“It felt like we were the first black people ever to be up there. There must have been at least 200 people at that cafe on the top of Mount Snowdon and everyone was white. I was very proud of myself. I was like: ‘Yeah, I’m that black girl you saw walking up here.’”
When Grace (not her real name) set off to complete the Three Peaks Challenge in 2019 – a 23-mile (37km) hike that takes participants up the highest mountains in England, Wales and Scotland – it was the furthest she had travelled since leaving her native country in southern Africa as a refugee. Before she discovered hiking, Britain “felt suffocating”, like a country of bricks and mortar, with nothing to remind her of the village in which she grew up.
Then a nine-month walking project set up by the Helen Bamber Foundation, a charity that supports survivors of human trafficking and violence, got her out in the hills. Though the project has finished, for Grace hiking has become a passion. She now spends every weekend discovering new beauty spots in and around the area where she currently lives. “I had been in this country for a decade and I had never imagined that Britain has places that are this beautiful,” she said.
Access for ordinary people to the countryside in England has never been straightforward. The right to roam, after decades of protests, was only won in 2000 and still covers only about 8% of English land. The National Parks Act in 1949 may have been “a people’s charter … for everyone who lives”, but for many the British countryside still feels like a no-go zone.
According to recent statistics, only 3% of visitors to the parks are from ethnic minorities. Younger people, working-class people and those with disabilities are also underrepresented. In 2018, it was estimated that 18% of children living in the most deprived areas had not been on any trips into nature.
But over the last year, as people turned to the outdoors for comfort during lockdown, that has been changing, with groups popping up all over the country. “I constantly get calls asking me about the next hill walk and all I can say is to hang fire for now,” says Kash Butt, the co-founder of Boots and Beards. The children of Pakistani migrants, Butt and his cousin set up the hiking group for Asian Glaswegians after a successful family reunion up Conic Hill in the Loch Lomond national park.
“When my parents came to this country, going out adventuring into the Scottish countryside was not really their priority. But we don’t want people to miss out on what we have here,” he says. “The second we can get out again, we’ll be ready.”
Project One Climbing was set up by Carmen McIlveen from south London, who is one of the 1% of British climbing instructors from ethnic minorities. “The idea was just to take a couple of kids from the estate where I grew up to the local climbing wall, but then it snowballed in an incredible way,” McIlveen says.
McIlveen has partnered with centres across the city and is planning to run larger outdoor camps “once the kids have gotten used to the heights”.
When Wanderlust Women, a mainly Muslim walking group from Lancashire, was set up in July last year, its founder had expected a maximum of eight women to join, but today their WhatsApp group has more than 100 members.
Kit Collective realised there might be a problem with access to equipment and has spent the past year getting outdoors brands to donate some of their stock, which it distributes to projects across the country. “We don’t touch anything less than a 100 quid jacket or anything less than £100 shoes, because there is a massive difference,” says Rory Southworth, who helps Kit Collective with procurement. “You put on a professional-level shoe and you feel like you should be on the hill, like you can tear down that descent: you’ve got that confidence.”
Or as 18-year-old Mya-Rose Craig, whose charity Black2Nature runs camps for children and teenagers of colour in the south-west, puts it: “If you’ve got one pair of shoes and it’s a really nice pair of trainers, why on earth would you want to go on a muddy walk through the fields, you know?” Getting out to the country may be a problem, too. According to government statistics, black people are twice as likely as white people to live in a household with no access to a car or van – vital for getting around the countryside.
But according to Mohammed Dhalech, the chair of Mosaic Outdoors, the main thing keeping people away is the nagging feeling they don’t quite belong. “I remember taking a group of multigenerational [minority ethnic] professionals out on a walk and I heard someone behind us say: ‘What are they doing here? They should be in London.’” Other people he has spoken to report feeling uncomfortable after noticing waiters seat them at a distance from other customers in country pubs and restaurants.
When, last summer, a combination of lockdown easing and good weather brought people en masse to nature spots around the country, it was often youths and people of colour who were blamed for extra litter and disturbances.
Trevor Beattie, the chief executive of the South Downs national park, says he doesn’t agree with that characterisation and positively welcomes people from the cities. “If more people are going to use the countryside, then there will be added pressures, but it is a wonderful opportunity. Right now, our rural economy is on its knees. It needs more diverse visitors and it needs them soon.”
He is overjoyed that more people are discovering the beauty of the countryside. As Grace says of her favourite hill: “There’s this view all the way to the top where you can see the whole town spread out below you. For some of us, we can’t leave this country – but we can travel within it and find peace.”
