The storming of Winter Hill
Decades before the Kinder Trespass, 10,000 walkers marched up a northern hill to fight for the right to roam. Here’s the story of what happened 125 years ago this month – and why the world forgot it ever happened…
Decades before the famous Kinder Trespass, 10,000 walkers marched up a northern hill to fight for the right to roam. Here’s the story.
EVEN IF YOU’VE never climbed Winter Hill, there’s a chance you’ve seen it. It’s passed by tens of thousands of motorists every day, and statistics suggest you’re likely to have been one of them, at least once.
You absolutely can’t miss it. It’s the colossal whaleback that rears up above the M6 on its busiest stretch, as it threads between Manchester and Liverpool. The parallel M61 runs even closer, and reveals the intimate connection between the hill and the town at its foot: Bolton.
Two things make Winter Hill unmissable. Firstly, it’s so far west in the Pennine range that it seems to stand alone, dominating the plain of Greater Manchester and south Lancashire.
Secondly, the mast. Shooting 1015ft into the sky, the Winter Hill transmitting station is one of the tallest structures in Britain, beaming TV signals to 6.3 million people across the north west. It looks impossibly tall, perhaps even taller than the hill on which it stands. (It isn’t, but given that the hill is 1496ft, it’s not too far off.) But while Winter Hill can be seen from almost any high-ish point within a 40-mile radius, it is definitely
Bolton’s hill. Town and moor are inseparable.
The streets creep to the skirts of the moor, and from afar, the outline of
Winter Hill is echoed and parodied by the white lattice of Bolton
Wanderers’ stadium.
Neither the stadium nor the mast were there in 1896. But Winter Hill was no less Bolton’s prize possession then than it is today. And that’s why we’re here. Because 125 years ago, a conflict happened on Winter Hill which changed… well, almost nothing, at the time. And yet, in view of what happened later, it suddenly looks like one of the most important events in the history of walking.
In 1896, Bolton was a cauldron of the industrial revolution. It was dominated by cotton, boasting over 100 mills along with dozens of bleaching, ▶
dyeing and processing works. And to the workers of Bolton, Winter Hill was the great escape. Even the furthest mill was no more than a short tram-ride from the flanks of the moor, so of a Sunday (or a Wednesday, when shops were closed), this was where the Bolton’s workforce came to escape the noise and smoke of the first ever northern powerhouse. Winter Hill might be boggy, often soggy, and frequently cloaked in mist and mizzle. But it was freedom.
Which is why, when Colonel Richard Henry Ainsworth closed off the main access to Winter Hill in August 1896, it all kicked off.
“The working people of Bolton had used the tracks over Winter Hill for generations, and as the town and its industries had grown, so had the people’s need to get out for a walk,” says Boltonbased historian and author Paul Salveson.
“On the other side, you’ve got Colonel Ainsworth, who owns the land and wants to keep it clear of the urban masses, deciding to close the access because it interferes with his grouse shooting.”
Paul has studied deeply into the history of his hometown, and we mainly have him to thank for the fact that anyone knows about the battle of Winter Hill at all. More on that in a bit.
But according to Paul (and pretty much everyone else), Colonel Ainsworth is definitely the villain of this tale. He was the owner of the Smithills Estate, which included the entire southern flank of Winter Hill. His bleaching works provided employment to hundreds of local workers, and he also owned coal mines higher up the hill.
It was an access track to these mines – Coal Pit Road – that he closed off, despite the fact it had been used as a way over the moor for generations.
And so the stage was set for an honest-to-goodness class war.
“Ainsworth was vehemently opposed to socialism and unions,” explains Paul.
“Bolton had several very active socialist groups, which were heavily involved in promoting the rights of workers and countryside access. So when he closed the access, that became the flashpoint.”
Ainsworth had been horrified by recent protests calling for increased access to open spaces. In one recent case, in nearby Darwen, a landowner had responded by (grudgingly) agreeing to allow walkers onto his land. Ainsworth regarded this as the beginning of Armageddon.
And just to confirm his fears, the Bolton Social Democratic Federation was indeed calling for action. Led by the determined duo of Joe Shufflebotham and Matt Phair, the federation called a protest march, winning support from
a journalist and Liberal firebrand with the magnificent name of Solomon Partington.
On Sunday 6th September, the federation met to lead a group of miners, millworkers, factory staff and interested bystanders up to the closed-off access gate on Coal Pit Lane. They thought they might get around 1000 people; in the event there was more than ten thousand. As the Bolton Journal reported: “The multitude far exceeded what had been anticipated. The sight was a magnificent one… the road was literally a sea of faces, and the multitude comprised thousands of persons of all ages and descriptions.”
At the gate, they were met by a handful of police, along with Ainsworth’s estate manager and a posse of gamekeepers. There were speeches. One speaker told the crowd they were ‘rushing to eternity’, but Shufflebotham overruled him: “We are not here to speak about another world, but this world!”
