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winded, I felt a flutter of apprehension. My hands were numb and my fingertips were stinging and pulsating with icy pain, but I couldn’t jam them into my pockets for warmth because I needed to balance properly on that hazardous snow. Then the idiocy of what I had done began to dawn on me. I was just another inadequately dressed townie, the sort which Highland rescue teams despair of. I had completely failed to appreciate the true nature of the landscape that I was walking into. It was a mixture of ignorance and urban arrogance, at the root of which lay the simple misguided conviction that, here in modern Britain, we have tamed the land and no harm can come to us when we are walking on it.

      Perhaps I am overstating the case, especially since, after ninety minutes of sliding, shuffling and crawling, I eventually made it back down. The sun had set behind me and the rich blue snow-capped peaks of the Cairngorms in the far distance seemed to hover in that indistinct twilight, with the stars out above, and the lights of Kingussie beneath me, looking like an old-fashioned illustration on a Christmas biscuit tin. The sheer physical discomfort of that journey back rather outweighed the earlier pleasure of walking and climbing without care. Yet I would do exactly the same walk again without hesitation. One crucial element of the rambling movement in Britain is the paradoxical belief that old wildernesses are disappearing, but that we can preserve them in all their purity by walking on them. Rannoch Moor stands as the most perfect example of this strange, nostalgic, in many ways completely counter-intuitive yearning.

      The idea of preserving wild landscapes is older than we would perhaps think. The year 1824 saw the formation of the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths In The Vicinity of York. This was followed two years later by the Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Footpaths. Despite the formality of these titles, the groups were more to do with a sense that working people needed a sanctuary, a guaranteed place of escape.

      As nineteenth-century journalist Archibald Prentice wrote of the environs of Manchester at that time: ‘There are so many pleasant footpaths, that a pedestrian might walk completely round the town in a circle which would seldom exceed a radius of two miles from the Exchange.’ He also noted that other northern towns were similarly close to excellent country, and that ‘thousands … whose avocations render fresh air and exercise an absolute necessity of life, avail themselves of the rights of foot-way through the meadows and cornfields and parks of the immediate neighbourhood.’

      The closure of many footpaths at a time when urban populations were beginning to increase dramatically also started to attract attention. A petition was drawn up in 1831 to protest against the ‘stopping up’ of such paths. Then, in 1833, a Select Committee on Public Walks was formed. It found that there were no common lands around Blackburn and that the inhabitants had nowhere that they could walk. Meanwhile, in Bury, there was some ‘uninclosed heath’ – but it was over two miles away from the town. In the same period, this idea of walking and escape percolated into popular literature. In 1842, John Critchley Prince wrote an essay, ‘Rambles of a Rhymester’, which was published in ‘Bradshaw’s Journal.’ In one passage, he declares: ‘What relief it was for me, after vegetating for twelve months amid the gloom, the filth, the squalid poverty … to find myself surrounded by green fields, luxuriant hedgerows, and trees just opening to the breath of Spring!’² Similarly, local newspapers in towns such as Burnley would often publish readers’ verse to do with the beauty of the countryside. They were appealing, not merely because of the conditions in the towns, but also because each family would have in its antecedents all sorts of memories of the rural life that had not long passed away. The preservation and protection of footpaths was also a metaphor for the preservation of treasured family memories.

      These rights of way had a political dimension as well, though. From the eighteenth century, Parliamentary Acts of enclosure had been parcelling up the land: areas that had once been common land were acquired by landowners, and the result had been countless bitter disputes, not just about rights of way, but also about wood and berry gathering, and the trapping of rabbits and hares. By the late eighteenth century, poaching was, in some cases, a capital offence. Enclosures had been going on rather longer; common grounds had been encroached upon heavily in the wake of the Reformation, when new landlords made grabs for former monastery lands. Hedges – which these days stand as one of the beloved metonyms for the English countryside – were once extremely unpopular. They marked the boundaries of seized land. Asserting the right to walk on what had been regarded as an ancient footpath was a symbolic way of redressing the balance a little. It seems that this in turn had the effect of making rural landlords rather more hostile to the old Rights of Way that bisected their lands. There was further fencing, and hedging, and stone walls were built. Although this was partly to do with new agricultural techniques – in essence, not allowing cattle to roam as far as they used to – there was also an undeniable effort to keep labourers off private land.

      On the banks of the Clyde in the 1830s, there was the case of one landowner who decided to prevent walkers – usually working men from closer to the centre of Glasgow – using the river path. The case grew so heated that it was put before the local authorities, who ordered that the path be opened again. But for every such victory, there were countless cases up and down the country of the Enclosure Acts making landowners consolidate their rights of ownership.

      Nevertheless, this nascent walking movement very swiftly spread to other industrial cities such as Liverpool and Leeds. These were all cities where the rivers reeked with effluent, and where the unsanitary nature of the accommodation made terrible diseases inevitable. The vast manufactories were monolithic, the opposite to anything that anyone would find in the openness of country. The desire to walk was to do with space, physical as well as mental. Home and work darkly mirrored one another. In ‘miasmatic courts and alleys’, an entire family would be crammed into one room; here they would eat, sleep and live. Then at work, men and women were hemmed in tight, in occupations that required them either to stay in one place to carry out repetitious mechanical tasks, or move through intensely claustrophobic tunnels, unable to stand up or stretch out.

      The Scots, with their even greater abundance of wild countryside, had their keenness for walking made even sharper by recent memories of the Clearances. What once had been the wide open common land, upon which whole communities had thrived, was seized in a series of brutal land-grabs perpetrated by Scottish aristocrats, intent upon maximising the profitability of their land by turning thousands of acres over to sheep grazing, and later to game and to forestry. We might timorously say – for the sake of some kind of balance – that the landowners in turn were not always acting out of malice, but were sometimes simply responding to different sorts of economic pressure. One of these pressures was the rate of emigration among the young in rural communities – even before the Clearances. Before such journeys were enforced, increasing numbers of young labourers had been beginning to set sail for Canada, to lay claim to their part of a New World, in search of greater prosperity.

      The crofting communities these young people left behind were part of a way of life that simply, inevitably, was going to go – much in the way that, two centuries later, the remote island of St Kilda had to be evacuated. The point about any period of economic turbulence – regardless of cruelty, intentional or otherwise – is that it is always those at the bottom who find that their security and stability have been ruthlessly stripped away. So it was during those decades that, for the sake of landowners grazing their sheep or turning their estates into hunting grounds, men, women and children were herded out of villages; some were sent to the western ports, from which they were expected to emigrate. Others went to the towns. Villages were burnt to the ground and old traditions destroyed in a matter of hours. And perhaps for this reason above any other, in Scotland the very notion of private land continues to this day to be of the most fantastic political sensitivity. There are those who still want revenge for the Clearances.

      After this came a Scottish version of enclosure, or emparkation: rich Victorians who gazed upon these vast glens and moors and who closed them off as far as possible for the purposes of hunting. For example, much of the south of the Cairngorms came to be owned by the Atholl Estate, having been seized in the early nineteenth century. In the 1840s, the Duke of Atholl became involved in a much-publicised skirmish with ramblers. These men – a professor of botany from Edinburgh University called John Balfour, and seven of his

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