The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker

doctors and I shall be well again.’ His essay is especially good on the mental benefits of a good walk, when ‘my thoughts start out with me like bloodstained mutineers debauching themselves on board the ship they have captured, but I bring them home at nightfall, larking and tumbling over each other like happy little boy-scouts at play, yet obedient to every order to concentrate for any purpose . . . I may wish.’ His book – Clio, a Muse and Other Essays – was published almost a century ago, but the condition, and the cure, are timeless.
    It is after this George, not his hippy nephew of the same name, that Trevelyan House, the St Albans headquarters of the Youth Hostel Association, is named, for he was their first president, in post for 18 years from the organisation’s launch in 1930. He’s left a rather less sober mark too, in one of the country’s oldest and oddest extant outdoor events, the Trevelyan Man Hunt. A boisterous hurrah for the upper classes, the idea was dreamed up in 1898 by Trevelyan and two Cambridge friends, having been inspired by the flight from the authorities of the two young heroes in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of derring-do, Kidnapped . Since then, the format has changed little: it is an exhilarating three-day scramble that still sees posh boys and their paters (the ‘hounds’) galloping over the fells of the Lake District in hot pursuit of a handful of young stablehands and jockeys in red sashes (the ‘hares’). The Trevelyan Man Hunt, or Lake Hunt as it’s sometimes known (naked swimming is an integral ingredient of the chase, for in common with many other aristocratic pursuits, it’s a thin excuse for a chap to get his kit off with his chums), sounds terrific.
    Defecting from the Liberals to become a Labour MP and Cabinet minister under Ramsay MacDonald, Charles Trevelyan was always astute in seeing which way the wind was blowing, and by becoming one of the first stately home owners to present his pile to the National Trust, pre-empting it as best as possible. More importantly, his gift came from a profound belief that owning huge tracts of land brought responsibility to ensure some measure of public access to it. Other politicians were neither as prescient nor as philanthropic, and the sound of the landed and wealthy resisting inevitable change continued to echo through Parliament and the press right up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
    Trevelyan’s 1908 access bill seemed at first to be successful; the Commons voted heavily in its favour. But for all the fine words in the chamber, as soon as it was shunted into committee, the bill was quietly sidelined and left to gather dust. In the press, only the Manchester Guardian , predictably enough, made enthusiastic noises; The Times seemed to forget its earlier support for Bryce and retreat into its Establishment lair, from where it shouted grumpily, in an editorial headed ‘Mountains and Molehills’, that the whole access issue was a ‘bogey’, and that every ‘man or woman or child who wishes to explore the waste places of this island can do so without let or hindrance from anyone’. Over the next 30 years, there were a further nine attempts to bring in new access legislation, all largely based on Bryce’s bill and all equally unsuccessful.
    To see how far, and how fast, things then changed, it’s instructive to take a closer look at two pieces of legislation enacted just a decade apart: the Access to Mountains Act of 1939 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. The 1939 Act was brought in as a bill the previous year by the Labour MP for Shipley, Arthur Creech-Jones. All through the 1930s, the public mood for greater access had been building up steam, galvanised by the Kinder protest of 1932 and its controversial aftermath. The idea of a first national long-distance path, the Pennine Way, had been floated by Tom Stephenson in a 1935 Daily Herald article, entitled ‘Wanted – A Long