wind that, quite possibly, would have the muscle to blow me clean off the top of the mountain.

I should really have called it quits, but I decided to push on to the top of the escarpment – or until my natural shelter ran out, whichever came first. If I stuck my head above the top and it was too blustery, I could turn round and climb back down without being mugged of dignity. Whether it’s Mount Everest or a Brecon Beacon, the basic physiology of a mountain can’t be argued with: the summit is only halfway home, and overstretching yourself before you’ve even made it there is usually a bad idea.

This wasn’t Everest, but it was certainly feeling extreme enough for what was originally supposed to have been a leisurely wander under the stars. I continued on up the path, and swiftly – much more swiftly than expected – I was high above the lake and approaching the top of Bwlch Giedd. Good paths make short work of ascent, and bad visibility – whilst a swine for views – can psychologically aid you, as you simply can’t see how much further you have to go.

As I reached the top of the escarpment I could feel the wind beginning to gather once more. It seemed bearable, so I tentatively carried on towards the summit. At first, the pushing gale from the south-west was robust, but not extreme; I could walk without too much trouble, albeit with a jaunty tilt of twenty or so degrees into the jet of wet air blasting the left side of me. I was now on the plateau’d top of the Black Mountain – the ‘billiard table’ – and whilst my eyes were fixed ahead for any indication of the top, I couldn’t ignore the huge drop that was now on my right. It seemed perverse that the direction of the wind was inclined perfectly to push me towards it.

In an effort to keep track of progress and stay focused, I kept pace in my head. From practice I knew that, on reasonable ground, every 64th time my left foot hit the ground I’d covered roughly 100 metres. This double-pacing technique was a staple of basic navigation, and for all my hopelessness with remembering my waterproof trousers, I knew that whenever I used this technique it was usually pretty accurate – as well as being a handy mental focus whenever things got stressful. My count was approaching 400 metres when ahead a squat rectangular shape began to solidify from out of the mist. The map didn’t indicate the presence of such, but that had to be a summit shelter. I reached it, and it was; a low, roofless horseshoe of slate, perhaps two foot high, but with its back to the wind and substantial enough to hunker inside and take stock.

The second I was beneath and away from the gale, I realised just how silly my decision to push on had been. My clothing was now so saturated my trousers were falling down with the weight of the water they had sponged up, and my sleeves hung limp around my arms. This little shelter would, most likely, have been my place of repose had I been lucky enough to catch a clear, calm night from which to appreciate the dark skies of the Brecon Beacons. But to me, right now, the thought of spending the night up here, in this weather, was chilling. I felt cold, soaked, and – however disappointed I was at not being able to reap the starry benefits of being this far from other people – truly, comprehensively alone. This was certainly an antithesis to comfort and civility, but it was starting to feel a little out of control. Were I to give up and stay here, hunkered down in this little windbreak in these conditions and the saturated state I was in, it wouldn’t be long before hypothermia began to gnaw. I can’t say the thought occurred to me at that exact moment – huddled and cold, being blasted by storm-force gales high on a mountain, miles from anywhere, with night solidifying around me – but my, what a strange way to spend a Saturday night this was. Or, put a slightly different way, what a privilege.

The safeguarding of Britain’s – and the world’s – dark skies revolves around a change in people’s thinking when it comes to their own use of light. By this reckoning, all that Britain’s wild places seemed to need in order to attain what the residents of the Brecon Beacons National Park were now obliged to do was a collective effort to reduce the amount of light pollution projected into the sky.

Something as simple as ensuring an outside light is angled downwards instead of obliquely, using a different type of lightbulb and – heavens – actually turning the things off when not being used to read the paper or shoot a burglar seemed, if embraced en masse, to be all that was needed to make a difference. In January 2012, the Somerset village of Dulverton – which lay within the other of Britain’s Dark Sky Reserves* – staged a mass switch-off of the village lights for a live TV event to highlight the difference even a modest settlement could make. As it happened it was pouring with rain, and instead of the jolly amassed crowd cooing in wonder beneath a newly unveiled ceiling of stars, they were spooked by the opaque blackness of a night not dissimilar to the one increasing around me on the summit of the Black Mountain. The last time our cities experienced the same sort of consciously collective darkness – besides the odd power cut, during which people were presumably more preoccupied with reclaiming light than appreciating dark – was during the Blitz.

