The Manchester Rambler

It was inspired by his participation in the Kinder trespass, a protest by the urban Young Communist League of Manchester, and was the work that began MacColl's career as a singer-songwriter.

The 'ramblers', led by Benny Rothman, walked from Bowden Bridge Quarry, near Hayfield, to climb the hill called Kinder Scout in the Derbyshire Peak District on 24 April 1932.

[3][4] What MacColl did not know was that the protest was to have a powerful long-term effect, leading to improved access to the countryside in the shape of national parks (from 1949), long-distance footpaths starting with the Pennine Way (opened in 1965) and various forms of the desired 'right to roam' (such as with the CRoW Act, 2000).

[5] "The Manchester Rambler", written in 1932 not long after the Kinder trespass and inspired by that event, was MacColl's first important song, according to Harker,[3] who argues that it "marks a departure from the [singer's] leaden-footed and slogan-heavy juvenilia".

The lyrics are suitably comical on the confrontation between the ramblers and the gamekeepers in the style of musical theatre, argues Harker, with lines such as "He called me a louse and said 'Think of the grouse'".

[15] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writes of MacColl that "One of his first and finest protest songs, ‘The Manchester Rambler’, dealt with the ‘mass trespass’ campaigns of the 1930s, in which hikers fought pitched battles with gamekeepers when they invaded privately owned grouse moors.

"[16] The Encyclopaedia of Contemporary British Culture describes MacColl as "a crucial figure" in the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and names "The Manchester Rambler" as one of his "more famous songs".

[19] The British Mountaineering Council's booklet issued in 2012 to commemorate 80 years of the Kinder mass trespass reproduced the lyrics of "The Manchester Rambler" in full.