A sort of severance

An excerpt from Patrick Galbraith's new book Uncommon Ground, which sees him wandering haunted moorland with the poet and Boundless contributor, Emily Oldfield

In the morning, we leave the flat and drive south. Heading over the top, at Cloughfoot, a pair of ravens drift high in the wind, and the last of the winter snow lies in the shadow of a low stone wall.

In Bacup, I stop for a moment to look at the art deco bingo hall, which was later a cinema, and is now closed. Emily tells me it’s beautiful inside, with its grand staircases and painted plaster. She tells me too that not many people had heard of Bacup until the murder of Sophie Lancaster and the brutal beating of her boyfriend in 2007. The couple were walking through Stubbylee Park in the early hours when a group of local teenagers attacked them. The incident became synonymous with ‘broken Britain’ and Lancaster, who had pink hair and a metal bar in her bottom lip, was known as the girl who was killed because she looked different. But her boyfriend, who lay in a coma for a week after the attack, said the press had got it wrong. It wasn’t, he thought, because they were ‘goths’ or anything like that, it was that the boys who attacked them were ‘forgotten people’. They had been left behind, with nothing much to do, in a town rinsed by the industrial revolution.

Acts of violence have always occurred but I don’t think we can overlook the impact on young people in rural, post-industrial towns, feeling disconnected and cut off. Relationships that once gave them a sense of identity and purpose have been lost: fishing towns with empty harbours, market towns where the livestock in surrounding valleys goes elsewhere, and shut-up pubs that would once have been full of farmworkers. Hollowed out places, without context and connectedness, which have lost much of their culture and identity, are unhappy places and Britain is full of them.

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We turn left near Rivington Services and head up a steep single-track lane. There are passing places all the way up but ‘No Parking’ signs have been fixed to the trees by the local estate. The residents and emergency services need access, the signs reason, ‘due to the pandemic’. We drive up and down the road twice and then decide that the only thing we can do is leave our cars pulled over to the side at the top.

A couple of hundred yards up the track, there is a gate across a path and a weathered sandstone slab, with a chiselled inscription running across it, has been sunk into the grass: ‘On Sunday 6th September 1896 10,000 Boltonians marched by this spot to reclaim an ancient right of way over Winter Hill. The path is now dedicated as a public right of way for the enjoyment of all.’ We stand next to it for a moment and Emily tells me that obviously her grandad wouldn’t have been born at the time but when he was a young man, four or five decades later, the march was still a very big part of local lore. Even if people hadn’t been there, they spoke about it as though they had. Emily recounts the details, like a child who’s learned a list of capital cities – ‘It set off from Halliwell Road in Horwich and then joined Coalpit Lane. The crowd swelled and swelled as the march went on and when they got to the gate, Colonel Ainsworth, the landowner and heir to a cotton-bleaching fortune, was there with the police.’ Emily tells me that a fight broke out and despite Ainsworth telling the protestors he’d have writs issued against them, they threw one of the policemen over a gate, ducked Ainsworth’s land agent’s son in the stream by our feet, and then marched over the hill.

Emily was in her mid-teens before she found out about the trespass. Despite the numbers being far larger than the estimated 400 who marched on Kinder Scout with Rothman in 1932, the Winter Hill protest never achieved the same profile. It’s difficult really to know why but Emily thinks that Kinder Scout gained more notice among the middle classes. The enduring popularity of Ewan MacColl’s ‘The Manchester Rambler’ has no doubt had an effect too. Emily also thinks that the author- ities were keen to suppress the momentum that the march on Winter Hill appeared to be gathering – the whole thing was initiated by the Social Democratic Foundation, who had placed a small advertisement in the Bolton Evening News, and she suspects that the socialists, under the leadership of a man called Solomon Partington, were considered to be dangerous. After the success of the 10,000-strong march in early September, another protest was scheduled for the following Sunday and a song was commissioned: ‘Will yo’ come o’ Sunday morning, for a walk o’er Winter Hill. Ten thousand went last Sunday, But there’s room for thousands still!’ There were 500 song sheets printed but in spite of trying, Emily has never managed to find one. It rained hard that Sunday and she wonders if the sheets were destroyed.

Emily, as well as writing poetry, and teaching at Manchester Met, is currently working on a book about northern food culture and packhorse trails. She isn’t sure really when her interest in old roads and forgotten routes began but she thinks it was probably when she came across a road called the Long Causeway. ‘It connects Burnley and Hebden Bridge and then goes on to Halifax and sometimes on old maps it’s just called “Causey”. It’s properly ancient.’ As well as walking the Long Causeway, Emily started reading up on its history and learned all about the preaching crosses on the road that signify places of spiritual gathering. She soon realised that almost all the paths she’s ever known, the railways, the canals, and the roads through the valley bottoms, are relatively modern and that for thousands of years before they were constructed, packhorse trails would have been the paths that her family and people like them would have used every day. She often thinks, she tells me, about all those people whose footsteps she’s walking in: the farmers, post boys, and murderers. Further up the hill there is a memorial to George Henderson, a Scottish merchant who was shot through the head in 1838.

