Peak District 'mass trespass' to highlight dangers of new planning laws

Thousands of ramblers expected to attend inaugural rally recognising how law-breaking led to free access to countrysideThousands of ramblers from all over the world are expected to join a week of activities in Derbyshire's Peak District, which became the UK's first national park as a result of deliberate law-breaking in 1932.Increasingly ranked with the Chartists, Suffragettes and Tolpuddle Martyrs as a reclamation of the stolen rights of "free born" Britons, the mass trespass is also being marked as a "torch which today's campaigners must carry forward".An inaugural rally, with a march to the moors behind a local male voice choir, will be told that privacy and barbed wire are regularly trying to re-enclose ground lost by landowners to eight decades of conservation campaigning, footpath revival and the right to roam.Leaders of the National Trust, Ramblers and the Open Spaces Society, which was founded in 1865 to protect common land, are expected to fire up an opening rally at Edale with warnings about the potential effects of new planning laws and the slow progress of mapping most lowland areas for open access.The Trust's chair Sir Simon Jenkins recently invoked Kinder's tradition of defiance in foreseeing "a new army of 'Swampies' ? the anti-bypass and airport expansion campaigner ? who will defend rural England with the same anarchy as Eric Pickles ? the communities secretary ? is attacking it".Writing for the Guardian earlier this month, Jenkins said: "With the countryside facing a return to the ribbon-and-sprawl of the 1930s, litigation and direct action will be conservation's only defence."The trespass events will also be used to publicise the benefits of half-a-century's free access to Kinder, where landowners in the 1930s claimed that walkers would destroy vegetation and wildlife and pollute water supplies.The chair of the organising Kinder 80 committee, the writer and walker Roly Smith, says: "The sacrifice made by the five ramblers who were imprisoned after the trespass should not be forgotten, but we also want to look forward to what has been achieved on Kinder by bodies such as the National Trust since then."Other events, ranging from a "trespass-themed ceilidh" to specialist lectures on grouse, climbing and the trespass's unusual alliance of Young Communists, tweedy ramblers and local people, will attempt to recreate the mixture of oppression and good humour which marked the day. Brief skirmishes left a gamekeeper with a broken leg, and there was natural outrage at the jailings by a court whose jury consisted of two brigadier-generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains and two aldermen. But the Manchester Guardian reporter described how the police inspector drove back with the returning procession, keeping his "baby" Austin carefully behind the vanguard as they sang The Red Flag.The trespass will be recreated on Wednesday 25 April, with two columns following the original protesters' pincer movement from Hayfield and Edale, meeting on the summit peat hags for sandwiches and songs. Rain is forecast but that has always had its place in the history of walkers' campaigning too.Planning policyConservationPeak DistrictRural affairsMartin Wainwrightguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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