Leave No Trace: Class, Race and Belonging in UK Hiking Culture

Leave No Trace: Class, race and belonging in UK hiking culture

by Tom Bennett 13131673

This dissertation is submitted as partial fulfilment for the Degree of: MA Culture, Diaspora and Ethnicity at Birkbeck, University of London

Research Dissertation

Word count: 11252

I certify that the work submitted herewith is my own and that I have duly acknowledged any quotation from the published or unpublished work of other persons.

Signed: Date: 9th September 2019 1

Acknowledgements

I would like to express thanks to Yasmeen Narayan and Luke de Noronha, who have both provided invaluable tuition that has been both challenging and inspiring. To my peers that have provided discussion and solidarity throughout; thank you.

Thank you to my parents, Wendy and Raymond Bennett for their continuous support, and Hannah Lee for her endless encouragement and belief in my abilities.

Abstract

As a collection of auto-ethnographic observations, this dissertation is concerned with the performance of middle-class and rural nationalisms, and the constructed ‘normativity’ of their traditions as an active component to British hiking culture that has assisted in the silencing of other communities within UK

National Parks. By walking the land, I have shown that it is within this cross-section that the problem lies, and to diversify our rural landscapes as truly ‘spaces for all’, is a matter of rebuilding our concepts of what it means to truly ‘belong’.

Contents

0.! Acknowledgements p2

1.! Abstract p3

2.! Maps p5

3.! Introduction: Edale p7

4.! Methodology p12

5.! Literature Review 5.1! Introduction p17 5.2! UK hiking culture p18 5.3! Rurality and middle-class performativity p21 5.4! Land-ownership and empire p25 5.5! Conclusion p29

6.! Findings 6.1! Crowden Clough and Sandy Heys p30 6.2 William Clough and Hayfield p37 6.3 Edale Cross and the Woolpack p43 6.4 YHA Edale and Back Tor p48

7.! Conclusion: Peveril Castle and Hope p52

8.! Bibliography p56

All photographs within ‘Findings’ are the authors own, taken onsite during his time spent in the Peak District in July 2019, unless stated otherwise.

All maps found within ‘Findings’ are taken from the online Ordnance Survey maps found here: 4 bing.com/maps last accessed 09/09/2019

Maps: Day One

Key

Edale Station: 1 Crowden Clough: 2 Sandy Heys: 3 William Clough: 4 Hayfield: 5 The Woolpack: 6 YHA Edale: 7

Maps: Day Two

Key

Back Tor: 8 Peveril Castle: 9 Hope: 10

Introduction: Edale

I’m sat on the 08:02 train from London St Pancras to Sheffield, regretting my decision to get such an early departure. I am however, feeling grateful that a First-Class ticket was only £3.00 more expensive than a Standard one, allowing me the luxury of ample legroom, a free cup of tea, and a charging point for my phone. I had to change at

Sheffield from Platform 2 onto Platform 4 to get the train to Manchester, stopping off at

Edale right at the heart of the Dark Peak. The second train was packed and stuffy, consisting of several families, a stag group who had started on their tins of beer early, a collection of individual hikers with oversized rucksacks (myself included), and an assortment of OAP’s surprisingly generating the most noise, as they chatted loudly above the ambient sounds of the train. There were several stops before Edale, but people rarely got on or off. It felt as though the train passing through each stop was a hindrance for everyone's commute from city to city, and people got audibly frustrated at the crawling pace of the train. They needed to get to Manchester, and these small villages and large hilltops were preventing them from getting there as quickly as possible. I spotted a poster advertised on the train:

Get the kids

climbing the hills

not the walls -

Kids travel

half price

by train.

The poster aims to bring families into the hills of the Peak District, encouraging those

onboard to escape the frustrations of their homes and explore the open landscape the

‘hills’ have to offer. Ironically, the frustrations emanating from passengers on the train

felt targeted towards the surrounding countryside landscape as opposed to the city

‘walls’ at their departure or destination sites. A young male audibly tutted as a revised

‘expected arrival time’ was announced over the tannoy due to a fallen branch on the

track further down the line.

Train posters embracing outdoor recreation and hiking practices have been commonplace in the

UK since the inter-war period, to encourage perceptions of ‘the rural landscape as collective property, free for the public to roam at leisure’ (Blanchard et al, 2019:77), but I would challenge this statement. Despite

it being ‘free for the public to roam’, does everyone actually feel as though the National Park landscape is a

space where they feel comfortable in occupying? Audrey Weber’s (1936) ‘Conducted Rambles, Summer’

presents an idyllic perception of supposed bygone rural culture as farmers distribute hay over a sun-

kissed pasture from a horse and cart, pitched as a spectacle for city dwellers to witness if they were to take

a Southern Railway train and head off rambling in the hills (image 01).

There is an apparent nuance in how we understand rural class demographics based upon this

image, as the countryside transitions from a site of working-class labour to middle-class leisure, for those

able to afford access. This understanding has been maintained since the interwar period and into

contemporary conventions and can be seen reflected within the Peak District National Parks visitor index.

It states that the typical identities of their present visitors are:

• aged 45-65

• in employment

• are from non-BME populations

• have access to a car

Image 01: Weber, A., 1936, • from ‘comfortable’ communities Constructed Rambles, Summer, Southern Railway poster, Image sourced from: • ‘affluent achievers’ collecting20thcruralculture.blogspot.com Last accessed 09/09/2019 9

More interestingly, non-visitors are also described as:

• under 24 years old

• having low incomes

• are from BME populations

• having no access to a car

• living with health inequalities

(Peak District National Park, 2015:6).

By portraying the marginalised BME population as outsiders to the Peak District borders and maintaining ‘non-BME’ (read white) populations inside, they are not just highlighting the social-class divide but reinforcing the stale perceptions of the rural landscape being a ‘collaboration between whiteness and national identity’ (Cloke, 2004:23), directly linking the rural geographies of the UK to the ideals of the English middle-class who predominantly occupy its space, habitually or otherwise. By hybridising the rural in this way, the countryside becomes a space that replicates and reproduces cultures of white middle-class normativity and embraces the performative nature of associated cultural ‘traditions’ and their factitious imperial histories. This in turn marginalises and excludes certain communities from 10

occupying outdoors space and denies any sense of ‘freedom to roam’ that is advertised via National Park or public-transport marketing, past or present. By observing these behaviours within the Peak District landscape first hand, I hope to challenge the classist and racist legacies of the land (and its people) that helps create a false sense of ‘belonging for all’ in present day hiking culture.

