Tag: DH Lawrence

‘Forgive us our …’

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The fear of being caught ‘trespassing’ is still common, which is perhaps why towpaths and ex-railway trails are so crowded with walkers. But defining exactly what trespassing means in law is difficult, and in most cases it is only a civil offence, meaning that few landowners would bother to prosecute. But the fear of being confronted by an angry farmer is still potent, even if the days of gamekeepers and their shotguns, or even mantraps, have long gone.

Looking north to Brinsley and Underwood from track by High Park Wood.

The situation is nicely depicted in DH Lawrence’s early (1910) story The Shades of Spring. A young man, Addy, who was brought up in this district on the Derbyshire/ Nottinghamshire border, but who has now moved away, is revisiting his old haunts. He is walking through the woods to the farm where his ex-sweetheart, Hilda, lives, but in the wood his path is blocked by a young gamekeeper:

‘Where might you be going this road, sir?’ The tone of his question had a challenging twang.

The use of ‘sir’ reveals the keeper’s dilemma: was he speaking to a gentleman or one of the local colliers? A guest at the ‘House’ would be free to go where they wished, but in the story Addy tells the keeper, Arthur, that he’s been away from the area for years, and he’s on his way to Hilda’s farm. Arthur then reveals that he’s now courting Hilda, and clearly resents Addy maintaining his friendship with her through correspondence. After a difficult conversation Addy continues on the path to the farm, despite Arthur’s sullen objections.

Haggs Farm in the 1930s

Like much of Lawrence’s early fiction this story is partly based on his own life. His unhappy relationship with Miriam Chambers, who lived at Haggs Farm near Felley Mill, Moorgreen, is famously depicted in his Bildungsroman ‘Sons and Lovers’. Lawrence had idealised Miriam as a spiritual being, when, as this story shows, she was more interested in a physical relationship than French poetry. The story concludes with her showing Addy the woodland love nest that Arthur had created for her, a cabin erotically if improbably furnished with animal skins. This is an interesting forerunner to the hut in ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, written much later, in which Mellors had his tryst with Connie. The model for both could have been this rather shabby shack in High Park Wood (below), almost certainly known to the young writer.

Less than romantic

So the story deals with two kinds of trespass: entering private land, but also Addy’s attempted trespass on Hilda, who Arthur clearly believes is now his private property. The story concludes when Addy is about to reluctantly depart; Arthur is stung by a bee, and, in a powerful image, Hilda sucks the poison from his arm, and oblivious to the now-forgotten Addy, the couple begin a passionate kiss.

Peripatetic post people!

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Old-model Postie

In the age of electronic messaging it is easy to forget the revolution in communication caused by the introduction of the penny post in 1840. This novel system of using stamps to pre-pay letters to anywhere in the country allowed working people, for the first time, to keep in touch with friends and relations, at a reasonable price. There was a huge increase in mail, and consequently post offices were opened in rural areas to organise the collection and delivery of letters. At this time country districts were more densely populated than today, and letters had to be delivered to widely scattered cottages and farms. Consequently, rural postmen (and women) were recruited, with routes of up to 15 miles, to be walked in all weathers for the delivery and collection of mail.

Hearts a’ fluttering…

When the new system was introduced the postmen tried to reduce their ‘walks’ by finding short cuts between the scattered houses, thereby opening up new paths in places. However, today there is little record of their remarkable work, although some posties were still delivering mail on foot up to the 1970s, despite the general introduction of bikes and later, vans. Derbyshire must have had dozens of such forgotten postmen, while in Cumbria Alan Cleaver has been collecting memories of their lives, as recently featured on BBC Radio 4 in ‘Open Country’.

A cheery wave

It’s hard to imagine anyone opting for a job today that involved a daily walk of 15 miles. Not only were letters delivered and collected daily, but the arrival of the post broke the intense isolation of much country life 150 years ago – there were cases of people sending letters to themselves, in order to have the postman call! Postmen were known to read letters out for folk who were illiterate, as well as bringing news from neighbours. Deliveries were even made on Christmas Day, as DH Lawrence recorded when living at Middleton by Wirksworth in 1918. Another notable change is the soaring cost of a stamp – compared with the Penny Black at one old penny, a modern second class stamp costs 85 new pence – 204 times more expensive!

See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-64452468

Walkers, hikers or ramblers?

On By SteveIn People, Walks and walkers1 Comment
Squeeze style on path to Alport Height

Many of our field paths were created by people walking to work, possibly in mines or mills. With the enclosure of moors and commons in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and the building of drystone walls to delineate the new fields, these routes became fossilised, often marked by a series of squeeze stiles, as on the path above. Today the mills and mines have gone, yet the paths are kept open by walkers – a leisure activity that would probably have surprised the mill hands of Arkwright’s day.

Matlock Bath’s Swiss-style station

Walking for pleasure became popular from the mid-nineteenth century, as some workers in the industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester gained a half-day holiday on Saturday and were able to take advantage of the new railway lines to escape from the smoky cities into the hills of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. At first the focus was on the Dark Peak moors, especially Kinderscout, which became a regular scene of conflict between walkers and the gamekeepers employed by the Duke of Devonshire, who owned much of the moors.

PNFS signpost near Alderwasley

The Manchester Association for the Preservation of Ancient Public Footpaths was founded as early as 1826, and Manchester remained a centre for the defence of workers’ interests, notably establishing the first public library (1852) and the first cooperative society (Rochdale, 1844). In 1894 the Peak District and Northern Counties Footpath Preservation Association (thankfully abbreviated now to Peak & Northern) was formed, and is still doing excellent work defending walkers’ rights and interests, notably through over 500 steel signs like the one above.

The Hemlock Stone today

The inter-war Kinderscout mass trespass has been widely publicised, but it was far from typical of the experience of many walkers in the Derbyshire hills. In general farmers and landowners have respected public rights of way and co-existed succesfully with ramblers. Perhaps a more typical walk is described by DH Lawrence in his Bildungsroman novel Sons and Lovers. Here, a party of friends and family, mostly connected with the Eastwood Congregationalists, set out to walk from Eastwood to the Hemlock Stone in Bramcote Hills one Bank Holiday. The walk actually took place at Easter 1905, and is an example of the way young people at that time, with little spare cash but plenty of energy, enjoyed their precious free time. The connection exemplified there between nonconformity, radical thought and hiking is interesting, and worth exploring further.