The most expansive works on ‘liberal governmentality’ suggest a cultural system built around a continuing dialectic of resistance and production.Footnote ¹ Technologies of governance converted a language of ‘freedom’ into regulation through buildings, statistics, plans and institutions. These fostered ‘liberal individuals’, who would ‘watch’ themselves, each other and the state. Liberal society was constantly self-reflexive, and as Patrick Joyce notes, this was one of its enduring strengths.Footnote ² Yet most examinations have either focused on planners, engineers, social researchers or architects in producing these technologies, or on the ‘liberal selves’ and public culture that their actions are said to have helped mould. Few studies demonstrate how liberal subjects utilized powers of freedom to produce technologies of rule, outside of familiar ‘technocratic’ professions.Footnote ³ A concentration on the city, where liberal ‘techniques of rule’ were ‘most systematically honed’, has limited such examination by describing comprehensive systems, in which individual agency seems limited to self-surveillance and control.Footnote ⁴ This article aims to restore a sense of reflexivity. It moves away from the city to consider how the one group of urban, self-consciously liberal men utilized freedom to define and regulate rural conduct.

David Matless’ studies of ‘citizenship’ in English landscapes, produced over a decade ago, provide the background to this study.Footnote ⁵ The ‘citizens’ that Matless found walking, planning or observing the countryside were those rational, free and self-governing individuals crucial to the governmentality paradigm. Preservationists, planners and ramblers contrasted the freedom and order of the countryside to their urban lives. They expressed and implemented a conduct of ‘moral practice’ which constituted an attempt to impose their ideas of ‘right living’ on to this space. Matless’ work suggested that the countryside can provide a productive arena for case-studies of liberal agency. While Matless tended to assign agency to national elites, such as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), however, this article emphasizes the role of ramblers themselves as they developed cultures within the specific context of liberal Manchester.Footnote ⁶

‘Liberal’ is used to describe a series of regulatory cultures based on and engaging with ‘freedom’ as a powerful construct of legitimate behaviour and social ordering. The ramblers in this study, for example, adopted codes of liberal self-regulation and self-improvement from cultures of ‘rational recreation’ intrinsic to the numerous public parks, libraries, museums and art galleries around Manchester.Footnote ⁷ That said, the campaign for access to the countryside did cast itself as a politically liberal cause, and appropriated a local history of civic struggle against central government, traditional aristocracy and southern hegemony.Footnote ⁸ Yet aside from this single issue engagement with democratic politics, these ramblers were not politically affiliated, and understood ‘freedom’ rather as a moral category bound up with behavioural codes and practices.

The early 1930s ‘hiking craze’ – particularly strongly felt in Manchester – explains the time-frame. At this time thousands of younger, working people utilized newly gained leisure time and decining rail fares to join the older ramblers of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation (MRF) in the Peak District.Footnote ⁹ The necessity of a short, cheap rail journey meant that few working people were excluded from moorland rambling, but also that older and younger ramblers would unavoidably come into close contact. Under the scrutiny of the MRF, the behaviour of the new ‘hikers’ challenged the ‘freedom’ of the moors. Most familiarly, this occurred through the 1932 Kinder Scout Mass Trespass.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the MRF dismissed these militant rambles as ‘froth and bubble’; they were more concerned with rowdy youth cultures which seemed to threaten not just the access campaign, but rambling itself.

This article uses the literature produced by the MRF, its members and associates to make three claims. First, these ramblers engaged with themes of ‘freedom’ and ‘order’ central to recent cultural histories of the city; in this sense they represent the urban archetype of the ‘liberal individual’. They contrasted the liberty of the countryside with the urban environment, ‘the prisons of economic necessity’ in which they lived. Their critique of the city emphasized that work and constrained, cramped space were harmful to freedom. Rambling was the experience of freedom and order in the countryside, which would counter these illiberal effects. Although the MRF never settled on a single term, Edwin Royce, who edited the MRF Handbook, used the phrase ‘social readjustment’ to describe these benefits.Footnote ¹¹ This phrase accurately describes how these ramblers hoped to change society in order to make it work more efficiently, without revolution or replacement.