My observations and analysis all contribute to the wider scholarship on cultural belonging within the rural landscape. In the proceeding chapters, my focus is split as follows, based on their chronological unveiling as I walked the Peak District: In Chapter One, I analyse the ‘rural’ as a racialised landscape, favoured by the middle-class and retained as a predominantly white environment through performed normativity that deflects the cause of racism onto the ‘urban’ or the marginalised ‘other’. Chapter two highlights the class conflict between hiking communities during the mass-trespass of Kinder Scout in

1932, that demonstrates how the middle-class can leverage their hegemonic capital to silence and erase the histories of the marginalised few by rewriting it as their own. Chapter Three contributes to this argument, by studying the foundation of the National Park system we are able to unveil its ties to Empire and the prevailing legacies of power it continues to maintain today. And lastly, Chapter Four concerns the omnivorous nature of ‘elites’, able to consume culture as a form of capital in order to champion space and superiority regardless of whether they belong or not. As a collection of auto-ethnographic observations, my dissertation is concerned with the performance of middle-class and rural nationalisms, and the constructed ‘normativity’ of their traditions as an active component to British hiking culture that has assisted in the silencing of other communities within UK National Parks. 11

Methodology

By employing an autoethnographic approach, I will be combining my theoretical research with a chronology of observations and thoughts recorded in early July 2019 whilst hiking in the Peak District

National Park over two days. Four chapters will be determined by these observations, influenced by particular geographies, people and objects that featured throughout my hike. To help provide a visual representation of the landscape, I have included labelled route maps of both days prior to my Introduction on pages five and six, as well as photographs and alternate maps, placed alongside each chapter for ease of visual consumption. I would encourage you to follow along with the maps as you read, so you can get a better sense of nearby villages and towns, or indications of heavier populated trails and local amenities that may affect your interpretation of the spaces I simultaneously occupy and discuss.

I have decided on using autoethnography for several reasons. I am able to use hiking, an activity I enjoy as both the process and product of my research (Ellis, 2010) that conforms to Tessa Muncey’s belief that ‘there is no distinction between doing research and real life’ (Muncey, 2010:3). This allows me the freedom to record as I see and embrace my own reactionary responses to my observations. It allows me to use my own personal experience to reflect and better understand the wider cultural experiences held within hiking, and to align my presence to the harsh realities of the exclusionary landscape. I have enjoyed the

process of writing autobiographically in the first-person and have embraced its stylistic use of storytelling in order to create an engaging eye-witness account for the reader (Caulley, 2008:442), but have found this challenging to balance with substantial theoretical research and a fixed wordcount. I too have struggled with the passivity of activism within academic writing about current social issues, but have found that the autoethnographic approach serves as a socio-political vessel to allow me to occupy and challenge the spaces I hike in. I am choosing to employ this approach because I want to show how visible, audible and physical these issues actually are within the rural landscape - all you have to do is walk and they will surround you. This is important to confront within my subject area, as the study of middle-class hegemony in Britain is complicit in identifying the influences of its power, were privileges and socio-economic status are often seen as ‘invisible’ factors’ to white individuals and majority white communities. I would therefore be replicating these values if I were to reject my own influence on the study, as a white male who grew-up within a predominantly middle-class white community and has been exposed to hiking cultures from an early age.

I enjoy hiking and have been fortunate enough to hike in the UK and Europe over the last 6 years.

In fact, I enjoy hiking so much, that I have begun my Mountain Leader qualifications in order to transition my career to revolve around it. But, research carried out by Outward Bound indicates that just 2% of 13

individuals participating in the Summer Mountain Leader Award, governed by the Mountain Training

Association, are from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds. It then reduces to less than 1% for the

Winter qualification of the same award (O’Brien, 2018), suggesting it to be an almost wholly white profession. Upon recent reflection of this, and in light of this thesis, I have increasingly become aware of my own imprint within this field of research as an additional white male contributor, who has been fortunate enough to feel a sense of belonging within the outdoors spaces I have occupied both locally and abroad, and to have never been knowingly profiled within these specific environments due to my ethnicity or social status. I therefore recognise that this may be a limiting factor within my research and that my observational analysis throughout this paper may be positioned very differently to those carried out by someone who would identify as a minority individual within the same landscape and culture.

There needs to be a sense of urgency when addressing these issues, as racist practices and attitudes too often go unchallenged in the absence of routine contact with minority ethnic people within predominantly white communities (Gain, 2000). For example, The Peak District National Park lack a diverse staff body, despite neighbouring both Manchester and Sheffield, two cities thriving with large multicultural, multi-ethnic communities. Of the last nine annual ‘Performance and Business Plans’, six of them have stated that 0% of their workers come from minority ethnic communities. Of the remaining 14

three, the highest percentage achieved was a meagre 1.07%1. Both the Cairngorms National Park in

Scotland2, and the Lake District National Park in Cumbria share the same alarming statistics for diverse workforces, the Lake District even going so far as to incorrectly label a pie-chart within their Equality and

Diversity report that shows their 91% ‘White British’ category simply as ‘British’ (Lake District National

Park, 2016:5). This not only highlights the poor diversity held within their staff, but the lack of understanding as to what they think defines being ‘British’; their reported assumption being that all British people are in fact white. If our National Parks staff, and our qualified mountain guides are majority white workers, how can we expect our outdoor spaces to be landscapes where minority ethnic communities and individuals can feel a sense of identity and belonging? They continue to address the problem yet do nothing about it, as it is not them who are affected. The issue is not necessarily the lack of diversity within our National Parks, but the retention of outdoor cultures and landscapes as legacies of white space.

By focusing on the Peak District National Park, my observations and theoretical analysis are representative of the National Park system as a whole, but this is not to ignore the nuances and cultural

1 All Performance and Business plan documents can be found on their website, referenced in my bibliography under (Anon, 2019) 2 The Cairngorms National Parks ‘Mainstreaming the Equality Act 2016/17’ reflects the same alarming statistics, declaring that they “do not currently have any staff that identify as being from an ethnic minority, and actions going forward include seeking a wider level of applications from people with ethnic minority backgrounds” (Cairngorms National Park, 2017:16). Despite this, when looking at the latest 2019 ‘Mainstreaming Update’, they still appear to have an entirely white workforce two years on2 (Cairngorms National Park, 2019:27) 15

difference that each embody, that would be possible to analyse if this were to be a larger piece of research.

Focus on the Pembrokeshire Coast, for example, would include the impact of dying seaside and picnicking cultures that once found great popularity amongst the bourgeois and is closely linked with hiking practices; or tracing its legacies associated to the trans-Atlantic slave trade that are no doubt evident when walking the coastline caught between the port cities of Bristol and Liverpool. Such a piece of research would prove quite different to this one, but for now, this can be seen as a point in which to start such discourse surrounding our National Parks.

Literature Review

Introduction

Within this section, I will be using the academic research of scholars, predominantly from within the field of social science but in combination with philosophers and historians, to demonstrate how UK hiking culture acts as a vessel for middle-class hegemonic behaviours. I will be showing how the construction of the bourgeois ‘norm’ has led to the performativity of white-middle class traditions and capitalist ideals within the rural landscape, and how these spaces are therefore racialized in binary to the

‘urban’ because of this. I will also be drawing research from artistic works and archival databases, in order to study identity and the (in)visibility of marginalised people within UK National Parks. The ancestral legacies of those in control of, and in possession of UK land, contribute to the ‘Othering’ of those currently and historically concealed from its landscape. This body of research ultimately demonstrates the exclusivity of the rural landscape, and how it’s been historically tailored to fit white middle-class ideologies of belonging and conformity.

