1.1 Air and the Body

As the scholars Tatiana Konrad, Chantelle Mitchell and Savannah Schaufler have recently written, ‘air is a consistent biological necessity, indispensable to human and more-than-human beings, to life and survival’, as well as something that at the same time is ‘materially and ideologically complex; at once an environmental and scientific concern, …, and register of entanglement, relation, and well-being’.Footnote ³⁶ It is therefore both simple in its indispensability and complicated in its relationality to the environment and other living beings. The first and last breaths we take are the key moments marking the beginning and the end of life – it punctuates everything. As Konrad et al. write, ‘breath as a bodily function, in which each inhalation registers direct contact with the external world, sees the alveoli, pleural cavity, the branches of the lungs, as sites of exchange – with air at once both inside and outside’.Footnote ³⁷ The body is made permeable through many mechanisms, but the rhythmical process of breathing is a key method by which we are all physically connected to our environment.

Air, however, has not always been conceptualised as one single element and it has existed in multiple contexts. For example, the ancient Greek Hippocratic tradition distinguished between different types of air: there was external air (aer, eeros) and external wind (pneuma, anemos), as well as inner wind or breath (pneuma, physa).Footnote ³⁸ The importance of the relationship between the environment and the body in early medicine is even captured in the title of one of the key Hippocratic works, Airs, Waters, Places. Although, by 1733, at a time of great interest in the physical properties of air, the physician John Arbuthnot could complain that physicians, unlike Philosophers, Mathematicians, Chemists and ‘Professors of Agriculture and Garden’, had not paid enough attention to the effects of air on the body.Footnote ³⁹ The reason for this lack of interest he suggested was that ‘air is of those Ingesta, or things taken inwardly, which neither can be forborn nor measur’d in Doses’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This highlights the historical complexities of something which is essential for life, is everywhere and is therefore taken for granted and yet cannot be easily controlled in terms of how much crosses the boundaries of our bodies. As Christopher Sellers, has argued ‘both environmental and medical historians can seek to understand the past two centuries of medical history in terms of a seesaw dialogue over the ways and means by which physicians and other health professionals did, and also did not, consider the influence of place – airs and waters included – on disease’.Footnote ⁴¹ Given our focus on modern Britain we will limit ourselves here to noting just these examples from the Western medical tradition, but we recognise that other cultures and times have also had their own conceptions and understandings of the relationship of air and the body in terms of health given its centrality to life.

Breath, speech and song are all interconnected physiological processes, as at the most basic level they all involve the inhalation and expulsion of air via the lungs. The main difference between them being whether conscious sound is made through this process, and, if it is, what kind of sound is produced. As Gillian Kayes explains, ‘breathing and phonation [vibration initiated by the vocal folds] are closely linked in vocal function: in singing and speech production the sound source can be “voiced” – a result of vocal fold vibration – or “unvoiced” – a result of air passing through a constriction above the vocal folds’.Footnote ⁴² The physicality of singing with its focus on a particularly high physiological use of air in comparison to general breathing emphasises this bodily connection with the external environment and is often viewed as a process by which health can be improved or restored.

As contemporary voice scholars Jing Kang, Austin Scholp and Jack Jiang note, ‘recent years have witnessed an incremental recognition of the value of singing activities in improving mental and physical health in both nonclinical and clinical settings’.Footnote ⁴³ Although they also recognise that these are not new ideas and trace these origins back to the early twentieth century, stating that ‘as early as 1930, Rollrath found that many famous singers had lived to be 80 or even more than 100 years old, which suggested that singing could increase longevity’.Footnote ⁴⁴ As we have seen above Byrd was already making connections about improving physical health by singing in the sixteenth century, but the idea of tying the physical act of singing to health and longevity fits within a wider narrative found in this early twentieth-century period of the role of air in relation to both exercise and, as we will explore here, singing outdoors. Potential reasons for longevity worth noting were not only confined to the practice of singing – the air itself was considered a factor. For example, in the 1959–60 SCR handbook numerous instances of longevity in Derbyshire were linked specifically to the air itself.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although the type of quality of the Derbyshire air is not specified in this piece, we can safely assume that what is implied is rural or country air rather than that which is found in urban settings.