As we walk, the temperature starts to rise and the morning becomes muggy and close. Up ahead of us, a lapwing cock rises and tumbles across the moor. In the late eighteenth century, Baptism and Methodism became popular throughout Lancashire; as a consequence, Emily says, of industrial work being so grinding. ‘It was basically a death sentence and methodism preached universal salvation so even if your life was miserable and short, you’d still go to heaven.’ It was, she supposes, a great source of hope. Emily thinks it’s sort of sad really but she supposes it brought people peace and they would often walk for miles and miles over the hills to listen to ‘open-air preachers’. In a way she thinks that the walk itself, the actual journey to hear that misery wasn’t going to be eternal had a sort of spiritual quality. It wasn’t just about the words. It was about the journey to get there too.

In front of us, running along a Rylock fence, large gritstone slabs, each of them a slightly different size, are sunk into the heather. Ramsey has walked all over the world but he thinks there’s something unique about paths like the one beneath our feet. ‘The slabs round here just have this sense of heft and resilience. They kind of meet you and they have a sense of importance.’ He talks slowly and in a considered, thoughtful way, as though every word counts. Emily, who is walking behind me, tells me that when she was very ill her relationship with the landscape changed. ‘I was like proper ridiculously skinny. My writing’s really tactile about the land because when you’re so thin everything’s amplified.’ When the wind blew and snow came down and she was out, she felt suddenly as though her concerns were small. ‘I felt like the land could just swallow me up and it was kind of reassuring.’ Publishers, Emily keeps finding, want her to dress her writing up as a sort of post- anorexia thing, a kind of journey to recovery. ‘People invite me to literary events and they want me to go in a certain vein but I don’t want to do that.’

For a long time, Emily didn’t eat meat but walking and ‘kind of talking to everybody along the way’ made her change her mind. ‘When you’re a student you’re kind of in this bubble and it affirms what you believe.’ But out on the hill she started to realise that small-scale farming was an essential part of the land- scape. ‘It’s hard to explain’, she tells me as we turn right onto the road over the top, ‘but I just had all these encounters with all aspects of life in an unrehearsed way. I don’t like to make any assumptions. I just wander and I talk. I talk to farmers. I talk to people in the pubs. Life in these small hill-farming communities is hard.’

Ahead of us, a radio mast, held on each side by steel wires, rises up in the fog. ‘It’s so weird’ Emily says, looking up at it. ‘You see all those cables and there’s that mound down there. It’s a Bronze Age hill fort.’ I ask Emily about her poetry and whether the things she writes about are always specific things she’s seen when she’s wandering, or whether they are the drawing together of lots of things. ‘Like that badger in that poem in Calder?’ She tells me that actually the badger lived very near her grandad’s house and he’d always go out to feed it in the fields at night. ‘I was there one night and he said let’s go and look at the badger. He’d feed it out his hand. And you know that moment with a wild animal when you look into its eyes and it looks into yours and you’re not quite sure what’s going through its mind and you want to convey that you don’t mean any harm but there’s no medium of language.’ We walk on and she says that not long after she went with her grandad to see the badger, he got moved into a hospice, and then at the end, he couldn’t talk but Emily remembers that ‘his eyes were still looking at me and there was a moment, just like the badger. It was the same.’

Where the track comes to a stop there is a small plastic plaque, to commemorate where the trespass ended. Some of the protestors just wandered back to town and others went on to the Black Dog pub in Belmont, a village at the foot of the hill. Over the months that followed the first trespass, there were further demonstrations and prominent socialists including Keir Hardie and Eleanor Marx visited the town, which was becoming a centre of dissent. Then, in mid-September, Colonel Ainsworth sent his land agent’s son to deliver writs to those who were considered to be the leaders of the protest. That afternoon, the number of marchers on Winter Hill was much reduced and over the days that followed, 32 further writs were issued.

In an attempt to split the campaign, Ainsworth instructed his solicitors to ask those 32 if they were socialists. If they answered ‘no’ and confirmed they wouldn’t trespass on Winter Hill again, the writs were withdrawn. Eventually, just the original ten faced charges and the trial began on Tuesday 9 March, 1897. The radical barrister, Richard Pankhurst, who represented the defendants, claimed that access to Winter Hill had long been part of the lives of Boltonians. There had been a stile, Pankhurst told the judge, for a long time at the start of the disputed path. Witnesses also told the court that there was a long tradition of going up onto the hill to inns like Black O Jack’s and William Fletcher’s Cottage, near where the radio mast now stands to buy gingerbread, which came with free beer (in order to get round licensing laws). It was also noted that the poor had gone out to live on the hill when they were unable to pay the rent on their cottages. Other witnesses spoke of a long history of people walking over the tops to get to the mills in Bolton and Horwich, and of a tradition of old ladies picking ‘whimberries’ in autumn, hence ‘Whimberry Hill’, the historic name for the eastern end of ‘Winter Hill’. But Ainsworth had instructed his gamekeepers to build butts for driven grouse shooting on the side of the track and witnesses for the prosecution, witnesses who were largely his tenants, confirmed that wandering and berry picking couldn’t go on. The judge found in Ainsworth’s favour and costs were awarded against the defendants along with injunctions to keep people out. Over the following weeks, Ainsworth hung flags on the walls of his bleaching factories to celebrate his victory.

At the Black Dog pub, Emily and Ramsey and I sit beneath a sign advertising psychic readings the following Wednesday, and Ramsey tells me it’s a funny thing because he’s never known a country where you can walk quite so freely as you can in Britain. Being an Arab in America, as he was for quite some time, meant staying on the path and England, he thinks, is a country that looks as though it’s just been created for walking.

Patrick Galbraith’s Uncommon Ground is out now with William Collins

Patrick is currently reading The Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales, which is published by The History Press