The north is a closely knit, indigenous, industrial society,” he said. “A homogeneous cultural group with a good record for music, theatre, literature and newspapers, not found elsewhere in this island, except perhaps in Scotland.” He added, with a wry smile, “And, of course, if you look at a map of the concentration of population in the north and a rainfall map, you will see that the north is an ideal place for television.”
Rivington Pike Tower. Photograph: Alamy
The mast is only a little higher than three older landmarks. Most walkers catch their breath at the Grade II-listed Rivington Pike Tower, built as a hunting lodge in 1733 on the site of an older beacon. Another focal point, a little further down, is the Pigeon Tower – built by William Hesketh Lever (aka Lord Leverhulme) as a birthday present to his wife, Ellen. The tower and the terraced gardens it overlooks were part of Lever’s private estate, landscaped by Thomas Mawson between 1905 and 1925.
The third landmark, the Two Lads Cairn, is a pile of stones on Crooked Edge Hill, large enough to resemble a tower from certain angles. Conflicting legends say the lads were two Saxon princes, two sons of a bishop, or two children employed at a mill.
If the summits of our more celebrated peaks have a generally middle-class atmosphere – the technical gear, the smart gizmos, the “hydration” drinks – the top of Winter Hill felt everyday, multi-generational, multi-ethnic and communal. This was especially fitting, given the hill’s role in our nation’s rambling history.Pigeon Tower, which was built by William Hesketh Lever (aka Lord Leverhulme). Photograph: Ruaux/Alamy
In August 1896, Colonel Richard Henry Ainsworth, scion of a wealthy family that had made its fortune in the bleaching trade and resident of Smithills Hall, decided to close a well-used track that crossed his land on the south-east slope of Winter Hill. His business’s reliance on the hill’s watercourses had perhaps given him a proprietorial outlook. Moreover, he regarded walkers – whether tramping to work or heading up there for a breath of clean air after a week’s slog in factory, mine or mill – as unwanted intruders on land he used for grouse-shooting. He had his gamekeepers turn people back and build a gate on Coalpit Road to show the way was closed. A melee ensued, but the colonel’s private army was no match for the great mass of demonstrators
Local people took umbrage at Ainsworth’s decision. Cobbler Joe Shufflebotham, secretary of Bolton Social Democratic Foundation, advertised a march up the disputed road, which won support from journalist and Liberal party radical Solomon Partington. On Sunday 6 September 1896, about 10,000 people joined in the march as it progressed along Halliwell Road through a densely populated working-class district, and up the hill track. A handful of police and gamekeepers were waiting for them at the new gate. A melee ensued, but the colonel’s private army was no match for the great mass of demonstrators; the gate was smashed and the procession continued. When the victorious party arrived at their destination, Belmont, on the north side of Winter Hill, they drank the hostelries dry.
The Bolton Journal reported that “the multitude far exceeded what had been anticipated … the road was literally a sea of faces and the multitude comprised thousands of persons of all ages and descriptions”. During that fervid September, there were three weekend marches and one on a Wednesday, the only day shopworkers were free to join. There was a further march on Christmas Day.
Despite the numerical success of the popular uprising, Ainsworth had writs issued against Shufflebotham, Partington and others. The marches were stopped while the case was heard in court. The colonel won, leaving the marchers to bear the costs. The tail of the trial was long: though locals were able to use the path from the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1996 that public access was formally secured.
The massed march (the walkers wouldn’t have thought of it as a “trespass”) of 1896 has never been accorded anything like the attention given to the 1932 march up Kinder Scout, led by Manchester communist Benny Rothman, which is usually credited with leading to the creation of the UK’s national parks.
“Although the march was a massive event, it was very local, only involving people who lived within two or three miles,” says Bolton-based historian and author Paul Salveson, an expert on the Winter Hill events. “That, and the fact they lost the case, might explain why it’s not better known, though it did lead to greater awareness about rights of way in the Bolton area. The first world war led to the slaughter of many of the participants and brought the curtain down on so many working-class activities. When I met Benny [Rothman] for the Kinder Scout 50th anniversary in 1982 he had never heard of Winter Hill.”
