Wanderlust: A History of Walking (25 page)

The crest of Kinder Scout posed a bigger problem. Benny Rothman, the secretary of the Manchester branch of the British Workers Sports Federation, writes of the grim cities during the industrial depression of the 1930s, “Town dwellers lived for weekends when they could go camping in the country, while unemployed young people would return home just to ‘sign on' at the Labor Exchanges and collect their dole money. Rambling, cycling and camping clubs grew in
membership. . . . The feeling of being close to nature receded as the crowds grew, and ramblers looked longingly at the acres of empty peat bogs, moorlands and the tops, which were forbidden territory. They were not just forbidden, they were guarded by gamekeepers armed with sticks, which some were not afraid to use against solitary walkers.” In 1932 the BWSF decided to organize a mass trespass to publicize the situation, and Rothman gave interviews to newspapers. Though opposed by other ramblers' clubs, the young radicals drew four hundred ramblers to the nearby town of Hayfield anyway, along with a third of the Derbyshire Police Force. Partway up, Rothman gave a stirring speech about the history of the access-to-mountains movement, to much applause. Farther up the steep approach to Kinder Scout's plateau, about twenty to thirty gamekeepers appeared, shouting, threatening the walkers with their sticks, and getting the worst of the scuffles they initiated. At the crest, the trespassers were joined by members of the Sheffield clubs and latecomers from Manchester.

For this temporary victory and scenic view, Rothman and five others were arrested. One case was dismissed. The others received jail sentences from two to six months for “incitement to riotous assembly.” Outrage over the sentences galvanized other ramblers and members of the public and sent both the curious and the committed to Kinder Scout. Annual rallies protesting lack of access had been held at Winants Pass in the Peak before, but the one that year brought in ten thousand ramblers, and further mass trespasses and demonstrations were held in the wake of this verdict. The politics of walking heated up. In 1935 the national federation of rambling associations became the Ramblers' Association, which stepped up activism on behalf of access, and in 1939 a bill for access was put before Parliament, unsuccessfully. In 1949 a stronger bill succeeded. The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act changed the rules. The national parks didn't amount to much, but the access did. Every county council in England and Wales was required to map all the rights-of-way in its jurisdiction, and once the paths had been mapped, they were considered definitive. The burden had shifted to the landowner to prove that a right-of-way didn't exist, rather than to the walker to prove that one did. And these rights-of-way have ever since appeared on the Ordinance Survey maps, making the routes accessible to everyone. Local councils were also required to create a “review map” of appropriate open-space areas and then to negotiate for them to become accessible to walkers—not as strong as an absolute right of access, but a great improvement. More recently a
number of long-distance trails have been created, making it possible for people to walk or backpack across Britain for days or weeks. In recent years, walkers have grown restless. On the fiftieth anniversary of its creation, the Ramblers' Association began holding “Forbidden Britain” mass trespasses of its own, and in 1997 the Labour party campaigned on a promise to support “right to roam” legislation that would, more than a century since Bryce's 1884 bill, at last open the countryside to the citizens. Recently, more radical new groups such as This Land Is Ours and Reclaim the Streets have taken direct action to enlarge the public sphere, and though walking is less central to their democratic and ecological agenda, the same populist issues of access and preservation prevail.

And this is the great irony—or poetic justice—of the history of rural walking; that a taste that began in aristocratic gardens should end up as an assault on private property as an absolute right and privilege. The gardens and parks in which the culture of walking had begun were closed spaces, often walled or secured by ditches, accessible to a privileged few, and sometimes created on land seized by enclosure. Yet a democratic principle had been implicit in the development of the English garden, in the way trees, water, and land were allowed their natural contours rather than being pushed into geometric forms, in the dissolution of the walls around the garden, in the increasingly mobile experience of walking through these increasingly informal spaces. The spread of the taste for walking in the landscape obliged some of the descendants of these aristocrats to live up to the principles implicit in their gardens. It may yet open the whole of Britain to walkers.

Walking for pleasure had joined the repertoire of human possibilities, and some of those enjoying the expansion returned the favor and changed the world, making it into a version of the garden—this time a public garden without walls. The terrain shaped by walkers' clubs is spread differently across different countries. In the United States it's a patchwork of wild places and a broad political movement bent on saving the organic world. Radiating from Austria are several hundred lodges scattered across twenty-one countries and more than half a million outdoor types with their own environmentalist bent. In Britain it's 140,000 miles of paths and a truculent attitude about the landed gentry. Walking has become one of the forces that has made the modern world—often by serving as a counter-principle to economics.

The impulse to organize around walking is at first an odd one. After all, those who value walking often speak of independence, solitude, and the freedom that comes from lack of structure and regimentation. But there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints. These basic freedoms have been the subjects of countless struggles, and it makes perfect sense that the laborers' organizations campaigning first for eight- or ten-hour workdays and then for five-day work weeks—struggling for free time—should also concern themselves with securing space in which to enjoy this hard-won time. Others too have campaigned for space, and though I have focused on wilderness and rural space, another rich history concerns the development of urban parks such as Central Park, a democratic and Romantic project to bring the rural virtues to city dwellers without resources to leave the city. The unhindered body is a more subtle subject. The early Sierra Club, with unchaperoned women sleeping on pinebough beds and climbing mountains in bloomers, suggests that in California, liberation—or some genteel degree of it—was a by-product: for Victorian clothing imprisoned women in the proprieties of shallow breaths, short steps, precarious balance. The nudism of early German and Austrian outdoor clubs suggests that for some, heading for the hills was part of a wider project of embracing the natural, a natural defined to include the erotic, and even for those who remained clothed, the clothes were the informal shorts that displayed the body. As for British workers—one only has to read Friedrich Engels's
Making of the English Working Class,
about living and working conditions so dire they deformed and diseased factory workers' bodies, to understand why striding across open space under clean skies was a liberation many were willing to fight for. Walking in the landscape was a reaction against the transformations that were making the middle-class body an anachronism locked away in homes and offices and laborers' bodies part of the industrial machinery.