Secondly, the MRF utilized the same liberal discourse to identify ‘hiking’ as inappropriate urban conduct in the countryside. They portrayed popular, youth and working-class cultures in the form of crowds, a visible female public and noisy or popular music as both disordered and un-free. These ramblers demonstrated the capability of ‘freedom’ and ‘order’ to be used in ways which excluded whole cultures as harmful and illegitimate. Matless argued that despite these types of descriptions, few social groups were formally excluded from rambling, that this was a ‘moral practice for all’.Footnote ¹² This article counters that this inclusion was conditional on the acceptance of specific knowledges about freedom and order. What emerges is an understanding of how cultural exclusion and ‘freedom’ operated alongside one another in mutually supportive ways.

Thirdly, the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation created a range of regulatory technologies through ‘liberalism’ They wished to persuade ‘hikers’ to ‘ramble’ by using methods that meshed well with an allegiance to liberal governmentality. During the 1930s, they created a framework utilizing surveillance, education, reason and self-regulation. MRF ramblers wished to govern without direct coercion. Yet in 1933 they set up a system of ‘Warden-Guides’, which operated at the limits of acceptable interference. They drew on their own experiences of urban life in creating these regulatory technologies. In doing so, they reflected upon the nature of ‘freedom’, and demonstrated how ‘liberal subjects’ engaged with and produced regulative structures within liberal society.

Urban historians have rarely paid attention to rambling, perhaps put off by a tendency to identify it as ‘escapist’, anti-modern and extra-urban. Cultural histories of rural leisure have instead concentrated on the theme of national identity, in which the English landscape represented a conservative, anti-modern and anti-urban ‘Englishness’.Footnote ¹³ The initial argument proposed by Martin Wiener, which linked Englishness to ‘economic decline’, is now rejected.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, as Peter Mandler has pointed out, ‘Englishness’ has since become a neat description of anti-modern national culture that can be easily drawn upon throughout modern history.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite a strong revisionist streak within recent studies, Englishness has remained the dominant paradigm for investigations of rural landscapes.Footnote ¹⁶ With the exception of Melanie Tebbutt's articles on rambling and masculinity, there remains little space for explorations of the countryside by urbanites which were not underscored by national identity, whether pro- or anti-modern, or framed through regional variation.Footnote ¹⁷

‘Englishness’ is not a useful construct for exploring the aims and aspirations of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation. Although descriptions of rural landscapes occasionally had a romantic or nostalgic tone, this was the exception rather than the rule.Footnote ¹⁸ The leadership of the MRF were not particularly anti-modern, nor did they emphasize the national character of the landscapes through which they moved. Personal friendships and common aims linked Manchester ramblers to both Tebbutt's Sheffield Clarion Club and to the network of planners and preservationists discussed by Matless.Footnote ¹⁹ While the Clarion offered a partner in access campaigning, the MRF engaged in a ‘moral practice’ shared by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. Yet they shared neither the explicit masculinity of the Clarion, nor the national overtones of the CPRE, who they often criticized for southern bias, putting preservation before rambling, and avoidance of the access issue.Footnote ²⁰ Within the wider diversity of rambling cultures, the MRF proposed a project of ‘social readjustment’ through the conduct of freedom.

The Manchester Ramblers’ Federation was a key organization in the inter-war rambling movement.Footnote ²¹ Its 150 affiliated clubs contained about 10,000 ramblers, and members saw it as the mouthpiece of ‘respectable’ Manchester rambling.Footnote ²² Edwin Royce, an insurance clerk from Levenshulme, edited its annual Handbook, a volume distributed to MRF members and on sale for one shilling. Contributors to this volume also published elsewhere on rambling, outdoors etiquette and amateur science, and the Handbook should be seen within a wider north-west tradition of guide-book writing. Although widespread support for the MRF was clear from attendances at the annual Winnats Pass demonstrations, there are significant silences within this set of sources.Footnote ²³ Whilst ramblers in the north of England were predominantly from the lower middle and upper working classes, the leadership of the MRF exposed their middle-class identities through identifiers of university education and descriptions of relatively expensive trips abroad.Footnote ²⁴ This group was also male-dominated; I have found just one female-authored article in 16 years of publications.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, these men saw themselves as adult and mature. Many probably were – Royce, for example, was 50 in 1930, the well-known naturalist Thomas Alfred Coward was 63 and, as noted above, many had university degrees. This group of middle-aged, middle-class men felt they could, and should, represent the views of other ramblers, and regulate conduct in the outdoors. That they did so by utilizing a liberal discourse of freedom and order is examined in this article.

