1965 was the year Winston Churchill died and Mary Quant introduced the miniskirt. The Sound of Music was released and the US Supreme court legalised the use of contraceptives by married couples. Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, released just the year before, seemed prophetic indeed.
But perhaps it was the opening lines of the iconic song – “gather round you people/wherever you roam” – that best forecast one of the landmark events of 1965: the opening half a century ago of the 267-mile long Pennine Way. Yet while the launching of the nation’s first long distance footpath marked an important departure, it also signified something that has become very British; a fruitful accommodation between public and private interests rarely found in the wildlands of the world.
Britain’s 117,000 mile network of public footpaths and rights of way – used by pilgrims, travellers and local people for thousands of years – ranks as an ancestral legacy with our greatest buildings and monuments. Yet its history has not been without conflict, and nowhere more so than on the bleak moorlands of the Pennine Way.
The roots, perhaps, go back to 1900, and the founding of the first working-class rambling club in Sheffield. By the 1920s tens of thousands of workers were spending Sundays walking in the wild. In 1932 some 15,000 headed for the hills from Manchester alone every weekend. But they often found their paths blocked.
It all came to a head that April when some 600 ramblers undertook a mass trespass, walking from Hayfield in Derbyshire to Kinder Scout, to demand that landowners should open a public path through the High Peak District plateau, to be walked when the land was not in use. Scuffles followed, six of the demonstrators were jailed, and a legend – and a cause – were born.
The following are paid links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
Copyright © 2011-2023 Internet Brothers. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 2324-6057
Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by Wordpress | Logo by Design Aspirations