He then leavened the barnstorming with caution, saying that although they might break through the gate and head up the hill, they should stick to the track at the heart of the debate, rather than provoking Ainsworth further by straying off-path.
At that, the surge began. The gate was sawn down, and the throng of 10,000 walkers brushed right past the defending forces. The police inspector was thrown over a wall, a gamekeeper was thrown into a ditch, and the estate manager’s attempt to take names was scuppered when someone snatched his notebook.
On they went, climbing to the point known as Stumps which marks the top edge of the moor, where (just as you can today) they drank in the colossal view. On a clear day, like that sunny afternoon in 1896, you can see everything they could – Manchester, Liverpool, the Pennines, the Lake District, Snowdonia, the Isle of Man. And you can see plenty of things they couldn’t: the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, Fiddler’s Ferry power station on the Mersey, Blackpool Tower. Plus you’re now right beside that immense and slightly terrifying mast, and the strange family of mastlets that sit clustered around it.
Here the marchers split. Most about-faced and marched back down the same way. The remainder went over the hill and down to the village of Belmont, reportedly drinking its hostelries dry.
Remarkably, that wasn’t even the biggest Winter Hill protest. They came back the following weekend in even greater numbers. Together these are thought to be the largest access protests in British history. ▶
Sadly, it was not to be the beginning of a golden age of access. Ainsworth took the ringleaders to court; the courts found in his favour. Partington was fined a colossal £300. It was enough to scare the working families of Bolton into silence, especially as Ainsworth and others like him were their employers.
Partington continued to rail against Ainsworth in articles and pamphlets for years afterwards, but to no avail.
“The problem was, although the socialist organisations had won this huge support, they didn’t know what to do with it,” says Paul.
“The better course would have been to build a mass rights of way movement across the northwest. Instead, it remained a local issue and Ainsworth was able to narrow down the debate into a legal battle over Coal Pit Road. And of course he blamed it all on dangerous socialist agitators. Eventually the First World War came along, and the story was almost completely swept away.”
Almost, but not quite. In 1981, Paul was researching the work of Bolton writer Allen Clarke, and came across a reference to the march in Clarke’s 1920 book, Moorlands and Memories.
“I’d never heard of this event before so I did some digging, and soon this whole story began to unfurl,” he explains. “It didn’t travel far as a story at the time because it wasn’t successful. But when you look back on it in the context of the Kinder Trespass and everything that came later, you see that those ideas were bubbling up a long time prior to all that.”
The Winter Hill clash will inevitably be compared to the Kinder Mass Trespass, which happened 36 years later, on April 24th, 1932.
On that day, around 400 millworkers, miners and dockers climbed up onto the privately-owned Kinder Scout plateau in Derbyshire, again led by socialist-leaning sports clubs. Scuffles broke out as they encountered gamekeepers, and punishments were meted out by the courts. But they did enough to bring the issue into national focus, and it started a process which led eventually to the right to roam, the formation of National Parks, and the existence of Access Land as we know it today.
There are obvious reasons why Kinder succeeded where Winter Hill didn’t. The Kinder trespassers were far better organised. They brought a Guardian journalist with them to tell the story to the nation.
“They came back the following weekend in even greater numbers. Together these are thought to be the largest access protests in British history.”
And they came from much further away, so were not in direct thrall to the landowners as many of the Bolton marchers would have been. (The Kinder trespassers had absolutely no knowledge of the Winter Hill story. When Paul Salveson mentioned it to Kinder frontman Benny Rothman in 1982, it was the first Rothman had heard of it.)
In 1938, the Ainsworth family sold their estate to the Bolton Corporation, and slowly but steadily, access to the moor became less restricted. And in the years since the story was rediscovered, a lot of good has happened. Commemorative walks were held in 1982 and 1996, the latter celebrating the centenary of the march. It was marked by the unveiling of an engraved stone at the gateway – and by the track’s official adoption as a right of way. (“It only took 100 years,” notes Paul.) Look at Winter Hill on an OS Explorer map today and you’ll see it painted entirely in the yellow wash of Access Land.
And now, to mark 125 years since the march, more events are planned, under the banner of Winter Hill 125. Walks, talks, music. School activities, TV coverage. And you can bet that as part of it, Bolton will be out for a walk, remembering the time that this town, and their hill, showed what people were willing to do when their favourite walk was taken away. You can call the Winter Hill protest a heroic failure, a mismanaged revolution, a lost cause. But you can also call it a signal.
And for a hill with a whacking great transmitter mast on top, that’s fantastically appropriate.
Paul Salveson’s website lancashireloominary.co.uk is packed with fascinating stories from Bolton and the West Pennines. You can also buy his books on the site, including Moorlands, Memories and Reflections (£21). You can find out about the events marking the 125th anniversary on Facebook; search Winter Hill 125.