However modest, the Brecon Beacons’ new status was enough to illustrate that, as the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, we should ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ And when it comes to the search for space and freedom in the British mountains, it’s not just in matters of ‘light trespass’ where the actions of a few can trigger a reaction that will be influential down the generations in their enjoyment of wild places. In fact, were it not for the actions of one group in particular, weather would be the least of my barriers to experiencing the starlit skies of the Brecon Beacons; in all likelihood, I wouldn’t be there at all. Actions which, funnily enough, also involved a trespass.

Today, like all of us in Britain, I enjoy constitutional access to wild places under a law called the Right to Roam. And this is something we should be very, very proud of, on two fronts: one, that we have a country enlightened enough to have introduced such a law. And two, that it did so based on the acts of what our new friend Maggie Mead might call ‘thoughtful, committed citizens’: namely a bunch of working-class Manchester socialists who, on one otherwise unremarkable morning between the world wars, decided to go for a walk.

In 1932 Britain was a grim place if you were poor. The bite of the Great Depression was being painfully felt: industrial output fell by a third, and that summer saw unemployment hit a record high of 3.5 million – most of them casualties of the downturn in northern industries such as mining and steel. Seeking focus and amusement for little or no cost, many of the unemployed began to walk for pleasure. The problem was, this pastime – ‘rambling’ – was a play without a theatre. In 1932 there were no national parks, no long-distance footpaths. Land was owned, and enforced as such. Areas that weren’t practical for agriculture – that is to say, mountain and moorland – were ring-fenced and populated with grouse, which landowners would make available, sometimes for as little as two weeks a year, to be noisily and gleefully dispatched by those who could afford cars, guns and time to fritter.

The ‘ramblers’ were almost comical in contrast. Unable to afford specialised gear, they would improvise: army clothing, work shoes, ragged clothing they didn’t mind being ruined. In addition, many walked under the auspices of groups such as the British Workers’ Sports Federation (BWSF), which were often suffused with broader moralistic leanings – in this case, communism – and which in many people’s eyes gave the activity a disagreeable air of rascal politics.

It’s difficult today to envision the kind of restrictions early ramblers were subject to. By restrictions we aren’t talking about barred access to a few manicured grounds or fenced fields: in the early 20th century an estimated four million acres of mountain and moorland in England and Wales were owned by a few inattentive individuals who didn’t – and couldn’t possibly – make anywhere near full use of it. Paths existed for ramblers to use, but such was the uprise in popularity in the pursuit amongst the working classes (it’s estimated that in 1932 some 15,000 ramblers took leave of Manchester on a Sunday to go walking) that these were often becoming as crowded as the suburbs, and potentially problematic frustrations were starting to mount. Worse, so-called ‘respectable’ walking organisations such as the Manchester and Stockport wings of the Holiday Fellowship – via deep-running relationships with dukes, earls and other influential citizens – were enjoying the freedom to wander on land forbidden to unemployed working-class ramblers. Enjoying the countryside – whether in the form of shooting, hunting or rock climbing – was, inexorably, a perk of the privileged.

By default, the wilder places of Britain became the scene of a strange class war. Landowning aristocrats were irritated by unkempt, Catweazle-type characters drifting illegally onto their land, and ramblers were increasingly frustrated at being barred from harmlessly entering what was effectively unused wilderness a bus ride from the inner city – and all over what they saw as little more than historic, ceremonial ownership by a few Hooray Henrys. It was a dangerously unstable stand-off: the ramblers had numbers and spirit, but the landowners and gamekeepers had the written law and cash – as well as employees with guns.

One of these landowners was the Duke of Devonshire. His particular 148,000-acre patch occupied an area of northern England known as the Peak District, which – despite a name that conjures pointy drama – is largely peaty moorland and vast, open plateau, reaching its elevational zenith atop Kinder Scout at 636 metres. It’s an agreeable if bleak place to wander, and its proximity to the northern industrial cities of Sheffield, Manchester and Huddersfield made it a natural choice for ramblers seeking to escape the depressing, economically stricken cities. But in April 1932 fewer than 1,200 acres of the Peak District were open for them to enjoy. Based on our estimate that 15,000 Mancunians left the streets and took to the upland paths each Sunday, this gave each person an area of considerably less than one tenth of an acre in which to find space and tranquillity. Something had to give – and on Sunday 24 April 1932, it did.

In the weeks prior to this a scrawled leaflet found its way into the hands of interested parties on both sides of the fence. One handed out in Eccles read:

B.W.S.F. RAMBLERS RALLY

This rally will take place on Sunday 24th April at 8 o’clock. At Hayfield Recreation Ground. From the rec, we proceed on a MASS TRESPASS onto Kinder Scout. This is being organized by the British Workers’ Sports Federation, who fight:

Against the finest stretches of moorland being closed to us.

