"I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler from Manchester way

I get all my pleasure the hard, moorland way,

I may be a wage slave on Monday

But I am a free man on Sunday."

(Ewan MacColl)

We live in a country that is not our own. It is believed (figures are hard to come by) that two thirds of all the land in Britain is owned by 200 families. Each of these owns an area twice the size of Richmond Park.

Nearly a third of the land is owned by the titled aristocracy - who Tom Paine called ‘the armed banditti who came over with the bastard' (William the Conqueror). The land has been taken from us by violence.

A further wave of dispossessions took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through Acts of Enclosure. These were private Acts passed through a Parliament of landowners which declared that parcels of land now belonged to whatever propertied person could afford to push the Bill through Parliament.

Kinder Scout in the Derbyshire peak District is one of the most beautiful areas in Britain. The high moorland has no farming value, yet working people were denied all access. The area was reserved for grouse shooting, a hobby of the rich.

In the Great Depression after 1929, walking and cycling were two of the only leisure activities young workers could afford. There were two great conurbations, Manchester to the west of the Peak District and Sheffield to the east.

The British Workers' Sports Federation decided to challenge the exclusive ownership of Kinder Scout through direct action. On April 24^th Benny Rothman led the mass trespass that eventually gave chunks of ‘our' country back to us. Setting off from the Manchester side, the ramblers arrived at the little village of Hayfield. It was swarming with police.

The word was passed round the tea rooms as to what direction they would march. The workers all set off together up to the Kinder plateau and towards the reservoir.

The way was barred by gamekeepers. A downside of mass unemployment was that plenty of men were prepared to hire themselves as gamekeepers, in effect rural bouncers with guns, to the aristocracy at knockdown prices.

The mass trespassers disarmed between twenty and thirty gamekeepers. They then ostentatiously mounted a picket on a grouse nest. In this way nobody could accuse them of trampling on wildlife.

The crowd successfully ‘stormed' Kinder Scout. Then they headed back in triumph to Hayfield. The police were waiting for them. Six were arrested, including Benny Rothman, and charged with incitement and riotous assembly.

What happened next will be familiar to many activists. It is certainly what happened in Southall after locals were accused of ‘rioting' to defend their mainly Asian local community against fascist attack in 1979. The defendants were called to courts miles away from their homes and the trials dragged out to maximise inconvenience. Eventually three months later at Derby the six received jail terms of from three to six months.

That is not the end of the story. In 1949 the Labour government created the first National Parks. The Peak District, including Kinder Scout, was one. Access for all! In 2000 a later Labour government enacted the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. This gives us the right to roam across open country. We now have unrestricted access to mountain, moor, heath, down and common - not just along the permitted footpaths. The Ramblers' Association, which as the Ramblers' Federation, had been hostile to the mass trespass 75 years ago, is pressing for access to unrestricted coastal access. We'll probably get it one day. After all, it's our birthright.

Landowners continue to obstruct progress. Madonna is taking court action to deny walkers access to any part of her £9 million Wiltshire estate. The thuggish landlord van Hoogstraten, who is building a grotesque palace on the South Downs, tried to close a footpath over ‘his' land.

Above all they're still there. They still call it their land. For how long?