On 24 April 1932, hundreds of ramblers from Manchester and Sheffield set off for the highest point in the Peaks. They were intending to highlight the gross unfairness of their severely limited rights to access an outstandingly beautiful area of country which was rarely farmed by its wealthy, aristocratic owner but instead kept only for occasional grouse shooting. The walk would go down in history as the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932 (named after the moorland plateau), and would later be seen as a seminal moment in the struggle for public access to private land.
At the time of the Trespass in 1932, calls for a “right to roam” had been being made for years. This was at base a question of competing freedoms, and of course one of class: should the land-owners be able to prevent the common man and woman from traversing open country, or did the latter have a fundamental and basic right to enjoy the countryside as much as the former?
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