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.

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.

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 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.