The writers at the beginning of this history of walking in the landscape, Rousseau and Wordsworth, linked social liberation with a passion for nature (though, fortunately, neither of them could have envisioned the Boy Scouts, the outdoor equipment industry, and other far-flung effects of the culture of walking). The walking clubs brought many ordinary people closer to their notion of the ideal walker, moving without impediments across the landscape.

LIVES OF THE
S
TREETS

There are few greater delights than to walk up and down them in the evening alone with thousands of other people; up and down, relishing the lights coming through the trees or shining from the facades, listening to the sounds of music and foreign voices and traffic, enjoying the smell of flowers and good food and the air from the nearby sea. The sidewalks are lined with small shops, bars, stalls, dance halls, movies, booths lighted by acetylene lamps, and everywhere are strange faces, strange costumes, strange and delightful impressions. To walk up such a street into the quieter, more formal part of town, is to be part of a procession, part of a ceaseless ceremony of being initiated into the city and rededicating the city itself.—
J
.
B
.
JACKSON
, “
THE STRANGER
'
S PATH
”

. . . after scrambling under bellies of horses, through wheels, and over posts and rails, we reached the gardens, where were already many thousand persons. . . . We walked twice round and were rejoiced to come away, though with the same difficulties as at our entrance.—
HORACE WALPOLE
,
IN A LETTER TO GEORGE MONTAGU ON A
“
RIDOTTO
”
AT VAUXHALL GARDENS
, 1769

Walking the streets so constantly as he did . . . gave him an opportunity of examining into the condition of every poor person that he met. Which he did, with so well practiced a sagacity, as could seldom be imposed upon. And every man that follows his example, will soon find, that this practice will lead him into the exercise of more charity, than is possible to be practiced in carriages of any kind.—
PATRICK DELANY
,
OBSERVATIONS UPON LORD ORRERY
'
S
“
REMARKS ON THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF JONATHAN SWIFT
,” 1754

They don't want anything to do with a roof and four walls. How can that be compared to the street? The vice of the children is the street itself. The street is an addiction even stronger than the thinner they buy in the hardware store. . . . Only the street is theirs. It consoles them for their loneliness and lack of love. It has a dizzying appeal. It gives them the money they never got at home. It gives them rhythm, a tempo, and immediate compensation.—
ELENA PONIATOWSKA
, “
IN THE STREET
”

In a charming sally, Mme de Girardin one day said that for the Parisian, walking is not taking exercise—it is searching. . . . The Parisian truly seems an explorer, always ready to set off again, or, better like some marvelous alchemist of life.—
F
.
BLOCH
,
TYPES DU BOULEVARD

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time; especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.—
VICTOR HUGO
,
LES MISÉRABLES

Bored, we stroll aimlessly about and look at things; and by way of curing our state we buy two old Saint-Cloud teapots, embossed with silver gilt in a box with a fleur-de-lys lock.—
THE GONCOURT JOURNALS
, 1856

The end of her life was terrible. She who had been the most beautiful and most desired woman of her time became a half-mad woman driven by a mania for walking. She was living at 26 bis, Place Vendôme, and every evening, dressed in black, her face hidden by veils, dragging along two miserable, fat, asthmatic dogs, she would leave her house, taking care not to be recognized, go to the arcades of the street whose name she was once so proud to bear, in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli. For hours and hours she would walk, coming back to her house only when the dawn was beginning to disperse the darkness she now cherished.—
ANDRE CASTELOT ON LOUIS
-
PHILIPPE
'
S MISTRESS COMTESSE VIRGINIA DE CASTIGLIONE

The patisseries, though! Several on every block, it seemed. The window displays were like pastry erotica. I discovered I particularly liked a vanilla custard pastry cut into segments like a wheel of Brie. Walking along the street, Eiffel Tower in sight ahead, eating the pastry out of my hand, was not unlike sex.—
E
-
MAIL TO THE AUTHOR FROM DAVID HAYES
,
TORONTO
, 1998

He began to take long walks along the Champs-Élysées to the Étoile, and exercise became a kind of punishment. As he wrote Miss Weaver on August 30, 1921, “I have been training for a Marathon race by walking 12 or 14 kilometers every day and looking carefully in the seine to see if there is any place where I could throw Bloom in with a 50 lb. weight fixed to his feet.”—
RICHARD ELLMANN
,
JAMES JOYCE

Fantine, in those labyrinths of the hill of the Pantheon, where so many ties are knotted and unloosed, long fled from Tholomyès, but in such a way as always to meet him again. There is a way of avoiding a person which resembles a search.—
VICTOR HUGO
,
LES MISÉRABLES