For cheap fares, for cheap catering facilities.

Against any war preparations in rambling organisations.

Against petty restrictions, such as singing etc.

Now: young workers of [Eccles] to all, whether you’ve been rambling before or not, we extend a hearty welcome. If you’ve not been rambling before, start now; you don’t know what you’ve missed. Roll up on Sunday morning and once with us, for the best day out you’ve ever had.

Scenes photographed in Bowden Quarry near Hayfield – the hastily rearranged meeting place in an attempt to shake off gathering police attention – on the day of what history would remember as the Kinder Mass Trespass are extraordinarily vivid, despite their age. One shows a crowd numbering in their hundreds gathering amidst an amphitheatre of fractured rock looking up towards a figure standing on a gritstone plinth and purposefully addressing the crowd. Were he holding a medieval sword aloft it would resemble a scene from an Arthurian saga. According to contemporary accounts, the man on the rock launched into a passionate sermon against trespass laws and access restrictions, and after warning the crowd against using violence against whatever they encountered, presumably signed off with something stirring like, ‘Right lads, let’s go for a bloody walk.’ And off they went.

Five hundred people left Hayfield that morning, aiming for William Clough, a comely valley that ascends onto the Kinder plateau – the moorland for which the Mass Trespass was destined. It was here that the group met their opponents, a group of gamekeepers who had been specially drafted in for the day by the Duke of Devonshire, who had caught wind of the ramblers’ plans. Violence ensued. We’re not talking wanton bloodshed and rambling-crazed savagery (the most serious injury reported by the Manchester Guardian that afternoon was a keeper named ‘Mr E. Beaver, who was knocked unconscious and damaged his ankle’), but by the time the ramblers reached the plateau – there greeted enthusiastically by another group who had set off from the south – and retraced their steps back to Hayfield, the authorities had decided the landowners’ strife warranted some official fuss.

Assisted by several gamekeepers, the police arrested six ramblers, all aged between 19 and 23: John Anderson, Jud Clyne, Tona Gillett, Harry Mendel, David Nussbaum and the man on the quarry plinth – a 20-year-old, five-foot Manchester communist named Bernard Rothman.

‘Benny’ Rothman was actually not intended to be the rallying speaker at Hayfield Quarry – the original nominee grew meek when the crowd swelled beyond 200 – but the articulate sermon he delivered castigating official rambling organisations for their malaise stirred the crowd into a strident buzz, and Rothman soon became a figurehead for the respect (and the flak) the Trespass would later attract.

Something of a part-time political agitator, the event had been Rothman’s idea. He was a regular visitor to the Clarion Café on Manchester’s Market Street – a kind of informal parliament for the working class and frequently the scene of stylised political debates between socialists, Trotskyists, communists and supporters of other ideologies. Rothman became a member of the BWSF and took part in many of the weekend camps the group organised in Derbyshire, which would invariably draw unemployed young men, many wearing old First World War surplus kit. Following a scuffle with some gamekeepers on the nearby hill of Bleaklow some weeks earlier, Rothman observed that whilst it was not unusual for small groups of ramblers to be beaten ‘very, very badly’ by the gamekeepers with no rebuke, if there were 40 or 50 ramblers the balance would be tipped. Discussing what they viewed as the historical ‘theft’ of the moorland, the plan was hatched for the Trespass.

The main headline on the following morning’s Daily Dispatch read ‘Mass Trespass Arrests on Kinder Scout: Free Fight with Gamekeepers on Mountain’.

Rothman and his five companions were brought to trial at Derby Assizes on the charge of riotous assembly, assault and incitement. Tellingly, as regards the motives of the prosecutors, ‘trespass’ – seemingly the most obvious offence – was absent from the charge sheet, as it was a civil matter. By most accounts the trial was a farce; gamekeepers, members of the police and representatives of the Stockport Corporation Water Works, which owned and leased some of the Kinder Plateau for shooting, delivered overwrought testimonies to a jury comprised largely of the rural Establishment. Whiffs of political perversion in the communist leanings of many of the key figures,* as well as a bit of tokenistic anti-Semitism (the judge made the useful closing observation that several of the defendants were ‘obviously Jewish’), seemed to pervade the proceedings.