UK hiking culture

Understandings of what hiking culture is, can often feel alien to those who have not grown up within families or communities that practice it. To put it simply, it is the participation of walking for recreational activity, commonly associated with the occupation of mountainous geographies - but too can be present within other landscapes such as inner-city or coastal environments. Hiking is an activity that can be enjoyed over a matter of minutes or hours, but often goes hand-in-hand with affiliations of camping and the desire to carry everything you need upon your back, in order to reduce life’s complexities to a continuous cycle of simplistic rituals:

Sleep

Repeat Eat

Walk

It is also praised as an easy, accessible, safe and enjoyable activity to improve health and wellbeing both physically and mentally (O’Mara, 2019) (NHS.uk, 2018), whose sentiments can be found embraced and shared within many hiking-affiliated organisations (The Ramblers Association, The Long Distance

Walkers Association, The Youth Hostel Association, National Trails UK, National Parks UK), who all promote welcoming and inclusionary spaces for all to access and practice hiking. Although I believe it’s worth endorsing, I do disagree with certain aspects of the above appeal. If participating in hiking activities

in any of our National Parks, basic suitable clothing and equipment is needed, an ability to use a map and compass is useful, you must be able to afford transportation costs and must know basic first aid practices.

These all contribute to the complexities of responsible hiking that often lead to people not hiking at all, because it’s too expensive, too time consuming, too specialist or too dangerous.

There are also many unwritten rules, laws and practices within hiking that often aren’t known unless you grew up within the culture. Wild camping, for example, is illegal by law but practiced commonly. Campfires are frowned upon by the community3. Bodily functions must be buried to a certain depth, and toilet roll should be disposed of separately. These, amongst many, simply aren’t known to the wider population, and can seem alienating and intimidating when you lack experience when hiking for the first time. Many of these rules fall under ‘Leave No Trace’ etiquette, where its primary focus is to minimise the human impact on our outdoors spaces, so we are able to enjoy them for longer. There are seven principles to Leave No Trace ethics:

•! Plan ahead and prepare

•! Travel and camp on durable surfaces

•! Dispose of waste properly

3 Campfires must comply with Leave No Trace principles unless in a designated campfire spot 19

•! Leave what you find

•! Minimise campfire impacts

•! Respect the wildlife

•! Be considerate of others

(Leave No Trace, 2019)

Despite being useful, as any set of guidelines are, the lack of awareness and visibility of this information is often never known. It’s not taught within our educational system and knowledge is assumed when participating in hiking activities, regardless of peoples differing experience levels or age. As my title suggests, the politics of Leave No Trace’s lexicography are indicative of what Pierre Bourdieu describes as ‘cultural capital’ a formulated elitism that ties cultural conformity to the socio-economic benefits of being middle-class. Bourdieu defines cultural capitalism as existing within three forms; the

‘embodied state’, that implies attributed time and labour ‘which must be invested personally by the investor […] like the acquisition of a suntan’ (Bourdieu, 1986:83), that could be found within the invested time and physical exertion to simply ‘walk’, so often perceived as an action of necessity and not an activity of leisure. Second is the objective state, ‘objectified in material objects’ (ibid:85) that can be found in the need for suitable clothing, gear and safety equipment. And thirdly, the institutionalised state, ‘in the form of academic qualification […], a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a

conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value’ (ibid:86) that can be attained having learnt the skills attributed to hiking, such as navigation, weather-reading and first-aid, or beyond into institutionalised

Mountain Training qualifications.

The socio-economic capacity to retain all three aspects of cultural capitalism can be seen distilled within the seven Leave No Trace principles. Without this cultural capital, individuals are forced to not comply, are seen as ill-prepared and a danger to the environment, and therefore do not ‘belong’. Those who can comply, produce and contribute to the hegemony of the middle-classes who have been historically seen to conform to capitalist ideals and the pursuit of respectability, whereby they can define their identity against the ‘‘lazy’ lower classes and the profligate aristocracy’ (Mosse, 1985:5).

Rurality and middle-class performativity

There is a wealth of academic research that explores ideas of the English landscape and the ‘rural’ as spaces that have trapped cultures of nationalism and whiteness. I have repeatedly returned to seek guidance from ‘Rural Racism’ (2004) by Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland, who have curated their research and collected articles based on the ‘rural’ being defined as a construct of middle-class hegemony to create an unchallenged zone of white belonging. This exclusionary behaviour polarises its definition in contrast to the urban and has allowed common understanding and popular culture to idealise the rural as

a place of sanctity and purity, and the urban therefore as a place of danger and pollution. The rural has always been romanticised as an:

“uncomplicated, innocent, more genuine society in which ‘traditional values’

persist, and lives are more real. Pastimes, friendships, family relations and even

employment are seen as somehow more honest and authentic”

(Little & Austin, 1996:102).

This is problematic, as these representations of identity also reflect within the cultural attitudes of the communities who live in and occupy these rural spaces creating a hierarchical imbalance over the

‘urban’. In doing so, we create an excluded ‘other’ out of marginalised urban-dwelling individuals who can no longer feel like they belong within rural spaces nor identify within the constructed rural idyll. By asserting social and cultural characteristics upon these terms, it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge and reverse perceptions to simply define a physical space by its geography alone (de Lima 2004;

Cloke and Little 1997; Philo 1992) without discussing who controls and/or occupies it. This is reminiscent of Stuart Hall’s analysis of ‘the West’, where the term is no longer used to define ‘Western Europe’ (as it was originated in the 15th Century) but appropriated to define a superior developed and modern society characterised and reproduced by those existing within that very socio-economic environment.

Interestingly, Hall gives the following examples: 22

‘Western’ = urban = developed [...] = good = desirable

‘Non-Western’ = rural = under-developed [...] = bad = undesirable

(Hall, 1992:277)

Although this is a drastic reduction of the terminology for examples sake, it does contrasts with the classifications of the rural and urban within the academic papers and publications of Chakraborti and

Garland. In Hall’s instance, the rural on a globalised scale is associated with an undesirable and under- developed landscape in accordance to Western values, yet on a localised scale, the rural is defined as the direct opposite in accordance to English values. This shows the nuance of its terminology, malleable to different scales of geographic representation, but both seemingly tailored to glorify the ideals of a majority population. Because of this, like Hall’s understanding of the ‘West’, academic discourse of the ‘rural’ (and therefore ‘urban’) can no longer be defined as simply geographical constructs, but as historical constructs instead. Understanding this terminology helps us consider the colonial and empirical legacies that are entangled within hiking culture and the national park system that can often be misunderstood as something of the past, that has been ignored or forgotten, and is something that no longer affects our modern day-to-day life (as discussed in ‘Land ownership and Empire’).

But, the binaries between the rural and urban, produced to protect the English middle-classes, also help us analyse and understand the performativity of the bourgeois idyll to maintain legacies of tradition and belonging. George Mosse wrote about nationalism and European ‘respectability’, where sexuality is used to highlight socio-normative behaviours generated by the middle-class to create ideals of manliness and female beauty. Conforming to these norms create familiar exclusionary binaries between

‘insiders who accept’ and ‘outsiders, [who are] considered abnormal or diseased’ (Mosse, 1985:1). Mosse states that this too is a ‘product of historical development and not universal law’ (ibid:3), suggestive of a performed conformity for individuals concerned to protect their cultural capital. Just like the acceptance of homosexuality in the ‘early Middle Ages, that was later considered dangerous to the Church and State’

(ibid:3), the changing norms of (hiking) cultures and (rural) environments can be shifted due to the power held within the performance of middle-class normativity that dictate who does and doesn’t belong within them.

