Think of the Grouse
92% of our country remains off-limits. Campaigning for greater access is crucial, but we also need to understand how class, access and capital have quite literally shaped our landscape.
They played ‘The Manchester Rambler’ at my grandfather’s funeral. It’s Ewan MacColl, doing what my father calls his best English folksinger impersonation with one finger jammed in his ear. The song is about a city boy who loves the moors around Manchester, so much that he misses his own wedding to a spot-welder whose eyes ‘matched the blue moorland sky’. One refrain of the song is ‘sooner than part from the mountains, I think I would rather be dead.’ Another is ‘Though I am a wage-slave on Monday, I am a free man on Sunday.’ It’s a silly, sweet song, but one in which the cold realities of land ownership, access and class writhe beneath the surface.
The central point of conflict in the song is the Manchester Rambler’s encounter with an irate gamekeeper, who tells him to ‘think of the grouse’ and reminds him that ‘all of this land is my master’s’. This means nothing to the rambler, who thinks that ‘no man has the right to own mountains / any more than the deep ocean bed.’ The song was written in 1932, inspired by MacColl’s involvement in the Kinder Trespass of the same year. Working-class youths from industrial towns flanking the moors regularly flocked to the Peak District in search of good clean leisure, but their efforts to enjoy the hillsides were regularly thwarted by gamekeepers blocking access to land, which was the private property of the Duke of Devonshire. On the 24th of April 1932, 400 organised ramblers walked up the William Clough Pass to demand greater access to the moors. After what is almost universally described as a ‘tussle’ with gamekeepers, six of the trespassing ringleaders were arrested, with two serving jail time for sentences related to the fighting rather than the act of trespass itself.
On their way back from their tussle with the gamekeepers, the Kinder trespassers reportedly sang the Internationale and the Red Flag. This trespass was not an amalgamation of random walking enthusiasts, but rather an organised effort on the part of the British Workers Sports Federation. Founded by the Labour Party and trade unions in 1923, by the time of the Kinder Trespass the BWSF was essentially a wing of the Communist Party, and many trespassers were themselves members of the Young Communist League. This commitment to radical leftwing politics is, it seems, often relegated to a point of interest rather than the crucial lynchpin upon which the trespassers’ actions hung. Their demand for access to the moors is directly tied to their position as (like the Manchester Rambler) ‘wage slaves’ in industrial areas that cluster round the Peak District like Sheffield, Bradford, and Salford. It is felt in their need for cheap, accessible leisure, their capacity to organise and be organised, and their ability to understand and articulate the injustice of the wider structures that underpin land ownership and access that many of us, even now, deferentially accept as just the way things are.
The events of that day have congealed to form their own legend, and their effect of spurring on the right to roam movement is still celebrated. The outcry at the prison sentences are credited with galvanising a movement that would eventually result in the creation of the first National Park in the Peak District in 1951, and later the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in 2000, which reviewed and protected existing footpaths and rights of way, as well as creating new ones. We owe a great debt to the trespassers of 1932, and all the anonymous campaigners for land access of the last eighty years. But although there is indeed greater access to Kinder today (which any sunny weekend throbbing with walkers will attest to), 92% of England’s land remains off-limits to the public. Even when land is ‘accessible’, what you can and can’t do on it remains tightly controlled — if you have a right of way through privately owned land, or through Open Access land like National Parks, staying overnight is universally off-limits, as is, in some cases, straying off the path. What is often put down to reasonable precautions protecting nature and livestock is in fact larger and more ideological, a deeply unequal balance of power pinning us to the path. The land is to be seen, presented like a tableau but ultimately unreachable, passed through only. Your presence is permitted, the landowner has deigned to admit you. You do not belong there.
***
I have been wild camping every summer since I was a teenager. The land has always been owned by someone, whether that someone is a person, like a farmer, or an organisation, like the National Trust, or a government body, like the Forestry Commission. I have always slept lightly, jumpy at the fear of discovery. Sleepless visions include the police coming (unlikely), or murder by a random killer who happens to be in the area (improbable but not impossible). But the cost of paranoia is more than worth the reward of an early-morning world covered with dew, white bursts of bog cotton stretching into a haze, alone on a small curve of earth, a tiny part of things in the bigness of the valleys and the stretch of the moors. Waking up to the sound of nothing but the birds is infinitely preferable to the tent zips and inane clatter of campsites, and the very act of being there is a fuck you to a natural enemy, whoever owns the land and doesn’t want to share it.
Such romantic revelry in the scenery and small thrill of trespass is necessarily tempered by a knowledge that even though the early morning vistas are devoid, for the moment, of people, ‘the human’ is still felt everywhere in the landscapes. Last year we camped up near Kinder Scout on a busy Saturday in the middle of the summer. Coming across other walkers becomes a kind of routine annoyance, a series of breathy greetings and quick grimaces, waiting for dusk to fall and the moorland to clear before setting up the tent. The falling light pulled out the long shadows on the grouse butts, dark against the swells of heather. The grouse butts are important. They’re wooden structures arranged in rows across the landscape, designed to hide grouse shooters who wait, poised, as beaters drive the birds up into the air to be shot. Their presence pulls us back from an imagined humanless landscape and into reality.
The grouse butts testify to a landscape that is, though beloved, deeply unnatural. Because almost all of our upland habitats are not only privately owned or tightly controlled, but are in fact a kind factory. This habitat, picturesquely bleak and desolate, has been managed carefully and exclusively to breed birds that are shot for sport, or really, for profit. Landowners and estates can charge literally thousands of pounds for the privilege of a few days spent killing some fat, unassuming grouse. That this particular patch of moorland was owned not by a private individual, but by the National Trust, which permits shooting, is an outrage for another essay, and I should also briefly point out that many conservation bodies still actively manage landscapes to produce the same kind of relatively sterile environment. That this has been deemed desirable is shaped perhaps in part by the legacy of grouse hunting and cultural and aesthetic ideas about what kind of landscapes and ecosystems are worth creating and preserving.
