The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths Read Online Free PDF Page B

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