View of landscape around Rivington Pike. Photograph: Alamy
Paul has written a book about the march and was involved in commissioning a play for the first commemoration, back in 1982. His most recent publication, Moorlands, Memories and Reflections, celebrates the countryside writing of dialect writer and radical thinker Allen Clarke, who wrote about the march and penned the stirring song about the Winter Hill protest, Will Yo’ Come O’ Sunday Mornin’?
A memorial stone to the marchers stands on Coalpit Lane. But, unless you go looking for it, you could walk for miles around without seeing any record of the historic clash. Just as most drivers ignore Winter Hill, so many walkers miss the glorious story of their recreational space.
This year – the 125th anniversary of the march – things might at last be about to change. Bolton Socialist Club, the Ramblers, the Woodland Trust, housing association charity Bolton at Home and other community organisations and unions have joined forces for a commemorative march along the original route for the weekend of 6 September. Folk singer Johnny Campbell is releasing a single for the occasion. There’s even talk of a new memorial, to be built by a local quarrying company.
“The events of 1896 showed how important the countryside was to working-class people in the north,” says Salveson. “It still is. This year’s celebration of those momentous events 125 years ago isn’t just a reminder of Britain’s biggest-ever rights of way demonstration. It’s intended to be a rallying call that the countryside is still under threat, with rights of way being eroded and inappropriate development threatening the landscape.”
• Join in the 125th anniversary events via Facebook
But there is another way to see this crisis – one that doesn’t place it firmly in the realm of the medical system. Doesn’t it make sense that so many of us are suffering? Of course it does: we are living in a traumatising and uncertain world. The climate is breaking down, we’re trying to stay on top of rising living costs, still weighted with grief, contagion and isolation, while revelations about the police murdering women and strip-searching children shatter our faith in those who are supposed to protect us.
As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife.
If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.
In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry. In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment. What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress.‘I’m glowing’: scientists are unlocking secrets of why forests make us happy
Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo. It is here that we fail marginalised people the most: Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”. Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today.
The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology. Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures. Suffering emerges within people’s experiences and histories of oppression. Liberation psychology sees people not as patients, but potential social actors in the project of freedom, valuing their own lineages, creativity and experience, rather than being forced into a white, eurocentric and individualistic idea of therapy. It directly challenges the social, cultural and political causes of distress through collective social action.
This framework makes complete sense when we hear that the pandemic in the UK has affected poor people’s mental health most. Does it mean wealthy, privileged white men don’t experience suffering? Of course they do. We’re still learning about the complicated ways these structural issues affect our everyday lives. For example, how the pressures of individualism and capitalism may lead to isolation and substance abuse, or how colonial violence towards immigrant families plays out within homes and on bodies.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying people in distress should be out there on the picket line. Pain can be debilitating. But those of us who are supporting people in distress, such as mental health workers, have a key role in social transformation. Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.
Instead of trying to change “mindsets” in therapy, we need to change race- and class-based hierarchies, the housing and economic system. Universal basic income has psychological benefits, and recent studies show how it improves the “crises of anxiety and depression”. As a clinical psychologist, some of my most powerful work has been not in the therapy room but in successfully advocating for secure housing for, or working in the community with, queer, black and brown facilitators in organisations such as Beyond Equality, to prevent gender-based violence. The network Psychologists for Social Change shows us a practical imagining of this work. We also need social change that is preventive, such as investing in young people and community-led services such as healing justice london and 4front. They work to shift trauma in marginalised communities through building social connectedness, social action and creativity, towards futures free of violence.
None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all). But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined, where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world. And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.
Meaningful structural transformation won’t happen overnight, though the pandemic taught us that big changes can happen pretty quickly. But change won’t happen without us: our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us.
