Everywhere but Britain, organized walking seems to become hiking, then camping, and eventually something as nebulous as, in contemporary terminology, outdoor recreation or wilderness adventure. The clubs are “walking and” organizations: walking and climbing and environment activism, walking and socialism and folk songs, walking and adolescent dreaming and nationalism. Only in Britain has walking remained the focus all along, even if the word rambling is often used to describe it. Walking has a resonance, a cultural weight, there that it does nowhere else. On summer Sundays, more than eighteen million Britons head for the country, and ten million say they walk for recreation. In most British bookstores walking guides occupy a lot of shelf space, and the genre is so well established that there are classics and subversive texts—among the former, Alfred Wainwright’s handwritten, illustrated guides to the wilder parts of the country, and among the latter the Sheffield land-rights activist Terry Howard’s itinerary of walks that are all trespasses. The American magazine Walking is nothing but a health and fitness publication aimed at women—walking appears there as just another exercise program—but Britain has half a dozen outdoor magazines in which walking is about the beauty of landscape rather than the body. “Almost a spiritual thing,” the outdoor writer Roly Smith told me, “a religion almost. A lot of people walk for the social aspects—there are no barriers on the moors and you say hello to everyone—overcome our damn British reserve. Walking is classless, one of the few sports that is classless.”
But accessing the land has been something of a class war. For a thousand years, landowners have been sequestering more and more of the island for themselves, and for the past hundred and fifty, landless people have been fighting back. When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they set aside huge deer parks for hunting, and ever since, the penalties for poaching and interfering with hunting land have been fierce—castration, deportation, and execution were some of the punishments meted out over the centuries (after 1723, for example, taking rabbits or fish, let alone deer, was an offense punishable by death). The commons were usually privately owned land to which locals retained rights to gather wood and graze animals, while the traditional rights-of-way—footpaths across the fields and woods that the public had the right to walk no matter whose property they traversed—were necessary for work and travel. In Scotland, common land was abolished by an act of Parliament in 1695, and in England enclosure acts and unauthorized but fiercely enforced seizures of hitherto common land accelerated in the eighteenth century.
Corollaries of the glorious open gardens of the era, the lucrative enclosures were vast areas fenced off and filled with sheep or farmed by a single large landowner, and they were often created by shutting landworkers out from agricultural and common land. In the nineteenth century, an upper-class mania for hunting inspired many more landowners to sequester public land that formerly supported many people. The Highland Clearances of 1780–1855 in Scotland were particularly brutal, displacing quantities of people, many of whom emigrated to North America, while some were driven to the coast, where they eked out a bare survival on small farms. Hunting grouse, pheasant, and deer for a few weeks annually has become the excuse for denying access to thousands of miles of Britain’s wildest countryside year-round, and while hunting in the United States is sometimes a source of food for poor, rural, and indigenous people, hunting in Britain is an elite sport. Armies of gamekeepers patrolled and patrol such land, and some have used extreme measures to keep people out: spring guns and mantraps, dogs, brandished guns and shots fired overhead, assault with sticks or fists, threats, and usually, the support of local law enforcement.
When Britain was still a rural economy of landworkers, the struggle over access was about economics. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, half the nation’s population lived in cities and towns, and nowadays more than 90 percent does. The cities they moved to, particularly the new industrial cities, were often bleak. Densely built, without adequate fresh water, sewers, or garbage collection systems and with a constant pall of soot in the air from the coal-burning mills and homes, the English cities of the nineteenth century were foul places, and the poor lived in the foulest. It’s a chicken-and-egg question as to whether the taste for the rural or the awfulness of the cities came first, but the British have always sworn allegiance to footpaths, not boulevards. People wanted to get out of the cities whenever they could, and many of these cities were still compact enough that one could walk out of them into the country. During this period, the conflict over the commons and the rights-of-way stopped being about economic survival and became about psychic survival—about a reprieve from the city.
As more and more people chose to spend their spare time walking, more and more of the traditional rights-of-way were closed to them. In 1815 Parliament passed an act allowing magistrates to close any path they considered unnecessary (and throughout these land wars, the administration of rural Britain has been largely in the hand of landowners and their associates). In 1824 the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths was formed near York, and in 1826 a Manchester association of the same name was formed. The Scottish Rights of Way Society, formed in 1845, is the oldest surviving such society, but the Commons, Open Spaces, and Footpath Preservation Society, founded in 1865, is still active as the Open Space Society. It fought and won the war of Epping Forest near London. In 1793 the forest was a 9,000-acre expanse used by the public; by 1848 it had been reduced to 7,000 acres, and a decade later it was fenced off. Three laborers who cut wood there were given harsh sentences, and in protest of the sentences and the fences—which had been ordered removed by a court order—five to six thousand people came out to exercise their right to be there. In 1884 the Forest Ramblers’ Club was formed by London businessmen to “walk through Epping Forest and report obstructions we have seen.” Countless other walking clubs were formed in these years.
The conflict is over two ways of imagining the landscape. Imagine the countryside as a vast body. Ownership pictures it divided into economic units like internal organs, or like a cow divided into cuts of meat, and certainly such division is one way to organize a food-producing landscape, but it doesn’t explain why moors, mountains, and forests should be similarly fenced and divided. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property.
Certainly one of the pleasures of walking in England is this sense of cohabitation right-of-way paths create—of crossing stiles into sheep fields and skirting the edges of crops on land that is both utilitarian and aesthetic. American land, without such rights-of-way, is rigidly divided into production and pleasure zones, which may be one of the reasons why there is little appreciation for or awareness of the immense agricultural expanses of the country. British rights-of-way are not impressive compared to those of other European countries—Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Spain—where citizens retain much wider rights of access to open space. But rights-of-way do preserve an alternate vision of the land in which ownership doesn’t necessarily convey absolute rights and paths are as significant a principle as boundaries. Nearly 90 percent of Britain is privately owned, so gaining access to the countryside means gaining access to private land, while in the United States a lot of land remains public—if not always conveniently located for Sunday strolls. Thus the Sierra Club fought for boundaries, while British walking activists fight against them, but the boundaries laid down in America are to keep the land public, wild, and indivisible, to keep private enterprise out, while in Britain they kept the public out.
~~Wanderlust: A History of Walking -by- Rebecca Solnit
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