Rothman delivered another impassioned speech. ‘We ramblers, after a hard week’s work, and life in smoky towns and cities, go out rambling on weekends for relaxation, for a breath of fresh air, and for a little sunshine. And we find when we go out that the finest rambling country is closed to us,’ he said, before emphasising that ‘our request, or demand, for access to all peaks and uncultivated moorland is nothing unreasonable.’ The six men all pleaded not guilty; all but one were found guilty, and sent to prison for between two and four months, with the harshest sentence – predictably – given to Rothman himself.

It was a huge misjudgement. Far from putting down such actions, the convictions dished out to the Kinder trespassers further ignited the cause. The public response had repercussions still felt today; in many respects, the treatment of Rothman and his cohorts was really the best thing that could have happened to wild places. A rally in Castleton a few weeks after the trial was attended by 10,000 people. In 1935 the Ramblers Association was founded, and a year later the Standing Committee for National Parks was formed, publishing a paper titled The Case for National Parks in Great Britain in 1938.

A setback came in 1939 when the progressively intended Access to Mountains Act was passed by Parliament in such an aggressively edited form it actually sided with the landowners, and made some forms of trespassing a criminal as opposed to a civil offence. But opposition to draconian access restrictions continued, and in 1945 – just as soldiers were returning home from the war to a country undergoing profound social changes – architect and secretary of the Standing Committee on National Parks John Dower produced a report containing the definition of what a national park in England and Wales might be like. Given what went before – and what would follow – it’s worth quoting at length.

An extensive area of beautiful and relatively wild country in which … (a) the characteristic landscape beauty is strictly preserved, (b) access and facilities for public open-air enjoyment are amply provided, (c) wild-life and buildings and places of architectural and historical interest are suitably protected, whilst (d) established farming use is effectively maintained.

In 1947, Sir Arthur Hobhouse was appointed chair of the newly enshrined National Parks Committee, and proposed twelve areas of the UK that would be suitable locations for a national park. ‘The essential requirements of a National Park are that it should have great natural beauty, a high value for open-air recreation and substantial continuous extent,’ he decreed in his report of that year. ‘Further, the distribution of selected areas should as far as practicable be such that at least one of them is quickly accessible from each of the main centres of population in England and Wales.’

In 1949 the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was passed, and on 17 April 1951 – with an irony not lost on many of the Trespass participants – the Peak District, including Kinder Scout, became the first national park in Britain.

The Lake District, home to the highest mountains in England, followed on 9 May; Snowdonia, thick with legend and shattered geological grandeur, on 18 October; the Brecon Beacons National Park – where I was now being battered – was opened on 17 April 1957, six years to the day since the first, and itself the tenth national park to be opened in England and Wales. Somewhat slower on the uptake, Scotland opened its first national park in 2002 (Loch Lomond and the Trossachs), with the Cairngorms National Park following suit the next year.

For the first time, access to our high and wild places was gilded by law. By 1957, with the opening of the Brecon Beacons National Park, 13,746 square kilometres of the most arrestingly beautiful countryside was officially enshrined as national park – just under 9 per cent of the total area of England and Wales.

The golden ticket in the eyes of access campaigners, however, was not stamped until the turn of the 21st century. The national parks were a giant leap forward, but much of what truly lay open to free access was only the very highest land, where agriculture was poor. Other than areas owned by bodies such as the National Trust, access agreements still had to be reached with landowners concerning the often restrictive rights of way through their land. But in 2000 the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (CRoW) was passed, coming into effect five years later, providing ‘a new right of public access on foot to areas of open land comprising mountain, moor, heath, down, and registered common land’. In other words, the balance had finally swung to the benefit of walkers, who could now roam freely in open country – the inverse to the Enclosure Acts of the 1800s that ramblers had fought so hard to repeal. In a stroke, the area of land upon which a walker could freely roam had expanded by a third.

Benny Rothman lived to see the CRoW Act passed. After a lifetime of lending his voice to access causes, the passing of the act was a vindication that came just two years shy of the 70th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Trespass. This he did not live to see; he died aged 90 just a few months before it, in January 2002.

Had he been at the anniversary celebrations he would have witnessed a fitting endstop, when the current Duke of Devonshire – grandson of the man who unleashed his gamekeepers on the trespassers of 1932, and evidently something of a good sport – took the podium. Presumably with a quiver in his voice, he addressed the crowd thus:

I am aware that I represent the villain of the piece this afternoon. But over the last 70 years times have changed and it gives me enormous pleasure to welcome walkers to my estate today. The trespass was a great shaming event on my family and the sentences handed down were appalling. But out of great evil can come great good. The trespass was the first event in the whole movement of access to the countryside – and the creation of our national parks.