Dr Sanah Ahsan is a clinical psychologist, poet, writer, presenter and educator
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
… as you’re joining us today from the UK, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
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And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
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But there is another way to see this crisis – one that doesn’t place it firmly in the realm of the medical system. Doesn’t it make sense that so many of us are suffering? Of course it does: we are living in a traumatising and uncertain world. The climate is breaking down, we’re trying to stay on top of rising living costs, still weighted with grief, contagion and isolation, while revelations about the police murdering women and strip-searching children shatter our faith in those who are supposed to protect us.
As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife.
If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.
In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry. In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment. What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress.‘I’m glowing’: scientists are unlocking secrets of why forests make us happy
Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo. It is here that we fail marginalised people the most: Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”. Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today.
The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology. Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures. Suffering emerges within people’s experiences and histories of oppression. Liberation psychology sees people not as patients, but potential social actors in the project of freedom, valuing their own lineages, creativity and experience, rather than being forced into a white, eurocentric and individualistic idea of therapy. It directly challenges the social, cultural and political causes of distress through collective social action.
This framework makes complete sense when we hear that the pandemic in the UK has affected poor people’s mental health most. Does it mean wealthy, privileged white men don’t experience suffering? Of course they do. We’re still learning about the complicated ways these structural issues affect our everyday lives. For example, how the pressures of individualism and capitalism may lead to isolation and substance abuse, or how colonial violence towards immigrant families plays out within homes and on bodies.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying people in distress should be out there on the picket line. Pain can be debilitating. But those of us who are supporting people in distress, such as mental health workers, have a key role in social transformation. Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.
Instead of trying to change “mindsets” in therapy, we need to change race- and class-based hierarchies, the housing and economic system. Universal basic income has psychological benefits, and recent studies show how it improves the “crises of anxiety and depression”. As a clinical psychologist, some of my most powerful work has been not in the therapy room but in successfully advocating for secure housing for, or working in the community with, queer, black and brown facilitators in organisations such as Beyond Equality, to prevent gender-based violence. The network Psychologists for Social Change shows us a practical imagining of this work. We also need social change that is preventive, such as investing in young people and community-led services such as healing justice london and 4front. They work to shift trauma in marginalised communities through building social connectedness, social action and creativity, towards futures free of violence.
None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all). But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined, where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world. And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.
Meaningful structural transformation won’t happen overnight, though the pandemic taught us that big changes can happen pretty quickly. But change won’t happen without us: our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us.
To return to the plant analogy – we must look at our conditions. The water might be a universal basic income, the sun safe, affordable housing and easy access to nature and creativity. Food could be loving relationships, community or social support services. The most effective therapy would be transforming the oppressive aspects of society causing our pain. We all need to take whatever support is available to help us survive another day. Life is hard. But if we could transform the soil, access sunlight, nurture our interconnected roots and have room for our leaves to unfurl, wouldn’t life be a little more livable?
Dr Sanah Ahsan is a clinical psychologist, poet, writer, presenter and educator
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
… as you’re joining us today from the UK, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future.Support the Guardian from as little as £1 – it only takes a minute. SingleMonthlyAnnual£6 per month£12 per monthOther
ContinueRemind me in Novemberhttps://6bd2070874e8cb4fdc70397ff773cf80.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
Cat’s small child cries
in the dark where loneliness hides.
Cat’s small child beats
its breast in the soft
furriness of its need.Cats don’t beat their breasts,
cats yell with lust
in the dark where loneliness hides?
Is it I, then, that cries,
mad child running wild?
Is it I that lies
in the dark where loneliness hides,
that listens as the wild geese wing
past short of the stars,
rime my roof with their dung?
Cat’s mewling, sky’s
sibilances, these
are the thieves of my ease?
What else waits
in the dark where loneliness hides?
My song has a crooked spine.
Should I break a bone
as I straighten it?
Or birth its crookedness in
the dark where loneliness hides?
How my heart sings 