Writer caught the poetry of tramping on the open moors

MOORLAND tramping. A stirring phrase. It’s redolent of open moor, and the exhilaration of crossing it on foot, savouring the broad vistas and breathing in deeply the pure moorland air.

The moorland tramper par excellence was Alfred John Brown. It was he who conceived the concept of tramping, which he boldly promoted in a trio of books he wrote in the late 1920s and 1930s. In one, Moorland Tramping in West Yorkshire, he defined the essence of tramping: “Tramping is to walking what poetry is to prose. It is walking, if you like, in an intenser air.”

He detailed some of its special joys: “Breasting a hill on boisterous days; the fun of being swept off one’s feet and hurled forward over open moor…the beauty of easy rhythmical movement, mile after mile…the sudden sight and smell of the sea… Tramping is an active delight, and every man who tramps will find his own crock of gold.”

Brown found many, sharing them in his books. For instance there was the six-mile (as the crow flies) moorland crossing between Chequers, near Osmotherley and Chop Gate. In a companion volume to Moorland Tramping – Tramping in Yorkshire (North and East) – Brown recommended this to “those who do not mind wading waist deep in heather for several miles”.

Confessing his “passion for rough moorland tramping of this kind”, he went on to describe how, following an imaginary straight line, he crossed “in just over three hours, and I thought I had done rather well. I do not think I have ever crossed deeper heather”.

Brown’s tramping guides helped make him, between the wars, king of Yorkshire’s outdoor writers. Post-war, his star shone again with such works as Broad Acres, a miscellany celebrating features such as green roads and village inns, and Fair North Riding, still the best book on that truly fairest part of Yorkshire. Brown adapted its relevant chapters to form the first – and still most readable – official guide to the North York Moors National Park.

But since his death in 1969, Brown has slipped into obscurity, his work appreciated only by a diminishing band of admirers, among them myself. But Brown is striding – his favourite term next to tramping – back. He’s earned an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Enthusiasts plan to mark two of his homes, at Burley-in Wharfedale and Sleights, with plaques. Most eye-catchingly, he is the subject of a biography worthy of the Bronte sisters – 534 authoritative pages, fully annotated with notes and references.

The Bronte comparison is apt because Brown sprang from the same Yorkshire earth, around Bradford, as the famous sisters, on whose eponymous moors he early gained a love of walking. Though he left school at 13, he became prominent in the wool industry – a sales director who travelled the globe.

But he longed to throw off the yoke of industry and in 1958 he managed it when, with his half-French wife Marie Eugenie, he bought the Whitfield House Hotel, at Darnholm, Goathland. His brochure is classic AJ Brown. Extolling the hotel’s attraction to the 20 guests it could accommodate, he wrote: “Just 20 people – the right sort of people. The kind who seek solitude and quiet after the turmoil of cities; people who love to explore the old moorland tracks and neighbouring villages by day… and to come back with an edge on their appetites to appreciate a good dinner. And to sit round the fireside on chilly evenings and talk or read or play bridge… But for those who disdain the comforts of the fireside and a good selection of books, even at night the quiet road outside the gate leads straight to the moors, where the air is like wine”.

Brown’s writing talent extended to poetry. His poem Wanderlust contains the lines:

“When I am old and full of pains,

I will sit at home and count my gains:

The peaks I’ve climbed, the ridges won,

I will number them carefully one by one.”

His hope had been to combine writing with his hotel venture. But both he and Marie Eugenie, a superb cook, were overwhelmed by their hotel roles. After six seasons, they sold up, though their hotel experience yielded two entertaining books by Brown – I Bought a Hotel and Farewell High Fell (aka Whitfield House).

In his final working years Brown returned to the wool trade. But he and Eugenie eventually settled in a Sleights cottage where, decades earlier, they and their family of five had enjoyed holidays. His headstone in the village churchyard bears two more lines of his verse: “There must be Dales in Paradise, Which you and I will find.”

As Brown’s biographer, John White, another Bradfordian though now in Liverpool, salutes the late Tom Scott Burns, of Nunthorpe, who had been forced by ill health to abandon a similar project before his untimely death, aged 65, in 2011. Excellently written and presented, White’s biography covers Brown’s industrial career and his wartime Bomber Command service, as well as his hotel years and, heart of the matter, his outdoor writings.

As White says, Brown “probably helped lay the foundation for other popular writers on walking in Yorkshire, for example Alfred Wainwright”.

But while Wainwright was wholly a mountain man, his target always the summit, Brown professed himself a “moorman”. He declared that “in the high places” he wanted “to walk north, south, east and west at the same moment”.

His routes today are not as adventurous as when he walked (sorry, tramped) them. Highways then still semi-metalled have been made up – eg Blakey Ridge. Grouse moor tracks now provide easy walking between Chequers and Chop Gate. But Brown’s tramping books still appeal for the warmth and gusto of the writing and Brown’s supreme ability to convey the exultant pleasure of striding out over moorland.

Generously laced with quotes, John White’s biography should restore AJ Brown to the very head of Yorkshire’s walking aristocracy.

Alfred John Brown: Walker, Writer and Passionate Yorkshireman by John A. White (£15, available plus £2.80 p&p from Amazon, or contact printer/distributor Smith Settle, 0113 2509201, tthorne@smithsettle.com)