I am utilising Judith Butler’s use of the word ‘performativity’ (Butler, 1988; 1999), to address the authorial command that is had by the ‘performer’ to act, to replicate and to reproduce these historically constructed norms. Just like a script would pass through the hand of many actors and actresses, who each take on and embody the role of a character, so too would the constructed identity of the white middle- classes, ‘stylized [through] repetition of acts through time’, ‘a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of

belief’ (Butler, 1988:520). ‘Performativity’ ties the middle-classes to the facticity of their traditions and

allows us to think about the intention of each ‘act’ that is reproduced and embraced as de facto, but

ultimately results in the exclusion and erasure of others.

Land-ownership and empire

There is little academic research to be found that focuses on the ties between empire, land

ownership and British hiking culture, but I have found several artistic representations of the subject

thought-provoking and influential to this study. The play, ‘Black Men Walking’, written by Testament,

discusses the silencing of marginalised hiker representation within the National Park landscape.

Influenced by the walking group ‘100 Black Men Walk’, a group who meet monthly to occupy the Peak

District landscape by hiking en-mass, the play allows the walkers to think about the lost black histories

that have been ignored or forgotten within the landscape. A resonant line carried throughout the play by a

choir of ancestral voices can be heard as follows:

“We walk. Though we are written into the landscape you don’t see us. We walked England

before the English.” Testament, 2018, Black Men Walk, (Testament, 2018) Play, Image sourced from: royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/black-men-walking/ Last accessed 09/09/2019

This allows us to think about understandings of visibility and identity within the landscape. The

histories of black and marginalised bodies have been intentionally erased, forgotten or deemed

unimportant within the landscape, therefore creating the illusion of an environment in which they have

never belonged and have never occupied. The invisibility of slave-ownership and colonial histories within

the UK countryside has often been strategically neglected within stately homes, National Trust properties,

and other sites of historical importance, but with the funding of projects such as ‘The Colonial

Countryside’ (a group of writers, historians and advocates who ‘invite primary school pupils to lead an

exploration into English country houses’ colonial pasts’) (Anon, 2018), we can hope for better visibility

and understanding of marginalised bodies that have historically existed within the countryside landscape.

The reason why so many young marginalised people fail to identify with the rural landscape today

(Chakaraborti, 2006; Fowler, 2017) may be because we are not teaching them these ignored histories.

The artworks of Ingrid Pollard, as seen amongst others at MK Gallery’s ‘Lie of the Land’ exhibition Image 03: Pollard, I., 1988, Pastoral Interlude (image 03), also embody themes of landscape, race and identity that have helped me understand the Text reads: “… it’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked positioning and reception of marginalised hikers within a countryside geography. Pollard’s quotes the Lake District; where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is attached to each image detail the colonial resonance within the outdoor spaces she inhabits as a black always accompanied by a feeling of unease; dread…”

Artwork, woman. Remnants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade seem ever so present, and its relationship to our land, Sourced from: ingridpollard.com/pastoral-interlude its ownership and its colonial legacies come into the foreground within this particular work. Catherine Last accessed: 09/09/2019 Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland’s research on the tracking and influence of slave ownership

and consequent post-abolition pay-outs have been catalogued on ‘The Legacies of Slave-ownership

database’ in order to ‘re-inscribe slave-ownership onto modern British history’ (Hall et al, 2016:2). This

allows us to understand and trace the influence particular families had in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries, that continue to have an impact upon the land and properties held within our National Parks

today. I will be using their database to show how Sir Arthur Hobhouse’ ancestral abolition pay-outs have

(perhaps) contributed to his wealth and status which allowed him to take on a position of influence within

the foundation of the British National Park system. Image 04: Pollard, I., 1988, Pastoral Interlude

Text reads: “…Searching for sea-shells; waves lap my wellington boots, carrying lost souls of brothers ^ sisters released over the ship side…” Both Ingrid Pollard and Testament’s work reflect the academic theories of postcolonial ‘othering’

Artwork, that can be found within Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (2003), that allow us to understand the erasure of Sourced from: ingridpollard.com/pastoral-interlude multi-ethic identities from the rural landscape as a result of white normativity and cultural racism. So Last accessed: 09/09/2019 much of the land owned within UK National Parks is owned by a selective few; aristocratic old money,

tycoon-led new money, the Crown and Diocesan estates… yet it’s very difficult to find out who owns what.

Within Guy Shrubsole’s ‘Who Owns England?’ he very quickly details the difficultly of why this is:

‘Concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it. Its why big estates

have high walls, why the law of trespass exists to keep prying commoners like you and me

from seeing what the lord of the manor owns - and why the Government’s Land Registry

[…] remains a largely closed book.’

(Shrubsole, 2019:1)

Knowledge of land ownership (and its mystery) is made difficult for those who don’t own land and is seemingly engrained into the fabric of our Nation’s infrastructure. These decisions, to hide ownership information from the public eye, are intentional and deliberate. Said observes that ‘men make their own history, that what they know is what they have made, and extends to its geography; as both geographical and cultural entities’ (Said, 2003:5), suggesting that the fabricated identities (histories) of UK landowners are also projected onto the cultures that exist within that land, and is reflected upon the land itself. In turn, this highlights that land ownership is unequivocally tied to Empire, and attributes to the protection of rural land and its cultures, preserving the land for the historic elite and their future descendants.

Conclusion

The invention of tradition and its ability to rewrite and reframe histories to suit the needs of the prevailing hegemonic classes allows us to understand the exclusionary practices held by hiking cultures that exist in the rural geography. In the conclusion to Eric Howsbawm and Terence Ranger’s ‘The

Invented Tradition’ (1983), Hobsbawn writes about middle-class sports that have ‘combined two elements of the invention of tradition: the political and the social’ that helps middle-class participants and fans to unify to both ‘national identification and factitious community’ (Hobsbawm, 1983:300). Throughout this chapter, I have demonstrated how hiking culture (and the participation of hiking activities) can be seen to embody both of these political and social tropes. Through the examination of scholarship on performativity, normality and constructed histories of the British middle-class, we are able to contextualise the impact of land ownership, empire and factitious idylls that result in racial and classist erasures of marginalised identities from within the principles and geographies of hiking culture. What follows are my observations within the Peak District landscape, that, as I walk, will unveil the presence of the above analysis within the present day functioning of these particular spaces.

Crowden Clough and Sandy Heys

I hop off the train alongside the handful of other hikers. The sky is overcast, and the clouds hang low overhead. I throw on my waterproof jacket for wind protection and get walking into Edale village. As if sharing a collective mindset, it appeared that the other hikers had done the same. Naturally, we dissipated in alternate directions and soon

I was alone following the start of the Pennine Way, striding along the well-defined, well- funded National Trail that stretches all the way to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border.