Whether or not the national parks would exist today without the Trespass – and whether I’d be able to appreciate the feeling of gradually being ripped from my feet on the top of the Black Mountain in the chilly spring air – we cannot know. But what is clear is that access to the British countryside took a great leap forward that day in 1932, and the degree of freedom we can all now enjoy wasn’t easily won.

However grumpy I was feeling in the summit shelter atop the Black Mountain, I was glad to have made it. Now all I had to do was make it back to the car. Emerging from the shelter, I caught sight of the trig point – a slim concrete pillar found on many British summits, for reasons detailed later – twenty metres or so away. Staggering over and touching the top, I snapped an awful summit photograph and, with no small degree of haste, turned in the direction from which I’d come.

It was now almost totally dark, the descent seemingly destined to be desperate. While my eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, night was biting, and soon I’d barely be able to see where I was placing my feet. I had a head torch somewhere in my bag but I didn’t want to use it unless I had to. Any bright light would destroy my night vision in a flash, and besides, I didn’t want to stop – not even to rummage in my rucksack.

It turned out that walking back towards Bwlch Giedd was a hell of a lot harder than walking from it. The wind was now punching me directly in the face, chilling my skin and making the simple matter of looking up almost impossible. I could barely see where I was going and the wind was doing its best to exploit this. Every time I took an uncertain step I felt the gusts attempting to pick me up, or snare my backpack sideways and try to pull me from my feet. I focused on my pacing and tried not to panic. All I had to do was get down before I became too cold to walk. That was all.

My instinct had been to get as far from the cliff edge as possible, but walking on the grass wasn’t so good; the grip between my boots and the ground wasn’t as positive as on the stone of the path. Trying not to lose balance or composure, I pushed on along the stones, distracting myself by trying to figure out how strong the wind was. A steady 50 mph was my guess, possibly gusting to 70 mph. This might not sound much when you’re sitting at home listening to it rattle the windows, but on a mountain trying to walk, anything over 40 mph and you’re struggling.

I reached Bwlch Giedd with considerable relief, and stepped into the shelter of the path that descended the escarpment down towards the lake. The sudden silence caused by the drop in the wind made me realise my ears were ringing. The path was rocky and trip-prone, but I managed to stay upright all the way down to the shore. Pulling out my compass and wrestling with the flapping, shiny cased map, I struck a straight bearing from the edge of the lake to the point where I’d parked the car. It would be a cold, damp walk out – but at least I was down. Now I had to get back across the rolling grass and several streams, and I’d be out of this wind, and out of this rain.

It took a while, but I managed it. Along the way I discovered the batteries in my head torch were almost flat, so the stream crossings were done in a darkness that was rather too profound for comfort. My compass bearing had been spot on, though, despite it being the headlight streak of a distant car that finally guided me back to my remote parking space. My final steps were beckoned by the little red blinking LED of my car alarm indicator. Even in mountain places – and dark-sky reserves, at that – it seemed electric light had its minor uses. I was intensely glad to be back at the car and, however foolish the decision had been, equally glad I’d pressed on, albeit at the cost of comfort. My trousers were so sodden I drove the 200 miles back home in my boxer shorts. Things had to get easier.

* If you’re interested (and who wouldn’t be!), the lowest quality for what is considered a dark sky – according to the International Dark Sky Association – is that ‘at a minimum the Milky Way should be visible and sky conditions should approximately correspond to limiting magnitude 5.0 (or Bortle Class 6).’ The Bortle Scale was created by John Bortle to aid astronomers, and runs from 1 (where shadows are cast on the ground from the sheer brilliance of the stars overhead) to inner-city skies of 8 and 9 (the sickly glow by which Bortle helpfully notes one can ‘easily read’).

* This is Exmoor, granted International Dark Sky Reserve Status in 2011. As of 2014, the other six reserves are in Namibia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany and Ireland. Honourable mention must go here to Galloway in southern Scotland, which in 2009 became a Dark Sky Park and has been decreed as naturally possessing the highest quality of dark sky. The difference between a park and a reserve is that the latter requires the cooperation of neighbouring communities to restore and maintain the quality of the night sky.

* It was reported with some degree of disgust that one of the songs the trespassers sang was the left-wing protest song ‘The Red Flag’, although several renditions of ‘(It’s a long way to) Tipperary’ were also given, as well as a modified version of Harry Lauder’s ‘The Road to the Isles’, with key locations in the song replaced with local landmarks for the occasion.