Ideas concerning health and rural leisure activities in the early twentieth-century were part of a cosmology of understanding where urban conditions were deemed unhealthy in contrast to the widely imagined countryside as a source of health and wellbeing. This reflects what Bill Luckin and Keir Waddington have described as the pro-rural/anti-urban sentiment that emerged in the nineteenth century and was strengthened by the concerns around physical and mental degeneration of the population at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁶ One widespread concern related in particular to the high rates of Tuberculosis (TB) which reached their height in Europe towards the middle of the century. It is thought that in 1850 tuberculosis was responsible for one in four deaths worldwide and, according to Richard Morris, ‘until the 1870s it was the number one killer of Britons’.Footnote ⁴⁷

As TB predominately affects the lungs, one central medical concept which emerged was that time spent in the ‘open-air’ (preferably rural or coastal outdoor air) should be viewed as an essential preventative and therapeutic approach for dealing with this and other related diseases. There were variations on what this meant in practice, but generally this led to patients spending as much time as possible in outdoor settings, even tents and wooden chalets, to obtain the maximum amounts of fresh air and sunshine. This became intertwined with ideas about healthy outdoor recreation and access for urban dwellers to more rural spaces.Footnote ⁴⁸ As E. A. Letts argued in his 1892 lecture, The Air We Breathe: ‘we live in air, and to a certain extent on air, for it is continually flowing into our blood. No wonder, then, that we are influenced by climate, which means the condition of the air’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is echoed in recent work on air which conceptualises it as the ‘medium and breathing the mechanism through which the outside environment is embodied. Air carries the weather, climate and particles from the environment into the body. Humans embody the climate of their environment through air, just as fish embody the climate of their environment through water’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Similarly, in his introduction to the book How to Conquer Consumption (consumption was another term commonly used for TB), published in 1926, David Masters emphasised these interrelated concerns about air, environment and the body, writing:

There is a sense of nostalgia in all these pieces for a time before industrialisation and urbanisation when people were more commonly employed as agrarian workers in rural communities. Dr David Chowry Muthu, an Indian physician who established the Mendip Hills Sanatorium in the UK and the Tambaram Sanatorium in India thought a solution to the health issues facing the nation could be found if the Poor Law was abolished and the poor were given free access to the land. He argued that these measures would mean:

He brought these ideas into his practice by recommending that TB patients that were recovering well should go ‘tramping’ in the countryside (see Figure 2), arguing:

Figure 2

Photograph of three patients (two women and one man) in Edwardian dress on a tramping tour or long walk in the countryside.

From David Chowry Muthu, Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Its Etiology and Treatment. A Record of Twenty Two Years’ Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria (London: Balliere, Tindall and Cox, 1922). Credit: Wellcome Collection.

Muthu, like many physicians treating conditions such as TB at this time, viewed open-air therapies as the answer (as a preventative as well as a therapeutic measure) and argued in 1910 that ‘the secret of its widespread interest in Europe is due to the discovery – if discovery it may be called – that fresh air, hitherto regarded as an enemy to be shut out and barred, is really a friend, and one of Nature’s best gifts to man’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Others such as the retired Lieutenant, J. P. Muller (previously of the Danish Army), who wrote the book, My Sun-Bathing and Fresh-Air System, also saw this natural method for health as a way to manage the issues brought on by modern life. He argued, ‘Man is subject to more bodily ills to-day than he has ever been before, and it is only natural, when you come to consider it, that the descendants of a race who had to hunt their food before they could eat should not be able to work in a factory or an office without suffering for it in some way or another.’Footnote ⁵⁵ These pro-rural/anti-urban nostalgic themes were also at the heart of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century movements, including the Arts and Crafts and Garden City Movements.Footnote ⁵⁶

