A park where most needed
the people’ s park Roly Smith
A park where most needed
There can be no doubt then that the Peak District was a national park where it was most needed. It has been estimated that half the population of the country lives within 60 miles – that’ s day trip distance – of the Peak, and that’ s from where the vast majority of its huge influx of over 13 million day visitors come.
And surely the wonder of the Peak is the fact that the walker can still get that unique, away-from-it-all, top-of-the-world feeling on places like the peaty wastes of Bleaklow or Kinder. This is despite the barely-credible fact that he or she is only a dozen miles from the bustling centres of Manchester in one direction and Sheffield in the other.
In fact, one of the major catalysts in the campaign for the creation of the Peak as a National Park in the 1930s and 1940s was that constant pressure for access, especially to the highest and wildest moorlands of the Dark Peak, by the citizens of the surrounding towns and cities. Those“ blue remembered hills” were actually visible to the wage slaves sweating out their workaday lives in the grimy cotton mills of Stockport and Manchester and in the blistering heat of the steel works of Sheffield. Yet this land which was formerly common for all to use was frustratingly out-of-bounds and forbidden to the weekend rambler – guarded by belligerent, stick-wielding gamekeepers and‘ Trespassers will be Prosecuted’ signs at access points.
The whole thorny issue of access to the Peak District moors came to head on Kinder Scout one sunny Sunday in April, 1932. The Lancashire branch of the British Workers Sports Federation had been turned off Yellowslacks on the western flanks of Bleaklow that Easter by a threatening gamekeeper.
So they decided on direct action, reasoning that if there were enough of them, the gamekeepers could not stop them. The proposed Mass Trespass was well advertised in local newspapers, and on the appointed day, about 400 turned up in the sleepy village of Hayfield on the western edge of Kinder.
After a rally at Bowden Bridge quarry, during which a 21-year-old unemployed mechanic named Benny Rothman addressed the crowd, they set off up the Kinder Road, around the Kinder Reservoir, and into William Clough on a centuryold right of way. At an appointed signal as they entered the clough, the ramblers struck out onto the forbidden moor below Sandy Heys and encountered a group of stick-carrying gamekeepers who had been lying in wait.
10 OUTDOOR FOCUS Spring 2026