However, I was soon to divert off as I wanted to take an alternate route up onto the

Kinder Plateau having read a week earlier about an exhilarating scramble up the

Crowden Clough waterfall. It would require careful foot placement, a firm grip on wet rock and a head for heights, but I felt safe enough knowing it was within my graded ability and that weather conditions were ideal.

What is it that draws me (and many, many others) to the pursuit of climbing to the top of something? It feels like such a needless hierarchical pursuit, to end up ‘on top’, above everyone and everything down below, as if claiming a brief moment of superiority over society. I would reject this as an explanation for why I like to walk, but it worries me that this idea of ‘conquering’ something is somehow a subconscious empirical result of

being white and British - the histories of beating something or someone cemented within the understandings of what achievement is. ‘Beating’ is such a violent word.

But maybe it is something simpler;

maybe it’s about the adrenaline rush,

or the fresh air,

the beautiful views,

the sense of achievement,

mental clarity,

physical workout,

or all (or any) of the above?

Or is it simply too easy to mask engrained colonial desires with those more widely accepted and palatable to society?

On top the wind picked up and the clouds hung low on the plateau. As I broke over the crest of the waterfall, a few families were having lunch bundled together under some large rocks; brightly coloured hooded raincoats and the sight of sleeves cramming soggy sandwiches into mouths. I carried straight on into the mist, navigating my way across 31

the barren moorland. I saw no one until reaching the Kinder Downfall. A young boy asked for my name as I passed by him and his family. “My name’s Tom, nice to meet you.” I replied, whilst maintaining my stride.

Skirting the steep ledge of Sandy Heys was tricky in such low visibility conditions.

Thankfully, the Pennine Way track was well worn and easy to follow. The path wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t quiet either, and it was obvious some people hadn’t quite prepared for the flippant weather conditions on top. A young couple approached from in front, clutching a map between them, it flapping manically in the wind. “Excuse me”, they asked. “Have we gone past the Pennine Way yet?”. “I’m pretty sure we’re on it,'' I said.

They started playfully bickering between one another. As it turns out, they had got totally disoriented by the cloud and joined the path unknowingly, bearing too far East and missing their turning. An easy if not common mistake to make when navigating in low visibility conditions. They were local, from Sheffield, and it was Ben’s first time out in the Peaks. I was actually heading in the direction they should’ve been going, so we walked and talked for a little while. Small talk mostly, but Ben had lots of questions about wild camping. He was worried about doing it, as it’s technically illegal in the majority of

England with the exception of Dartmoor, and he was worried about the harshness of punishment when caught. I spoke about my experiences with wild camping, having been

caught several times by landowners and farmers in recent years. They’re generally very

accepting, so long as you’re discreet, by yourself (or within a very small group) and

respectful of Leave No Trace principles. The worst repercussion I've had was with a park

ranger who woke me up at 5am and flashed a torch in my eyes on the Southern Coast

when I camped at Durdle Door back in 2017. The ranger said, “as long as you’re gone by

09:00 and you clear up after yourselves, you can crack on”, or something along those

lines. Generally, rules are very relaxed and very forgiving. Ben nodded silently along,

interested but clearly in thought. Our conversation made me wonder if Ben would face

the same treatment, as a black male, if he ever decides to go wild camping.

It reminded me of an ITV news clip I watched recently, about a farmer who got three visits from the police in two weeks, as they continuously received reports of vegetable theft by a black male within his cornfields. As it turned out, it was the farmer himself, David Moinake, all along, every time just tending to his crops. I remember David commenting on the ignorant perceptions of his local community who continuously assumed he was the thief:

“if [they] see you in town, that’s okay, but if [they] see you somewhere else, deep in the

rural areas, then what are you doing here?”

(ITV Central, 2019)

This shows the racialised social policing that takes place to identify who does and doesn’t ‘belong’ in the countryside. Black individuals and groups are more likely to be profiled and policed because of their ethnicity, something Paul Gilroy likes to call ‘the myth of black criminality’ (Gilroy, 1987), that is based off of historically racist ‘common sense’ understandings that links black youths to crime and the inner-city

(Runnymeade Trust, 2008:14). So what happens when criminal behaviour is reframed within a rural environment? When discussing dominant conceptions of the rural, Chakraborti & Garland notes the

“most popular ways of viewing [it] has been to dichotomize ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’” as opposites of place (Chakraborti & Garland, 2004:2). By doing this, the distinction of outdoor spaces like our National

Parks are therefore understood as whatever the ‘urban’ landscape isn’t, and vice versa. If the concept of the ‘rural’ is a space created by the white middle-classes through tradition and performativity, the responsibility for sought belonging within the rural geography is placed upon the shoulders of the marginalised individual entering into the landscape and not the current occupier, deflecting any sentiments of racism and exclusion. Rural racism is so often hard to identify, because racism is so commonly attributed to those inner city areas (Henderson & Kaur, 1999:58), so when a black male occupies a rural environment, the imposing threat of an assumed urban-dwelling individual sets to taint the presupposed white traditions and ideals of the countryside aesthetic and frames them as the aggressor of racialized disruption. Exclusionary territorial behaviours are more likely to exist to re-emphasise the

insider and outsider dynamic, in Mr Moinake’s case, defined by community ethnic profiling that frames him as both the criminal, and as the individual causing racial conflict.

There is also something to be said about the protection of countryside geographies that are seen as particularly fragile and delicate spaces constantly needing to be harmonised and treated with care. This echoes discourse on the ‘normal’ where the realisation of balanced ‘middle-ness’ is celebrated

(Davis,1995), particularly as it reinforces the middle-class pursuit for perfection. But, the introduction of something foreign must come alongside the resulting loss of something familiar. Vron Ware talks about this in an interview with Lola Okolosie:

“If you want to keep things white there is a commitment to a kind of purity in which

anything is damaging, and everything is threatening. […] There is also a sense that the

countryside itself is being ruined by a process of urbanisation and industrialisation. It is

very hard to look at certain aspects of Englishness without talking about loss, whether that

loss is understood in racialised terms or not.”

(Ware, via Okolosie, 2017)

The introduction of ‘the unfamiliar’ is therefore not just seen as a threat, but as a root cause to the destruction of these seemingly precious environments, and against the predefined English values of the

countryside. Mr. Moinake and Ben’s identities as a result, are chosen for them, without their consideration or consent. Within my observations above, I’m too preoccupied with how I define myself, my thoughts and my actions within the landscape. But I rarely consider how others perceive me, because I always assume I belong within the landscape. That’s simply not the case for everyone. So, if Ben was to pitch his tent in the corner of a field, or on a beach just like I did, and were he to get caught just like I did, would he face the same forgiving consequences that I had?

Williams Clough and Hayfield

I left Ben and Corina where the Pennine Way crosses perpendicular to the footpath descending down into William Clough. I had intentionally come this way, as I wanted to retrace the route of the famous Kinder Scout trespass. I first expected William

Clough to have some kind of atmospheric weight to it, as a site of monumental importance for its contribution towards the UK Rights to Roam laws. In reality, it didn’t.

