‘I am a free man on Sunday’: Rambling, Freedom and the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, by Erin Jarrett

“I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday.” The final, defiant lines of Ewan MacColl’s The Manchester Rambler are set to a jovial tune that has become a standard for English folk singers; yet one could be forgiven for not having heard it. The song, and the trespass it commemorates, occupy a somewhat niche space in English history – side-lined, along with the entire debate around land ownership and access, by ingrained and unquestioned notions of property.