‘Social readjustment’ and rambling as liberal conduct

Along with many other ramblers, planners and preservationists, the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation portrayed upland areas as sites for the development of ‘citizenship’ through rational and self-controlled conduct. These ramblers wished to leave un-free cultures behind in the city, while in the countryside liberal conduct would lead to moral and physical ‘readjustment’. The MRF fits well with David Matless’ analysis of ‘moral practice’ in the English landscape.Footnote ²⁶ This section develops his analysis by demonstrating how this ‘moral practice’ was defined through concepts of freedom, order and conduct drawn from the experience of liberal governmentality.

Much of the language used by the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation can be located within the romantic-socialist tradition of John Ruskin, William Morris and Robert Blatchford, in which critiques of urban life were common.Footnote ²⁷ Yet it would be wrong to assume that the MRF had a particularly anti-modern or even anti-urban ideology which celebrated nostalgic ‘Merrie England’, or that advocated a ‘back-to-the-land’ solution to urban problems.Footnote ²⁸ Cyril E.M. Joad, philosopher, preservationist, regular speaker at the Winnats Pass demonstrations and a friend of Edwin Royce, wrote that rambling ‘does not imply a desire to live in the country’.Footnote ²⁹ References to Blatchford's ‘Merrie England’ and rural nostalgia were often ironic, with the past portrayed as dangerous, morbid and lawless – anything, in fact, but ‘merrie’.Footnote ³⁰ The study of the history (along with the prehistory and geology) of the landscape through which ramblers walked was not rural nostalgia, but rather part of the ramblers’ modern, rational and moralizing idea of ‘freedom’.

A discourse of self-improvement and self-education ran through MRF literature, inheriting a culture of ‘rational recreation’ encouraged by reformers of the nineteenth century, and especially strong in Manchester.Footnote ³¹ John R. Ashton, a cotton spinner who authored the Open Air Guide with post-office clerk F.A. Stocks, noted in the 1930 Handbook that, ‘Going out with congenial companions to engage in a mutually attractive sport should be helpful to every member of the club. The interchange of ideas, the clash of minds, should enliven the day and heighten the perception of each.’Footnote ³² As Matless has shown, rambling was seen by some as a way of creating modern ‘citizens’. Edwin Royce, editor of the Handbook, was no exception when he described it as a ‘social readjustment’.

This idea of a ‘readjustment’ linked these spaces directly to cities.Footnote ³³ A.W. Hewitt was a regular contributor to the Handbook, and represented the National Council of Rambling Federations in the early 1930s National Park movement.Footnote ³⁴ For him, the appeal of a Peak District national park based on Pennine moorlands was that ‘No recommended area is so accessible to such vast populations who most need frequent change and breathing space. The life blood of England, these energetic workers of the staple industries, depends for its very existence on easier open access to these already adopted playgrounds.’Footnote ³⁵ The ‘mountain and moorlands’ were a space in which the ‘readjustment’ of the urbanite should take place, in order to make them more productive. This enhancement of urban lives would sustain England's competitive edge in the difficult 1930s European market.

MRF ramblers used themes of freedom and order to construct a boundary between the city and countryside. Like Tebbutt's Clarion Club, the MRF aimed to obtain freedom through rambling.Footnote ³⁶ ‘The rambler camper is freest of all’ claimed V.G. Billier in the 1931 Handbook.Footnote ³⁷ Freedom was a theme that could be found across the wider rambling community. It formed a key refrain in Ewan MacColl's Manchester Rambler, sung on the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass: ‘I may be a wage slave on Monday/But I am a free man on Sunday.’Footnote ³⁸ The Manchester Guardian's mountaineering correspondent, Patrick Monkhouse, who was also a member of the elite, exclusively male and Manchester-based Rucksack Club, observed: ‘no wonder if they find, in the freedom from walls and roof, freedom from other restrictions and bonds which lap them round in everyday life’.Footnote ³⁹ Unlike the escape from domesticity described by Tebbutt, however, Hewitt, MacColl and Monkhouse all positioned the city as an illiberal site of respectable but restrictive labour which entitled the worker to temporary liberation in the countryside.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘We can only learn liberty by the use of liberty’, commented Rev. H.H. Symonds, in his guide to the Lake District, ‘and until we get this free access to the open country back again into our city life, we shall be unsatisfied.’Footnote ⁴¹ Ramblers positioned the countryside against the city through a reforming discourse of liberalism.

