Free The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker

off for deer forests, in which a growing numbers of wealthy industrialists, from America as well as Britain, would hunt. Ghillies and stewards policed their perimeters, and innumerable instances were recorded of people being forcibly barred from entering land and using old paths that had been open to all since anyone could remember.
    As is nearly always the way, it took a startling headline to bring the situation to a head. The ‘Pet Lamb Case’, as it became known in the Fleet Street papers that covered it with breathless excitement, came about when a lamb owned by Highland crofter Murdo Macrae strayed into the 300-square-mile deer forest rented as a shooting estate by American railroad millionaire William Louis Winans. Bearing in mind that Winans’s estate (although called a ‘forest’, it was mainly mountain and moor) engulfed the small hamlet where Macrae and his family lived, the lamb needed to go not much further than the end of the garden to be on forbidden turf. Winans turned the full force of the law on to Macrae, ultimately unsuccessfully. Worse, he made himself a laughing stock – even the landowner from whom Winans rented the estate publicly denounced him. Not that it much dented his swagger: The Times reported that, while he was travelling through the Highland village of Tomich, some stones were thrown at his carriage. He stopped and immediately offered a reward of £500 – a quite unimaginable sum to Victorian crofters – for the capture or discovery of the guilty people.
    It was at this time that Bryce was attempting to introduce his bill to Parliament. Public opinion could not have been more on his side. Editorials in The Times and other newspapers detailed the historical grievances in the Highlands and used the ‘Pet Lamb Case’ as the ultimate example of how skewed the situation had become. The time, it seemed, was ripe, but no-one had told members of Parliament. Bryce presented his bill, but it was dismissed without debate.
    A year later, in 1885, James Bryce’s constituency of Tower Hamlets was abolished and he headed to Scotland for a newly created one, becoming the Liberal MP for Aberdeenshire South until 1907, whereupon he took up the post of British Ambassador to the USA. The first MP to have his name scribed on the walkers’ roll of honour was a fascinating individual, fulsomely bearded, fearsomely intellectual and a prolific author on topics as varied as botany, ancient history, sociology and modern political theory. In his earlier years, he’d walked and climbed much in the Alps, Scandinavia, Russia and beyond, even climbing Mount Ararat in an 1876 expedition. At over 13,000 feet, well above the tree-line, he found a large piece of carved timber, four or five feet long, and deduced it to be a remnant of Noah’s Ark.
    Bryce resubmitted his Access to Mountains (Scotland) Bill on an almost annual basis, but it was not actually debated until 4 March 1892, some eight years after its parliamentary debut. He gave his long-awaited introduction to the measure with relish, as he described how difficult getting into and around the Highlands was at that time for the hiker, artist or scientist. So assiduous are the landowners in protecting their vast estates (which, at their peak, accounted for around 6,000 square miles, a fifth of Scotland), he said, that ‘one is obliged to stalk ghillies as the ghillies stalk the deer.’ Tory members opposite could not take him, or the idea, seriously. After Bryce claimed he had ‘climbed mountains in almost every country’, some buffoon shouted ‘Holland?’, to loud guffaws. Incidentally, even that was an ill-informed heckle: Holland has some fairly significant hills in its south-eastern corner around Maastricht, with Mount Vaals top-ping a thousand feet (321m). The micro-states of Monaco and Vatican City excepted, Europe’s flattest country is, by some distance, Denmark, where three ‘peaks’ scrap it out for national supremacy. They are all around 170