NorthernFellWanderer is the alter ego of a worn out middle aged bloke who loves the fells of the north of England.
To be honest, I’m not that worn out. As for middle aged; well, I was born before 1975 and after 1970 – middle aged? Who knows. I guess 100 years ago I’d be dead by now. Particularly as I come from northern working class background.
And I think there is some relationship here, being northern, being working class, and being a wanderer of the fells. Fell wandering is, and I think always was, a very working class thing. An escape from the towns and cities choking with smoke; from the pits and factories and cloth and cotton mills of the north. From Blackburn to Oldham, from Rotherham to Huddersfield, grafters, both male and female became, in the words of Ewan MacColl ‘freeman on Sunday’ despite being ‘wage slaves on Mondays’. add another page.
As for being truly working class. My grandparents certainly were. Mill worker, hospital cleaners and painters and decorators. My mother was a nurse and my father an engineer. Perhaps they were ‘upper’ working class. I’ve got two degrees, a university associate professorship and am in a highly respected referral profession. I suggest some would say that it is disingenuous for me to describe myself as working class. They may be right. But that was the life I was born into. And I don’t think you can educate yourself out of a culture which has been bred into you for several generations. A bit like a jack russel doesn’t stop been a yappy but wiley little rat catcher, just because it went to the Barbara Woodhouse school of dog training and someone entitled it a Spaniel. As a wise man once told me “tha can’t polish a turd”.
So working class I am. Northern I most certainly am. A fell wanderer I shall always be.
This little blogsite or whatever you call it (blogshite sounds good) is nothing more than a diatribe of ramblings of my fell ramblings and wanders (in addition to other nonsense).
To be continued……
In the meantime…
Manchester Rambler: Ewan MacColl
I’ve been over Snowdon, I’ve slept upon Crowden
I’ve camped by the Wainstones as well
I’ve sunbathed on Kinder, been burned to a cinder
And many more things I can tell
My rucksack has oft been me pillow
The heather has oft been me bed
And sooner than part from the mountains
I think I would rather be dead
I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler from Manchester way
I get all me pleasure the hard moorland way
I may be a wage slave on Monday
But I am a free man on Sunday
The day was just ending and I was descending
Down Grindsbrook just by Upper Tor
When a voice cried “Hey you” in the way keepers do
He’d the worst face that ever I saw
The things that he said were unpleasant
In the teeth of his fury I said
“Sooner than part from the mountains
I think I would rather be dead”
He called me a louse and said “Think of the grouse”
Well I thought, but I still couldn’t see
Why all Kinder Scout and the moors roundabout
Couldn’t take both the poor grouse and me
He said “All this land is my master’s”
At that I stood shaking my head
No man has the right to own mountains
Any more than the deep ocean bed
I once loved a maid, a spot welder by trade
She was fair as the rowan in bloom
And the bloom of her eye matched the blue moorland sky
I wooed her from April to June
On the day that we should have been married
I went for a ramble instead
For sooner than part from the mountains
I think I would rather be dead
So I’ll walk where I will over mountain and hill
And I’ll lie where the bracken is deep
I belong to the mountains, the clear running fountains
Where the grey rocks lie ragged and steep
I’ve seen the white hare in the gullies
And the curlew fly high overhead
And sooner than part from the mountains
I think I would rather be dead
Northern Fell Wanderer 