Federation publications consistently emphasized that ramblers needed to be informed and rational in order to access the freedom of the countryside. Rationality would reveal the order of the countryside. Many articles in the Handbook quoted scientific texts and evidence, questioned popular belief and engaged with scholarly debate.Footnote ⁴² Readers were provided with substantial reading-lists, compiled by E. Ogden of Manchester Public Libraries, and with lists of Ancient Monuments that could form the focus of walks.Footnote ⁴³ Jasper E. MacDonald, an amateur antiquarian, often quoted academic authority, and, along with other contributors, used diagrams to rationalize geographical forms or views.Footnote ⁴⁴ Other contributors such as J. Wilfred Jackson, of Manchester Museum, and Louis Stanley Jast (1868–1944) further demonstrate links to key public institutions in Manchester. Jast was famous for his introduction of the Dewey system of library cataloguing, emphasis on liberal access to library facilities and the design of Manchester's Central Reference Library, of which he was chief librarian until his 1931 retirement.Footnote ⁴⁵ A will to self-education had been enthusiastically taken up by the ‘respectable’ working classes for almost a century. Amateur science was particularly popular in the north-west, although according to Jonathan Rose naturalism declined from its Lancashire stronghold after 1900.Footnote ⁴⁶ The recurrence of naturalism, geology and history in the Handbook points also to a continuing interest in amateur science.

More importantly, it chimes with work on ‘rational recreation’, a culture particularly strong in Manchester, in which libraries and parks formed a kind of training in liberal etiquette – even if Hewitt criticized the ‘high railings’ and ‘forbidding notices’ of public parks.Footnote ⁴⁷ In contrast to the ‘hiker’ described below, the rambler would internalize systems of self-rule which would allow freedom to continue despite closely controlled conduct.Footnote ⁴⁸ For ‘Skipper’, a regular contributor of ramble outlines to the Handbook, excitement was allowed, but control would prevail: ‘I run, jump, sing, and with a wild “Hallo”, sprint across the sandy level shore. Then soberly, solemnly, my stockings are tucked into my empty boots.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Nora Willington, a solitary female voice in the MRF and its secretary for much of the period, was more stringent. Nature ‘is a great mother, but one must approach her with an understanding heart and a desire to learn’. Willington demanded quiet and the absence of crowds.Footnote ⁵⁰ For her and others in the Federation, loudness, crowding and over-enthusiasm were a threat to the rational freedom of the liberal self.

The ‘Complete rambler’, according to T.E. Bean, should have time to ‘stand and stare’.Footnote ⁵¹ Alongside walking, ramblers took part in a visual relationship with the landscape. The objects, sites and views they encountered could be ordered through rational science, contemplation and discussion. The rambler utilized a ‘visual rhetoric of modernity which privileged the observer with a vantage point separate from the observed’.Footnote ⁵² It is no surprise that the most important tool for categorizing and objectifying all he (or more rarely she) saw was an OS map.Footnote ⁵³ However, the Federation did not seek to create a kind of rural flâneur.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ramblers were engaged in a search for detail and meaning within the world around them in stark contrast to the ephemeral and spectacular experiences of flânerie.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Rebecca Solnit has pointed out, the ‘moral imperative’ of countryside walking replaced the ‘shadier business’ of walking the street, with its potential for loitering, soliciting or promenading.Footnote ⁵⁶ The conduct of rambling was related to the quietness, earnest conversation and rationality of the library and university rather than to that of the loud and chaotic city street.

The experience of the liberal city underlay how the leadership of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation defined the conduct of rambling. They fantasized about a perfected liberal zone outside the city, in which freedom and order would be completely enmeshed and where the urbanite would be temporarily ‘readjusted’ from the other, more problematic, effects of city life.

