| Date | 24 April 1932 |
| Location | Kinder Scout, Peak District, Derbyshire, England |
| Caused by | Exclusion of working-class walkers from privately held moorland managed as grouse-shooting estates |
| Resulted in | Arrest and imprisonment of five participants; increased public support for open-access legislation; contribution to the National Parks and Countryside Act 1949 and Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 |
| Parties | British Workers' Sports Federation · Young Communist League of Great Britain · Derbyshire Constabulary · Duke of Devonshire's estate gamekeepers |
| Lead figures | Benny Rothman, John Anderson, Edward Beever |
The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass was a coordinated act of civil disobedience on 24 April 1932 in the Peak District of Derbyshire, England. Several hundred walkers, organised principally through the British Workers' Sports Federation, deliberately walked onto the privately held moorland of Kinder Scout — then the highest point in the Peak District at 2,087 feet — in defiance of the landowners' exclusion orders. The event is widely regarded as the pivotal moment in the long campaign for public access to open countryside in England and Wales, ultimately contributing to the passage of the [National Parks and Countryside Act 1949](/wiki/national-parks-and-countryside-act-1949) and, later, the [Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000](/wiki/countryside-and-rights-of-way-act-2000).
By the early twentieth century, the vast majority of upland moorland in England was held under private ownership, managed primarily as grouse-shooting estates and closed to walkers for most of the year. The Peak District, situated between the industrial cities of Manchester and Sheffield, was visited by tens of thousands of urban workers seeking recreation, yet formal rights of way across the open moors were virtually nonexistent. Ramblers' organisations had lobbied Parliament on access to open land since the 1880s, without legislative result. By 1932, frustration among working-class hiking clubs — many of them affiliated with the wider labour movement — had reached a point at which direct action was judged, by some organisers, to be the most practical remaining avenue.
The principal organiser of the trespass was Benny Rothman, a twenty-year-old mechanic and member of the Young Communist League of Great Britain, who coordinated the action from Manchester. Rothman and his associates distributed leaflets at Hayfield railway station and along the approach roads to Kinder Scout in the days preceding 24 April, inviting ramblers to join what they described openly as a deliberate act of trespass. The landowner, the Duke of Devonshire, had been informed in advance by Derbyshire Constabulary, who stationed gamekeepers and uniformed officers on the lower slopes in anticipation of the march.
### Saturday, 24 April 1932
Approximately 400 to 500 walkers assembled at Bowden Bridge quarry near Hayfield on the morning of 24 April 1932. Rothman addressed the group before the ascent, emphasising the legal character of the action and instructing participants not to engage in violence. The group then proceeded up William Clough and onto the Kinder plateau, where they met and briefly scuffled with a line of gamekeepers deployed by the estate. One gamekeeper, Edward Beever, sustained a sprained ankle during the confrontation — the sole injury recorded in the Derbyshire Constabulary incident log for the day.
### Descent and Arrests
On the descent toward Hayfield, Derbyshire police arrested six men, including Rothman. The arrests were made on charges of incitement to riotous assembly and, in two cases, assault. A seventh participant, John Anderson, was arrested separately the following day. The remaining walkers dispersed without further incident. A simultaneous trespass organised independently at Winnats Pass, near Castleton, drew an additional 200 participants but produced no arrests.
The trial of the arrested men was held at Derby Assizes in July 1932 before a jury described in contemporary press accounts as composed largely of military officers and landowners — a composition that drew public criticism from the Manchester Guardian and the Sheffield Independent. Five of the six defendants were convicted; Rothman received the heaviest sentence of four months' imprisonment. The severity of the sentences generated wider public sympathy for the access movement than the trespass itself had produced. A rally at Winnats Pass the following month drew an estimated 10,000 participants, the largest open-country access demonstration recorded in England to that date.
The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass did not produce immediate legislative change. Successive parliamentary access bills were introduced and rejected throughout the 1930s and 1940s. It was not until the [National Parks and Countryside Act 1949](/wiki/national-parks-and-countryside-act-1949), passed under the Attlee government, that a statutory framework for national parks and limited public access was established in England and Wales. Kinder Scout itself fell within the newly designated Peak District National Park, created in April 1951 as the first national park in the United Kingdom.
The [Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000](/wiki/countryside-and-rights-of-way-act-2000), which opened the majority of mapped upland, mountain, moor, heath, and down to walkers without the requirement of specific rights of way, is routinely described by access campaigners as the legislative fulfilment of the principles advanced at Kinder Scout in 1932. The [Land Reform Scotland Act 2003](/wiki/land-reform-scotland-act-2003) extended comparable statutory access rights across Scotland. Benny Rothman lived to see the passage of the 2000 Act and attended celebratory events on the Kinder plateau in that year; he died in January 2002.
The trespass has been commemorated in an annual event held each April at Bowden Bridge quarry, organised since 1982 by the Ramblers' Association. In 2012, the eightieth anniversary rally attracted figures including the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and was accompanied by a heritage interpretation board installed by the Peak District National Park Authority at the site of the original assembly point. Singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl, who was present at the 1932 trespass as a fifteen-year-old, later cited it as a formative influence on his political and artistic development. The event is recorded in the collections of the [London Metropolitan Archives](/wiki/london-metropolitan-archives) and in the Peak District National Park Authority's documentary archive at Aldern House, Bakewell.