The ‘wilderness’ we woke up to that morning near Kinder Scout, with all its sweeping vistas and rippling hills, had been tightly controlled. The heather is burned and cut each year, sheep and cattle are grazed to keep the vegetation down. While this does benefit some moorland species, many others are unable to survive in such a sparse, disturbed environment. Whilst the heather cutting and burning is sometimes credited with maintaining blanket bog, a rare and ecologically important habitat, a 2022 study in Upper Teesdale found that cutting actually damaged the sphagnum moss whose capacity to absorb and store water is vital for the bog. Heavy machinery used in the cutting also flattened and compressed the area, destroying ‘microhabitats’ which further reduced biodiversity. And, despite laws against harming birds of prey, it is not uncommon for farmers and landowners to poison the grouse’s natural predators like golden eagles, red kites, and peregrines, as well as trap mammals like stoats that eat grouse eggs and young chicks.
The presence of the heather itself is in large part due to the already-degraded condition of the soil, and centuries of grazing that have compacted the earth. Before human intervention and intensive farming, herds of large herbivores that roamed through the landscape would likely have created a patchwork habitat of scrub, trees and meadow, peat bogs that have since been drained for farming or cut for fuel forming rich pools of life. Now, with the fencing off and parceling up of the countryside, the fate of a landscape completely devoid of human intervention and intensive management is less certain.
***
We can’t stop at dreaming merely of access to that 92% of our country that is still denied us. The very economic conditions that confine our Manchester Rambler hero to wage slavery also created the landscape that he loves so dearly, as the moors the trespassers fought for were shaped by the forces of capital they were fighting against. When the gamekeeper in the song says ‘think of the grouse’, what he is really saying is ‘think of the income they provide my master’. The landscape is never just a landscape, its very existence is deeply implicated in structures and histories that extend far beyond each heather-clad hillside or patch of woodland.
The Manchester Rambler declares that he gets all his pleasure ‘the hard moorland way’, but what does it mean to derive pleasure from a vista whose barren aesthetic has been shaped by capital? The bleak and beloved moorland is kept preternaturally static in favour of one species, or rather, in favour of the enjoyment offered by a few months of shooting that species each year, the ultimate class signifier. Our concept of wilderness and natural beauty has been warped by a countryside that is almost entirely intensively farmed, from industrial arable fields to the monotony of timber plantations. Tied up in the Manchester Rambler’s pronouncement that ‘no man has the right to own mountains’ is the complicated reality that if no man owned the mountains, then without the intense management, the burning and trapping and grazing that goes along with that ownership and the need to extract profit from it, those mountains, and our experiences within them, would look radically different. If we are to comprehend that singular act of trespass in 1932 as part of a commitment to a larger, longer term political project, we must recognise it as political project whose visions of an emancipated population include, however inadvertently, an emancipated landscape.
The terms of profit and extraction can be an uncomfortable framing with which to consider the British countryside. So many of us love the bare moors of the Peak District, the bald Welsh hills of the Cambrian Mountains, the rolling fields of corn, the docile herds of patchwork cows. We are so attached to the landscapes that are a product of capital that any proposed changes to them are often met with deep hostility, often from farmers who are worried about the economic repercussions of such changes, but also from those who resist the aesthetic changes that a wilder, more biodiverse landscape might bring. This has been the case time and again in uplands areas of the UK such as Mid-Wales and the Lake District, as well as the arable south. We need to think bigger than conserving the way things are, maintaining a status quo that we have learned to love in the place of a wilder country.
***
My grandfather was born in Salford and met my grandmother at the Cromlech Club, a mountaineering group he co-formed in 1952. Although the legacy of such groups are often intimately tied up with the radical left politics, my grandfather’s love of outdoor pursuits refuses to bend to my romanticising impulse. More reactionary than radical, he left Salford for rural petty bourgeoisdom running a village newsagents. We never spoke about his mountaineering days, and everything I know about him is constructed through the backwards glance of photographs.
The analogue memory of my grandparents’ youth lingers in all its black and white glory, kitted out as if they’re racing to the South Pole rather than scrambling in the Roaches, smiling on the steps of climbing huts, perched outrageously on walls of jagged rock. My grandmother persists, largely docile and unaware of what day of the week it is, or who I am. She stopped taking big country walks years ago, and stopped climbing long before that. She recently declared, however, that she is going to live to three hundred, telling her doctor that she still goes climbing every weekend, and that she’s ‘done Everest’ (she hasn’t). Sooner than part from the mountains, even the mountains of her mind, I’m sure that she would rather be dead.
Their mountains were loved, deeply and uncritically. But the song that played as the village church filled out for my grandfather’s funeral not only honours a rosily remembered past, but asks awkward questions about our future. It demands that we consider what it means to love a landscape whose very formation is a product of the intertwined effects of environmental degradation and class oppression. They are a result of the same system that began with the parcelling up of the commons 300 years ago, the same system that keeps us out today, that forces farmers to overgraze the hills, to produce more than the soil can bear. And so in dreaming of wilder mountains, more biodiverse moorland and balanced ecosystems, we must necessarily dream of a political project which makes that possible. There is no easy and immediate ‘answer’, of how to balance farmers, walkers, ecologists, state interests, but we can’t just stop at merely being allowed onto the land. We need to make it, or let it make itself, anew.
Reading List
The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes (2020)
Rebirding by Benedict Macdonald (2019)
What Effect Does Heather Cutting Have on Mosses? Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust
The Context The Right to Roam