The ‘hikers’

During the early 1930s the Federation witnessed a sudden increase in trips to the countryside.Footnote ⁵⁷ Paid holidays and increasing recreational periods released unprecedented numbers of working people into the world of leisure. Cheaper transport now made the countryside a viable recreational option, and walking quickly became a fashionable ‘craze’.Footnote ⁵⁸ For a short period, rambling was popular amongst working-class urban youth cultures associated with dance ‘crazes’ and urban entertainment.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is unclear how many of these newer visitors actually behaved differently from the established rambling movement, and issues such as crowding, noise and litter were probably as much a result of larger numbers as of errant behaviour. Yet the cultures some newcomers brought with them were alien to the middle-class, middle-aged, male leadership of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation. The MRF feared a threat to the reformist and self-improving culture highlighted above, as well as harm to the access lobby. In increasingly passionate tones, the literature of the MRF attempted to define ‘hiking’ as an illegitimate conduct devoid of either freedom or order.

In appropriating the word ‘hiking’, the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation aimed to define closely a distinction between it and ‘rambling’ that remained acknowledged but unclear. The Manchester Guardian featured a running controversy during 1931–32 over the use of ‘hiking’ to describe what many considered ‘rambling’.Footnote ⁶⁰ This discussion often turned on the derivation of ‘hiking’ as a word, and tended to parallel the criticisms described below. ‘Hiking’ was an Americanism associated with youth cultures and fashion trends, a low-brow threat to the word ‘rambling’ that failed to take its deeper meanings seriously.Footnote ⁶¹ The MRF, like other commentators, utilized this ‘controversy’ to appropriate ‘hiking’ to describe an illegitimate category of walking.

Few of the newcomers joined a rambling club belonging to the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation. Approximate membership numbers remained at around 10,000 for much of the period.Footnote ⁶² The ramblers discussed here could therefore draw a clear distinction: they compared ‘complete’, rational ramblers with the irresponsible and threatening figure of ‘hikers’ moving around the countryside in chaotic destruction.Footnote ⁶³ Willington noted that ‘In the country some feel that the restraint of the town is cast away. They treat the country like a fair ground and miss everything worth having.’Footnote ⁶⁴ The MRF portrayed these new visitors as lacking self-control. For them, the freedom of the countryside led not to self-imposed order, but rather the rowdy hedonism of a fair.

As a consequence, the countryside was rendered useless for the conduct of free, rational rambling. For regular contributor to the handbook Harold E. Wild, a ‘misuse’ of ‘one's freedom over the Derbyshire Hills’ resulted from ‘noisy young folk “letting off steam”’ and who were ‘thereby to a large extent shutting out for themselves, as well as for others, the sense of impressive solitude, the quiet majesty of the hill country . . . Mentally, they have not left the town at all . . . most have yet to learn – to ramble.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Like Willington and others, Wild saw these ‘young folk’ as harmfully constrained in urban society, and their ‘misuse’ of freedom as a symptom of their inability to leave urban cultures behind.Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘Hiking’ was threatening because it brought with it urban leisure cultures associated not with the quiet, rational reflection of educational institutions, but rather the noisy, crowded excitement of the street and dance hall.

This imagery of disordered youth articulated broader themes of racial and cultural degeneration, promiscuous femininity and critiques of banal popular culture. Nevertheless, the image of ‘hikers’ consistently emphasized notions of primitive hysteria contrasted to the ramblers’ emotional control. Royce described one group in 1932: ‘Seven of the tribe looking at one map fully spread, hanging in ape-like festoons on (apparently) precipitous crags moaning – with ukelele distractions – the latest banality in the approved whining tenor style, happy hikers (the authenticated happy man had no shirt), open-air girls, care-free girls etc.’Footnote ⁶⁷ This language created a dystopic alternative to the ramblers’ ideal of modern progress through legitimate, rational conduct. Whilst ramblers could benefit from the freedom of outdoor, non-urban space, these ‘youths’, ‘troubadours’ and ‘jazz-band larrikins’ could not experience the freedom of the countryside because their behaviour in it lacked the necessary control.Footnote ⁶⁸

The imagery within the Handbook demonstrates how Manchester ramblers helped to produce the ‘anti-citizen’ that Matless found portrayed in preservationist literature.Footnote ⁶⁹ The MRF were also heavily involved in the campaign for ‘access to mountains and moorlands’, and this added a political impetus to distinguish between ‘hikers’ and ‘ramblers’.Footnote ⁷⁰ By portraying ‘hikers’ as responsible for destroying the countryside, ramblers cast themselves as legitimate and above reproach, whilst providing a framework within which to assert their own version of countryside leisure. The increasingly vitriolic accounts of the ‘hiker’ allowed the ramblers to shape more closely their own identities and draw distinct boundaries between themselves and this ‘other’. They were able to define a problematic group of outdoor visits that required a solution, and position themselves as that solution.

