My grandad was only ever elderly as far as I knew him. A bit grumpy. Kind to me, his smallest grandchild. He was a man who felt like he’d never really done anything. Like most of my grandparents he was born in the 19th century. I have to stop for a moment when I write that.
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The 19th century. Right at the end, in 1898. In 1918 he was sent home from the front of WW1 with Spanish flu. He survived Ypres when most of his regiment didn’t because he was ill. His sister and my great grandmother weren’t so lucky. But this ain’t a CV story or even a story
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about a pandemic. This is something else. He worked, most of his life, as a clerk in an office. He started out low ranking and ended up there too. The absolute epitome of a white collar worker.

As a child there were three things I knew him to love, birdwatching, Toc H, and
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recorded music. We’d regularly walk together down the road from his small house into the main part of town, me to cash the small postal order he’d get for me when we visited, him to buy a single or more rarely an LP. I’ve still got many of them. Songs from the 60s and 70s
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and some of the releases that featured well known bits of classical music. He wasn’t a music snob. He had eclectic tastes all round. And we’d sit in his small front room and listen together. He’d often be rubbing his knee. A few years before he died he finally got a replacement
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and that was wonderful to him. The fourth thing he’d been passionate about as a younger man was walking. I knew him only in his waddlesome old age, but in his 20s and 30s and 40s he’d been a passionate hiker. And this is what this story is really all about.

He’d work hard
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throughout the week and on one weekend a month he’d catch a train on the Friday night and go off somewhere to walk. It was a compromise with my grandmother. Just once a month. She was working too so one weekend a month she did her thing. It was a surprisingly egalitarian
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arrangement for the times.

He had a canvas backpack, a sheet of oilcloth, a blanket which could be reconfigured into a poncho by a cunning arrangement of buttons he and my grandmother had come up with, and a small spirit stove. Even in my childhood these were regarded as some
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sort of holy relics of an important past.

He’d spend the weekend walking, kipping down at night under a hedge, or in a haystack, or if he was lucky and the weather was inclement he might find an open farm building, or, once or twice an open church. I can see him now,
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Cudgelling the horsehair kneelers into a makeshift bed. It must have been hard. But not as bone leaching cold as a stone flagged floor.

He’d usually make it home on the Sunday afternoon. But, just occasionally he’d catch a milk train overnight and change into his work clothes
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on the train or at the rail station.

Of course, he had a few run ins. With gamekeepers. With landholders. With a few farmers too. Trespass was the kind of issue you could be in serious trouble over. He was mostly a very law abiding man. He worked in a solicitor’s office, he
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knew all the small things and the big that could go badly wrong in someone’s life. But he had a thing about a person’s inalienable right as he saw it to be able to stand free under the sky on any piece of land.

And this brings us to the heart of this story. In his 30s he was
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a bit lost. He’d got two small children. He already knew he was destined only for small things at work. He was married. Adequately. But he was facing the reality that his would be a little life with a narrow circumference.

He kept quiet about how he found out about the walk.
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Perhaps he was worried for others. It’s hard to tell. And there is no one left to ask. But, at some point towards the end of 1931 or at the start of 1932 he read or heard about a planned trespass on Kinder Scout.

He saved his train fare. Changed the weekend of the month he’d
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be away and worked out his route.

He travelled up from south of London on the Friday. All the way to Macnchester. On the Saturday he caught a train out on the Hope Valley line to Edale.

All through my childhood I wasn’t sure if it really was called that, it seemed like
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such a propitious name. He spent Saturday night wrapped up in a blanket and his oilskin. Watching the distant lights of Manchester of Sheffield. I don’t know if that’s true. How lit were those towns then? But it made for a good telling.

In the morning of the 24th April
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he had only the vaguest idea of where he was supposed to be. He had a map of course. But a map is not the territory and Kinder Scout is a big area. He walked around a lot. He could hear voices now and again, raised, angry. And sometimes in the distance he could see a bunch
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of men. He caught up with some eventually. Some arrests had already been made, there had been a fight with some gamekeepers.

He chatted easily with the men he met and they shared a couple of bottles of beer. They were amazed that he’d come all that way. He was amazed that
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they were risking their livelihoods so close to home.

But they all understood both the lure and the longing of the land around them.

He’d got a bit lost on the way he explained. Which was why he’d missed the rumpus.

I think he’d have liked to stay, up there, with these
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who shared such fellow feeling. But work and his little life was calling. So he got back to Manchester. Caught a milk train south. Changed on the train. And walked into work.

He remembered there was a lot of filing to be done that Monday. And having to listen to his boss tut
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over the pictures in the paper of those ruffians on the hills.

The Kinder Scout trespass on the 24th April 1932 became one of the rallying calls of the right to roam movement. Maybe it wasn’t as effective as some would like to think. But it provided an iconic moment.
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Grandad didn’t make much of it. He said it felt like he wasn’t really there, missing all the good bits as he did. Getting lost, in effect.

But it rallied him a different way. He got lost, but he found himself. He got involved in more things locally. He did more at his church.
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He pushed against the boundaries of his small life, like blowing into a balloon. So it reaches its limit but never bursts.

In his 70s he’d look at the newspaper clippings, or light the little spirit stove and make us tea. Whatever the circumstances of your birth he’d say,
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under the sky? Under the sky, we are all free.

Today is 88 years since the mass trespass on Kinder Scout. It’s getting tougher for everyone in Britain to access land. The possibility of wildness or simply to be able to live outdoors is growing ever harder.
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Proposed legislation to curb movement by Roma and travellers is the continuation of the denial of nature.

So, I’m grateful to those men, and to my grandad, who went out there, to remind us all to be free. Under the sky. And on the land. And to trespass if we must.