Alien Nation - Trespass #3

It seemed impossible not to start at the bottom of the hill where one of the most notorious land protests in the history of England had taken place. On 10th January 2021, the beginning of covid-19 lockdown 3, I took a train to Edale to meet up again with Anna Jennings, one of the engagement rangers for the Peak District National Park Authority. I didn’t have a fixed idea of what we were going to do or talk about. I had re-read the Park’s audience development plan, completed the Peak District Local Plan survey and the only thing I had in mind to do was to have a conversation about her role in the Park and her ambitions for it. As luck would have it, it was one of the most beautiful crisp, snowy, blue sky days you could wish for. The train arrived on time, Anna was waiting for me and we started walking ….

Anna Jennings, Engagement Ranger based in Edale.

Before I emigrated to the UK, my boyfriend Dug had asked me to walk to Pennine Way with him. According to his mum it would either ‘make or break’ our relationship. The Pennine Way was the first official long distance footpath in the UK, it opened in the same year I was born, stretching 431 kilometres between the villages of Edale and Kirk Yetholm and follows the backbone of England into Scotland. This spine literally divides England into East and West. I always enjoyed walking but I was grossly under prepared for a 16 day hilly hike, carrying a heavy backpack with tent, cooking utensils, sleeping bag and clothes for every kind of weather. It was 1986, our raincoats smelled of pure polyvinyl chloride, my boots were not watertight. The only thing I thought would be useful to have was a woollen jumper that, believe it or not, I had actually spun and knitted especially for this trip. It was bulky, too warm to walk in, it got wet in the rain and grew two sizes bigger and it didn’t fit in my backpack.

It was a tough day that first one. They’ve changed the route now but in 1986 we were still guided up through Grindsbrook Clough, over the Kinder Scout plateau to Kinder Downfall via a myriad of boggy peat channels, crossing the A57 onto Bleaklow and finally finishing at Crowden Youth Hostel. I loved the names of the places, they sounded alien and wild. The walk starts gently enough but quickly turns into a rocky steep climb through a gorge that, if you are unlucky (which we were) fills with ice cold water running off the Kinder plateau. After the first day we were cold, wet, tired and hungry. We decided that camping was not going to be an option if we wanted to get to the end so we sent the tent, sleeping bag and cooking utensils back to Dug’s parents’ house in Norfolk, we ate as many of the tins of soup we had carried along and slept for 12 hours. On day 2 my pack was 8kg lighter.

The walk was life changing for me. It had been hard, I had suffered three days of excruciating knee pain, I swear that at one point my feet had started to decay and in the last few days of the trip I got badly burned by the sun. Every day brought a new adventure, a new ordeal and new pleasures.

One incident stuck in my mind though, when we accidentally veered off the path and found ourselves challenged by a farmer walking towards us with a shotgun pointing at us. We had taken a wrong turn. I wanted to run back but Dug told me to keep walking towards him, he wouldn’t shoot us, we hadn’t done anything wrong, we had just made a mistake and we had to cross that farm land to get back on track. After shouting some horrible things at us he turned round and went back into the farmhouse and Dug and I got back on the road. A horrible moment. Was it trespass? We had entered land that was privately owned and had no right of way, no public footpath. But is an assault on a person not equally the crossing of a boundary, another form of trespass?

I remember the feeling of euphoria when we arrived in Kirk Yethold, enjoying the free Wainwright pint in the pub. Completing the Pennine Way coincided with my decision to move to the UK permanently. Our relationship had survived but more importantly, I had fallen in love with hills, with England, with the endless stretches of moorland, the crags, rivers and dales, the woodlands and uplands as well as the people we had met along the way who had looked after us in their bed and breakfasts, had bandaged up my knees, washed and dried our socks, wished us well every morning before we set off. It was my introduction to England and I had been welcomed. The memory of that mad angry farmer had dissipated.

Much has changed in nearly 35 years. The peat bogs have eroded so much more that flagstone pathways have been laid down to keep walkers on a track. Other conservation work is going on to repair the landscape to save these carbon rich moorlands from further degradation. Areas are covered in nets to protect the new sphagnum moss that is planted by volunteers of Moors for the Future.

With rights come responsibilities. Rights, hard won by the men and women who took part in the 1932 Mass trespass of the Kinder plateau and subsequent protests, could easily be taken away for the simple reason that the protection of this landscape is more important than our right to roam. It is not as simple as this I’m sure. The way some of these moorlands are managed by landowners has lately been questioned too, even in Royal circles. The fact that land, used for grouse shooting, suffers because of the frequent burning of great patches of heather, uncovering the peat and thereby releasing carbon into the atmosphere has been acknowledged as a great problem. I’m hopeful that difficult conversations with the super rich land owning classes might actually become easier over time, even though time is not on our side.

I need to get back on track, having veered off and ventured into an area that I still know too little about. The project I have now started is around how we welcome, how we collaborate, how we can all benefit from the diversity of people with different skills sets, knowledge banks, life experiences. My volunteering work for City of Sanctuary in Sheffield and Tiafi in Izmir has highlighted that people who seek refuge are often in a lock down situation for years on end. And yet, I have so often thought that there is enough to do and that doing stuff that feels rewarding gives you pleasure, confidence, an improved sense of who you are and why you are here. It connects you to the world, binds you to a cause, gives you a sense of self worth, a reason to be. Someone, not so long ago, when I explained my reasons for wanting to start this project told me to organise another mass trespass. “Just march them to the top of the hill”. It had crossed my mind at an earlier stage too but this is not time for a mass protest. I think it needs to be done sensitively through dialogue, sharing experience and exchange of knowledge. Lock downs, as I wrote in an earlier blog post, have created a fear, sometimes closely resembling a distaste or hatred of outsiders. Marching these ‘outsiders’ to the top of a hill and down again is only a bit sensational and I don’t need the notoriety.

So the stage is slowly filled with props and the actors in this play are given their lines and asked to respond, encouraged to interpret, improvise. My first prop was delivered by Anna to my house and will be sent out to Ayse, Dilek, Hilal and Nilufer this week. It is a pack that consists of publications, leaflets, information sheets from the National Park Authority and other organisations based in the Park, to attract, inform and engage visitors. I’m asking them to read them, tell me what they find interesting, what is missing, what they like to do, what puts them off coming here. The four women and their families all have different skills sets and life experiences and I like to find out what they are attracted by and what they like to connect with but also, what is missing, what is putting them off venturing out here. How can the Park do things differently, how can businesses here benefit, how can the workforce and communities become more varied and mixed? It could be the start of something better. That’s all I hope for anyway.