The leadership of the MRF criticized a series of conducts that contrasted sharply with their own cultural backgrounds. They used a discourse of freedom, order and self-governance to refuse the legitimacy of certain youth, female and working-class cultures. The ‘hiker’ was a threatening figure because it encompassed all the ‘imprisonment’ that ramblers left the city to escape and ignore, including cultures to which the MRF leadership felt alien. Eliminating this ‘misuse’ from the countryside soon became a priority for the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation, but they needed to do so without undermining their own sense of freedom and self-imposed order.

Regulating the landscape

Alongside defining both legitimate and illegitimate conducts, the leadership of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation discussed regulation. They operated within the ideological constraints of their definition of ‘freedom’, whilst offering and implementing pragmatic solutions. This entailed importing technologies of control from modern, ‘liberal’ Manchester. The MRF aimed to persuade rather than force ‘hikers’ into becoming ‘ramblers’. The ‘freedom’ of the countryside had to be protected, since it was from this that the urban rambler achieved ‘readjustment’. They imagined the ‘hiker’ as an irrational category, which would be automatically overcome by reason and self-supervision – ‘when they have put away childish things, we shall be glad to see them (no sign as yet) helping with the serious side of rambling’.Footnote ⁷¹

Rather than seek to punish or limit the movements of new visitors to the outdoors, the Federation sought to turn them into ramblers. ‘Merely to disown the hooligan element is easy but not very useful’, Ashton pointed out in the 1930 Handbook, ‘to use their energy in better ways would be a great stroke’.Footnote ⁷² The policy was to circulate MRF views on ‘correct’ behaviour in the outdoors, and to use regulative technologies derived from the urban environment to instil a spirit of self-regulation. Early activities, for instance, often featured signs echoing the by-laws at the entrance to municipal parks.Footnote ⁷³ The leadership of the Federation hoped to enable urban visitors to experience the beneficial qualities of the countryside.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Royce pointed out, ‘it is not obvious how the tripper is ever to appreciate the sanctity of natural beauty if he is forever barred from it’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The MRF nevertheless saw a culture of self-discipline as an important part of this apparently egalitarian response.

The MRF saw the Handbook itself as playing a major role in instilling respectable conducts. It was on sale to non-members, although Ashton complained that it was ‘only’ reaching a fifth of ramblers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Royce wrote that ‘it has been the continued policy of the “handbook” in its “Ramble Outlines” to encourage the walker to try new pastures’, in order to prevent overcrowding.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Handbook also contained cartoons and poems which more explicitly denounced specific modes of behaviour.Footnote ⁷⁸ Descriptions of rowdiness, destructiveness and other irresponsible conduct within the Handbook were attempts to promote a culture of self-regulation, disseminating a discourse of what rambling entailed, from the established expertise within the MRF.

The Handbook was not widely enough circulated to have the impact required, and in any case was probably read only by those already initiated into ‘rambling’. Suggestions for more overt regulation culminated in 1931 with the ‘Oldham Moorwardens’, the first of a scheme that was regularized by 1933.Footnote ⁷⁹ The ‘Ramblers’ Federation Warden-Guides’ were split between three districts, each of which was run by a ‘District Warden’. Applicants to the scheme were ‘strictly’ from within the MRF, and, after being proposed by a club secretary, were questioned on their ‘capacity’ by the District Warden. Attributes included ‘a thorough knowledge of the district, tact, anxiety to preserve rambling status, rural amenities and rural livelihood and activity in the prevention of litter, damage of all kinds and conduct derogatory to the rambling movement’.Footnote ⁸⁰

The wardens, with their arm-band bearing the logo of the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation and title of ‘Warden-Guide’, were intended to introduce new people to rambling, protect ramblers’ rights and communicate ‘good’ behaviour by example.Footnote ⁸¹ There was an element of surveillance within the scheme as well. ‘The real article cannot be everywhere, particularly in the rough country’, Royce had pointed out in 1929, ‘but the knowledge that the law has a thousand “eyes” may cause some of the delinquents to be more circumspect in their behaviour’.Footnote ⁸² Yet more often wardens encouraged self-regulation by a direct, but tactful ‘word’ with those committing the cultural trespass.Footnote ⁸³ The policy of Warden-Guides was to reason with the ‘hiker’ to instil a sense of self-regulation.