There were better Cloughs to explore in the surrounding area, with nicer trickling fords, with edible berry bushes within reach, with more solitude and scenery in all directions. It was however, the most diverse section of trail I have experienced within the UK, and that was refreshing. I have walked it several times, each time passing families from differing cultural or religious backgrounds; a family from South Asia, their two girls tearing past me as they chased one another, a Hispanic couple arguing in Spanish (I can only assume it was about the steep ascent based on their gestures), and a collective of Jewish families, that I was able to identify due to the males wearing Kippahs. I kept walking, and as I got down to a footbridge on the cusp of Kinder Reservoir, I was greeted by a sign facing the opposite way, declaring entry into National Trust property. ‘Welcome to the High Peak

Estate’ it read. ‘Estate’. It’s such a heavy, classist word, don’t you think? It’s so possessive in its titlement, and doesn’t particularly sit well considering the history of this site.

I continue walking, handrailing the river Kinder for a couple of kilometres until I reach the carpark at Bowden bridge. On the way, the boundaries on either side of me became more defined and narrower, with architectural battlement features that led to an unnecessarily large gated entrance; traces of the Duke of Devonshire’s private estate of years past. At the carpark (once the site of a dis-used quarry where the flock of working- class and unemployed folk from Manchester and Sheffield congregated to begin the trespass), I sat on a bench to collect my thoughts. The bench was inscribed:

“AS I TRUDGE THROUGH THE PEAT AT A PACE SO SLOW

THERE IS TIME TO REMEMBER THE DEBT WE OWE

TO THE KINDER TRESPASS AND THE RIGHTS THEY DID SEEK

ALLOWING US TO FREELY RAMBLE THE DARK PEAK”

Directly above the bench was the plaque commemorating the trespass, embedded

15ft high into the overlooking rock slabs. I’d seen this online and was interested in seeing the surrounding area. The carpark had a constant flow of cars coming in and out of it. I guess the walk up William Clough, the way I had come, was an ideal distance for families to get some fresh air at the weekend, making it a popular start and finish point. All of a 38

sudden, I heard a loud *crack* of a gun. How fitting, I thought, to be at this particular

site and hear the distinctive sounds of a grouse shoot; the very activity that caused a

land-lockdown for so many centuries under King’s orders. I was surprised to feel the

atmospheric weight of the place here in a gravelled public car park instead of in the

Clough, and I felt a bit disappointed.

In April 1932, the British Workers’ Sports Federation orchestrated a mass trespass of William

Clough, in order to gain access onto Kinder Scout. Frustrated with the enclosure of neighbouring hills and moorlands due to laws protecting private-property, unemployed and working-class hikers from

Manchester and Sheffield took stand again the land-owners, farmers and game-keepers who were keeping their land privatised for the pleasure of an occasional grouse-hunt (Stanistreet, 2007:1), a selfish waste of open space and clean air for those wanting to escape their industrial hometowns on a weekend. There seemed to have been only one minor physical altercation between the rival parties, with six trespassers arrested and charged with ‘unlawful assembly and a breach of peace’ (ibid:159) on their return to the nearby village of Hayfield.

The exact number of trespassers who took part wildly differs between 150 - 1000 individuals, depending on the source you read (Stephenson, 1989:155), and their claimed success of reaching the top

has too been put into contention by journalist research 50 years on4. Despite this, the ‘mythology’ of the trespass5 is known as a unanimous victory in paving the way for our country's Right to Roam laws that allows access for all, ‘forever and for everyone’. Interestingly, what has been less reported in available academic discourse is the class and social conflict between rambling associations at the time of the Kinder

Trespass, constantly overshadowed by the polarisation between the working-class ramblers and the aristocratic land-owners. The Manchester and District Ramblers Federation, the largest organised group within the Ramblers affiliation during the 1930’s (largely a collective of middle-class white walkers) released the following statement to ensure its members were not associated to the trespassers movement:

‘The Manchester and District Federation wishes to state as definitely as possible,

that it had no part in the events which took place in Hayfield and on Kinder Scout on April

24th, and it had no connection whatsoever with the organisation responsible for the

happenings on that day.’

(Anon, 1932)

4 Guardian, 16th April 1982, as cited in (Stephenson, 1989:158) 5 As termed by the organiser of the Trespass, Benny Rothman, when challenged upon his wavering recollection of the trespass route (Rothman, 1982:7).

The Ramblers Federation didn’t want to disgruntle their land-owner peers with the illegality of trespassing but were trying to take a civil and legal approach with them to gain accessible land, which was just too slow for the workers from nearby cities who no longer wanted to wait patiently. They were fighting for the same open-access laws, but clearly wanted to differentiate themselves from the working- class, liberal attitudes of the BWSF. The wider Ramblers Federation has long benefitted from its Board’s ties with the upper echelons of society, often owners of UK land, that have helped its success to continue as the leading Walkers Association in the UK for over 100 years. Tom Stephenson quips that the list of vice-presidents in the 1913 handbook reads like pages from the ‘Burke’s Peerage’, including names such as

Lord Avebury, Lord Eversley, Lord Farrar, the Earl of Meath and Sir Jerimiah Colman (Stephenson,

1989:79). The President, Sir Frederick Pollock, also has ancestral ties to the East India Company, known for their heavy involvement and profiteering from the transatlantic slave trade, who gave his great uncle a healthy £1000 every year back in 1847 (London Gazette, 1847). Even in 1962, one of their vice-presidents was the Duke of Sutherland, whose direct ancestral lineage quite literally erased the arable farmers living upon his land, in one of the worst cases known during the Highland Clearances in the early nineteenth

Century6. The enormous 100ft statue of the Duke, which looks over the village of Golspie from a nearby hilltop, remains a cause of controversy and has fuelled numerous campaigns to remove or replace its existence in recent years7.

6 As detailed in (Richards, 1973) 7 BBC reporting here (2011): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-15924649, last accessed 09/09/2019 41

The Ramblers have historically situated themselves firmly within Britain's white middle-classes, seemingly oblivious to the consistently troubling history of its presidencies, to act as a mediator between the working and upper classes. By leveraging the power of land owners who could speak on behalf of their respectability for the landscape post-Second World War, they were able to continue the work of the

British Workers Sports Federation to push the rights to roam as a concern to the British Government.

Even now, the Ramblers discourse surrounding the Trespass alludes to their involvement in the event8, claiming it as their own movement and continuing to reproduce the rural narrative as an environment of middle-class history. This continued erasure of others from the legacies of UK hiking history, contribute to the repetitious nature of middle-class performativity, rewriting and fixing the narrative as one that they can identify to. The lingering traces of enclosure are still evident at the site, the gates to Kinder Reservoir and Williams Clough still standing. Despite always being ajar, the gate detail negative signage, and encourages visitors to use the overgrown footpath that forces you through stinging-nettles and boggy ground underfoot. Alongside this, the sounds of recreational grouse shooting, still a favoured pastime of the land-owners and farmers alike, contribute as evidence to show that he hierarchy of the rural landscape remains, despite the change in access law.