The Federation leadership did not always feel comfortable in running the Warden-Guides, and there are contradictions within the pages of the Handbook that consider their aims and actions. W. Knott, the secretary of the scheme, noted ‘some confusion of thought about the purpose, functions, etc., of Warden-Guides’, but his explanation was anything but clear: ‘The Warden Guides were formed to make anybody's job somebody's job, information and service to the Ramblers’ Federation (Manchester and District in particular), the rambling movement in general and the public, is the complete reason Why the Warden Guides.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Knott went on to suggest that the Warden-Guides scheme should make itself redundant – to spread knowledge of rambling so widely that all conduct in the countryside would be self-regulatory. One way in which the MRF could justify the scheme, then, was to portray it as a temporary measure necessary for the long-term protection of liberty.Footnote ⁸⁵ They also emphasized the ‘unostentatious’ and ‘not imposed’ nature of the Warden-Guides, and their reluctance to create a system of coercion was one reason for their refusal to join the Ramblers’ Association on its formation in 1935.Footnote ⁸⁶ Other rambling federations were said to have adopted alternative schemes too close to a more overtly regulatory system proposed by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.Footnote ⁸⁷ While the Manchester Warden-Guides were an important part of the regulatory framework, they were limited by what could be justified within Manchester ramblers’ definition of ‘freedom’; overt regulation was beyond the pale.

In many ways, the Warden-Guides can be described as a success. As ‘guides’ they proved popular, and were, at least according to newspaper reports, well received by the general public.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet other evidence suggests that they experienced difficulties in regulating people on the moors. The addition of the word ‘guide’ in 1933 was intended to soften the regulatory overtones of ‘warden’ by giving the role greater pedagogic content.Footnote ⁸⁹ The MRF also consistently struggled to recruit to the scheme, perhaps reflecting mistrust in organized surveillance.Footnote ⁹⁰ The impact of the wardens is also questionable, since the ‘hiking craze’ was already subsiding by the time they came into being.Footnote ⁹¹ Nevertheless, in the Warden-Guides the MRF had created a regulatory system acceptable to the vast majority of countryside users. At the same time, it conformed to a Mancunian idea of rambling on the Derbyshire moorlands which emphasized ‘freedom’.

The MRF combined the introduction of Warden-Guides with urban-based education as preparation for a visit to the outdoors. The ‘standard of rambling’, according to Ashton, could be increased by holding lectures in Manchester on outdoor topics and if ‘a little use is made during the week of the fine collection of open air books in the Reference and other libraries’.Footnote ⁹² Others lobbied Local Education Authorities to make a new generation literate ‘in map-reading, compass reading, topography and other subjects appertaining to rambling skill’.Footnote ⁹³ Stocks and Ashton's Open Air Guide, first published in 1928 but running to a second edition in 1929, was a series of short introductions to the ‘key’ topics of rational interest – geology, astronomy, wild animals and flowers, photography, architecture – each followed by a bibliography of scientific books. As the authors put it,

The MRF also saw the countryside as having agency in creating legitimate conduct. They felt that the freedom of the hills would encourage new recruits to constrain their conducts for the benefit of that freedom. For H.H. Symonds, ‘the freedom of the open air and of the fell side is a civilising thing: it is a needful part of our self knowledge, and of our knowledge of one another’.Footnote ⁹⁵ This belief in the civilizing value of these landscapes manifested itself in organized rambles led by Warden-Guides along less frequented paths in the Peak District. As Arthur Smith claimed in 1935, ‘Future developments will find wardens on tracks that are too well known . . . Folk who walk on the roads will be shepherded on to the paths, and gradually the whole of the walking public will become moorland-conscious.’Footnote ⁹⁶

The Manchester Ramblers’ Federation hoped that order would be produced through governmental technologies built around the authority of the rambling tradition, a panoptic system of control, the liberal landscape itself and a rational, self-improving discourse on education. By the mid-1930s, rambling took place within a complex system of behavioural codes and technologies of control. As a liberal system, it had matured. What began as an escape from a city in which liberal forms of social order were perceived to be deteriorating morphed into a recreation of liberal order, including explicit codes of legitimacy and illegitimacy which gave ramblers the authority to manage this outdoors space, utilizing urban systems of power.