The Scotsman reporting here (2017): https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle-2-15039/is-this-scotland-s-most- controversial-statue-1-4544586, last accessed 09/09/2019 The National reporting here (2017): https://www.thenational.scot/news/15502316.is-it-time-for-the-duke-of- sutherland-statue-to-come-down/, last accessed 09/09/2019 8 https://www.ramblers.org.uk/kinder80, last accessed 09/09/2019 42

Edale Cross and the Woolpack

There’s an ancient monument marked on the map as the Edale Cross, so I go and

take a closer look. It stands protected by a stone wall fence on three of its sides and sits

modestly underneath the Swine’s Back. It is a crudely carved Latin Cross held slightly

akilter by large tufts of grass, and it appears to have taken a heavy blow to its left arm at

some point over the years. This was once a boundary marker, dating back to 1610 to

signify the edge of the royal forest9; land claimed by the crown and off limits to poor folk

who had once foraged and hunted the land to sustain their hunger (Shrubsole, 2019:49).

I think about the current issues of border control within the UK and contemplate the lack

of progression we have made since the Medieval period. Thousands of migrants are

currently locked out, in mass-camps lining the French coast and beyond, all deemed

unworthy to use our land for protection and shelter. They camp through necessity, whilst

I camp for enjoyment. Are the boundaries of our National Parks locking people out too? I

walk on, the dirge of wind buffering against my ears through my woolly hat. With my

head down, I push on to find some shelter.

9 https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1008615, last accessed 09/09/2019 43

I continue walking until I reach the Woolpack, a unique group of large Gritstone formations held 600m aloft on the rim of the Kinder Plateau. Its dusk and I have the place to myself, perfectly sheltered from the breeze whipping overhead. The area feels like a hoarders basement crammed full of curiosities and lost treasures; the cluster of rocks are packed within such a dense area of what otherwise is a barren moorland plateau. Wandering around, the busts of ancient Kings and Queens emerge from the rocks - curvaceous skull silhouettes and facial indentations appear where the rain and the wind gather pressure over centuries, to create 8... 10... 20-foot deities looking over me and the valleys below. It feels spiritual but I'm unclear why. They all look so familiar, one in particular taking on the regal elegance of Nefertiti’s bust, others resemble the bodies of Rapa Nui and the masked faces within the Benin Bronzes, but maybe this is comparable to seeing shapes within clouds or hidden words within a bowl of spaghetti hoops. The ingrained interpretation of these foreign objects immediately relating to colonial theft within European museum culture overthrew any sense of natural origin for this collection of unique, immovable rocks. Maybe this hoarder’s basement is in fact a museum, and actually, the way people meander through the Woolpack, admiring their form and design, has more resemblance to the gallery than it does to the outdoors. But if that were true, who keeps the keys? Who has the curatorial authority to write the

histories and catalogue the details of the rocks? “Someone with too much power”, I

thought.

After the Second World War had ended, Sir Arthur Hobhouse, a liberal Politician, managed to pass the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, opening a total of ten National Parks within

10 years. They were marketed as a “recreational gift to Britain’s returning Second World War service men and women” (GOV.uk, 2018i) and chosen in ‘areas of ‘wild scenery’ accessible from major cities, with its establishment seen as both an educational process and an assertion of preservationist cultural authority’

(Matless, 1998:84). Many however, where not so keen on the prospect. Vaughan Cornish, a well-known geographic author of the time, was sceptical of the National Park formations as a space for all. As early as

1930, he commented on the ‘careless indifference of the town tripper’ (Cornish, 1930:9) within such a landscape, declaring they would not sufficiently appreciate the beauty of the National Parks as they were not educated to do so. He even went so far as to suggest the controlling of the proposed Parks borders, so that his peers (of white middle-class) ‘were not obliged to run the gauntlet of discordant vulgarities in order to reach the beauty of wild nature’ (ibid:5). Others went so far as to suggest locking off the perimeters completely, allowing access only by airplane so visitors would ‘land in the midst of wildness through which he must find a way out on his primitive feet’ (Abercrombie, 1933:223).

Cornish and Abercrombie were never concerned about the accessibility of the Parks for people living within the nearby cities, and actively wanted to restrict their ability to enter and enjoy them. They thought the landscape of the National Parks had to be appreciated in order to gain access to them and without the knowledge and education to do so, people were deemed unfit to access the land, retaining it for the wealthy elite who had the power to police and control what the National Park system and its borders would look like. Thankfully, Hobhouse, amongst others, maintained the need for the system to be accessible by all, seeing the potential for the landscape to be an educational platform for the masses, but he is not without a history that has helped shape his position within the Government through the mistreatment of others. He is a descendent of Isaac Hobhouse, a ‘major Bristol slave-trader, with 68 recorded voyages in the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database between 1722 and 1747.’10 He passed on his estate and £3000 to Arthur’s lineage within the Hobhouse family, although it’s hard to trace how much of this was retained by Arthur specifically, due to lack of documentation, an often quickly muddied asset post-abolition. Despite the positivity of Arthurs individual actions to help establish the UK National

Parks, his colonial legacy is important to study and more important not to ignore or forget. Although he may not have directly held any of the inherited slave-trade money personally, ‘the social and cultural capital acquired through the slave-wealth remains within the family, sustaining its members within the ranks of a British imperial administrative class’ (Hall et al, 2016:4). Without the established cultural capital or social status his family maintained throughout its lineage, he may not have ever made it to his

10 !https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146659087,!last!accessed!01/09/2019 46

governmental position and possess the power to challenge the need to have National Parks within the UK.

Therefore, the abuse, the suffering and the horror that was the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is unequivocally entangled within the foundations of our protected outdoor spaces that have, and always will be, tied up within histories of racism, erasure and belonging.

YHA Edale and Back Tor

I arrived at the Youth Hostel two kilometres out of Edale, having stopped in the small village for a pint of coke and a burger aptly named the ‘Kinder Scout’ which was lashed with two patties, onion rings, bacon, cheese and salsa; a mountainous ordeal in and of itself. I was rosy cheeked and hazy, with a comforting dull ache spread across my lower body suggestive of a good day walk. It was jarring to enter the common room of the YHA, as it was full of children shouting excitably, kneeling on sofas, crowded round the few who had smartphones. They all wore uniform neckerchiefs around their neck, teal and purple, to identify their cub or scout troop to which they belonged, and it reminded me of all the past years that they would’ve been me. I loved being a scout, and I have fond memories of camps on the Norfolk Broads and kayaking on the Thames. Other aspects of scouting I reflect back on, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. I wonder how many times I saluted the Union Jack over the years? From age five to age eighteen I saluted it twice a week, every week and I wonder what that does to children internally, particularly through such influential years of growth. What and who are you admitting subservience to when saluting a flag? The monarchy? The nation? Neither felt very appealing to me now. I left the common room, the cubs none the wiser to my entrance in the first place, and I headed straight to my dorm. 48

I woke early to dulcet snores emanating from a neighbouring bunk. I showered, dressed and was out the door by eight AM, the cub troop still drowsily eating sugary cereal from bowls, elbows on tables and tufts of hair shooting of in miscellaneous directions, not fully awake after what must’ve been an excitably late bedtime away from their family homes. I crossed under the railway line that I had used yesterday, and continued on my planned route, with Back Tor presented before me, a steep bank that would soon get my blood moving again. The sun crept over and slowly lit up the north face as I was making my ascent, and I was excited by the views I would get from the ridgeline. The walk along the top, between Mam Tor and Lose Hill was popular, and as I approached I began to hear music.

“Bitch where you when I was walkin'?

Now I run the game got the whole world talkin'”

I couldn’t quite see the source of the music, but it was loud enough for me to recognise the song.

“Everybody wanna cut the legs off him, Kunta

Black man taking no losses”

(Lamar, 2015)

And there they were, a group of six white teenagers, slouched in a large circle all

resting on their oversized rucksacks, all wearing brand new (or fresh looking) hiking

boots listening to Kendrick Lamar. They were Duke of Edinburgh participants; they

stood out, the masses of kit and maps dangling from their neck being the dead

giveaways. They weren’t particularly concerned or engaged with the music, it served as

a consistent background noise to save their awkward teenage silences. There was

another group at the summit, and another group on their way from Mam Tor, so I

headed straight over and down towards the village of Castleton, avoiding them both.

The Duke of Edinburgh Award, founded by the Duke himself, Prince Philip, is a charity that gives young people the opportunity to discover new and interesting talents (dofe.org, 2019i), commonly culminating in an expedition and an overnight camp of one to four nights. For many, this is an entirely new experience, and participants will have to invest in the extravagant kit list suggesting a total of seventy-two items (dofe.org, 2019ii) in order to complete the award. For parents and guardians, this is often unaffordable, unless you are able to borrow gear from family and friends or belong to a school or

club who are able to supply it. This does lead to a division of who can and cannot take part based on who can and cannot afford the kit, echoing the theories of Bourdieu’s cultural capitalism we previously looked at within the seven principles of Leave No Trace. But I believe this capital goes beyond simply ruling who belongs and who does not. In Shamus Khan’s ‘Sociology of Elites’, where he defines the study of the ‘elite’ as the ‘control over, value of, and distribution of resources (read capital)’ (Khan, 2012:362), he not only suggests that elites hold the power to decide who belongs, but they also decide on the power, how it functions and where it functions. Ultimately, ‘elites are the engine of inequality’ (ibid).

When thinking back to my observations on the Duke of Edinburgh participants on Back Tor, their casual listening to a contemporary American hip hop artist, whose lyrics revolve around the historical inequalities of the black experience, and yet somehow, they are oblivious to the context in which they were listening to it shows the dichotomy of their elitism. They can simultaneously occupy the rural landscape whilst participating in an exclusive award, and also listen to music unironically that is (presumably) outside of their middle-class, white, English cultural upbringing. This ‘omnivorous’ action, as termed by

Peterson and Kern (1996); to digest both high-brow and low-brow forms of culture and claim them as their own, shows how cultural capital functions within the rural landscape even by those who are not familiar with it, yet are still able to maintain the white middle-class familiarity for the idyll to remain undisturbed.

Conclusion: Peveril Castle and Hope

Castleton is a quaint little village but fuelled by tourism. Every shop sold ice-creams, trinkets, cheap kids toy and postcards. I wandered round each of them to find imitations of the same things, as if they all shared the same supplier. It was a Sunday, so it was busy, and the local Mountain Rescue team were positioned on the edge of the carpark with their banner and buckets, looking for donations. I got an ice-cream, rum and raisin, and went to sit down next to an elderly lady who was enjoying watching the world go by on a park bench. We exchanged pleasantries, and she quickly got into talking about the problems of the village.

“There isn’t a supermarket here anymore…”

“community busses only come twice a week…”

“£8.00 for a return ticket to Buxton!”

“Theres only 4 pupils at the primary school now…”

“too many internet B’n’B owners…”

I found it inciteful, finding out about the intricacies of the village; on the surface it appeared to be thriving, but for those that live there, the community was crumbling and

they, or at least this particular woman, was stuck inside with nowhere to go. I walked up

to the English Heritage site, Peveril Castle, and through the valley known as Cave Dale. It

was an atmospheric place, and the hubbub of the village quickly faded within the steep

banks of the ravine, the castle towering overhead from its position of superiority.

What I hadn’t known at the time, was that 124 hectares of land in Castleton, including Peveril

Castle, was owned by the Duchy of Lancaster (duchyoflancaster.co.uk, 2019), more commonly known as

Queen Elizabeth II. The history of the Duchy is somewhat Machiavellian in its creation, summarised well by Shrubsole (2019:56), and was founded by the ludicrously rich John of Gaunt, whose wealth remains in the hands of the royal household today, as a separate strand of income technically exempt from corporation tax11. The duchy currently owns a total of 45,674 acres of UK land, as well as coastlines and mineral mines (ibid:57) and in ‘2018, they reported £20,000,000 profit’ (ibid). The duchy was a creation by the royal family, in order to sustain its power and wealth for centuries to come and its continued profitability only goes to show the control it has over our outdoor spaces and is clearly unaware of the needs of the communities it possesses and profits from. This speaks largely about the silencing of their wealth, that quietly ticks over whilst communities target the local councils and national governments to help fund their struggles. By keeping a low profile, remaining vague about their investments and profit

11 Although the Queen does voluntarily pay tax on its income (Shrubsole, 2019:5 53

publication, the Duchy of Lancaster, one of many corporations and Dukedoms who carry out such practices, can continue their legacies with little questioning or public outcry.

I have time to kill before my train home, so I find a nice loop that takes me up to

Mam Tor and back down Winnats Pass before making my way to Hope station. As I

walk, I continue to observe the landscape and its people; A woman in a sari was put off

by her husband from walking up Mam Tor due to her unsuitable footwear, a community

church was flying the St. Georges cross and an antiques shop was selling old golly pin

badges. I arrived in Hope with plenty of time to catch my train, so I sat and thought

about the reality of its namesake in a nearby field. Is there ‘hope’ for a more inclusive

rural landscape in the future? Can hiking culture exist outside of middle-class tradition?

Walking to the station, I pick up ‘ParkLife’, the official Peak District National Park

Magazine, and flick through it whilst on the platform. On the front cover was a subtitle in

Arabic welcoming Sheffield communities into the National Park, and within its pages it

champions the success of its Mosaic programme that helps ‘engage new audiences,

specifically black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, within the National Park‘

(Riley et al: 2019:4), and a full two page spread on the work of Ghazala Razzaq, who

helps lead walks for the Sheffield Asian Womens Resource Centre.

Work is being done to challenge the lack of diversity within hiking culture and our National Parks, and they are being occupied by minority ethnic communities to some extent. But, what this dissertation demonstrates, is that this is a far wider issue that requires an awareness of and restructuring of white middle-class normality that is active within the National Park system and other countryside spaces, that retain it as an exclusive space. The creation of traditions, the legacies of Empire, the racial binaries and the hunger of the elite all contribute to the erasure of ‘others’ within the rural landscape, that continue to deflect the problem away from the middle-classes. By walking the land, I have shown that it is within this cross-section that the problem lies, and to diversify our rural landscapes as truly ‘spaces for all’ is a matter of rebuilding our concepts what it means to truly ‘belong’.

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