These ideas are also picked up in G. H. B. Ward‘s 1922, foreword to the SCR’s songbook, Songs for Ramblers to Sing on the Moorlands, where he describes how traditional songs are particularly appropriate for singing outdoors because of their inherent connectedness and resonance with not just the landscape but the open-air itself. Ward writes: ‘what better medium could we desire than the old English country folk song with its simple appeal and the very breath of the countryside in its jingling rhymes’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This nostalgia for the simplicity of the past as well as the concerns around air and health are brought together in the description of the air as ‘the very breath of the countryside’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, the founding ethos of the CHA was in part around the health benefits of rambling and being in the rural open air. Occasionally this made it into the choice of songs by outdoor recreation groups. For instance, the lyrics of ‘On Trek!’ (the marching song of the scouts) include the line ‘Boys, we are going where the clean winds blow!’Footnote ⁵⁹ Another example published in the SCR songbook ‘A mountain thought’ contains the line ‘The health-born winds about us whirl’, and the line ‘With a heigh-ho! In the fresh air’ is a repeated refrain in the rewrite of ‘Come to the fair’, titled ‘A dinner table song’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Rural walking was itself encouraged as a healthy practice because of its action on the lungs (see Figure 3). In 1908, an article in The Circle magazine (which was aimed at children within the co-operative movement) titled ‘Pleasures of the Countryside’ extolled the physical virtues of walking in the countryside. The author argued that ‘walking is the most healthful form of exercise, because it brings practically all the muscles of the body into action, while the lungs are refreshed and strengthened by breathing the pure air’.Footnote ⁶¹ Along with a discussion of the importance of natural history knowledge and observation, it is clear that getting outside was encouraged for the health of children as well as adults. A short piece entitled ‘On Walking’ in the 1959–60 SCR handbook described how one could not ‘help but feel pity for the townsmen’ who experienced ‘No pleasure in walking, that strengthens the limbs and invigorates the lungs!’Footnote ⁶² Edward Carpenter, a leading cultural, political and social reformer, was one of those heavily involved in the wider movement to encourage outside recreation. As Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska has discussed in detail, Carpenter delivered a lecture to the Fabian Society titled, Civilization, Its Cause and Cure in 1889, in which he claimed that civilisation was a ‘disease’ that was ‘physical, social, intellectual, and moral’.Footnote ⁶³ He contrasted this by looking at the ‘“higher types of savages” whose “superabundant health” was due to regular “shouting, singing, dancing”, and a culture in harmony with nature’.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Zweiniger-Bargielowska argues, in Carpenter’s view ‘health was more than a “purely negative” absence of disease. It could only be acquired by the “adoption of a healthy life, bodily and mental”’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This involved a ‘“return to nature”, a “life of the open air”, “clean and pure food”, and “companionship of the animals”’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Along with the open air, he recommended sunlight and sunbaths which were also central elements of the sanatoria regimen and chime with the health practices of both Muthu and Muller as discussed above. We have a sense then that Carpenter considered that perfect health could be achieved through physical activities out-doors, ‘in harmony with nature’, including singing which takes us back to Byrd’s quote about singing as ‘delightful to nature’. It is also worth noting here that the founder of the SCR, G. H. B Ward, considered Carpenter a friend and mentor, and quoted his writing numerous times within the pages of the club’s annual handbooks. As such, we can see that Carpenter’s ideas influenced both the practices and ethos of the club.

Figure 3

‘Come Rambling’: a 1950s poster for The Ramblers’ Association depicting a young (and implicitly healthy) couple walking in a rural landscape.

Figure 3 Long description

A poster with the text “Come rambling” at the top, above an image of a young man and woman, smiling and holding hands. They are dressed in rambling clothes: short sleeved shirts and shorts, and walking shoes. The man has a rucksack on and they are walking up hill. Behind them is a farmyard and cottages, and beyond that a hillside marked out into green hills

Credit: Image courtesy of The Ramblers.

Carpenter was far from being alone in his belief in the power of singing. In 1901 a US physician, S. A. Knopf, outlined how

Similarly, Muthu recommended singing exercises as an ideal way for TB sufferers to recover their strength arguing that ‘they invoke correct nasal breathing, maintain a better expansion of the chest and a freer passage of air to remote parts of the lung, such as the apices – which are liable to become tuberculous owing to their comparative inactivity – and determine a more efficient supply of blood to these parts, and thus indirectly improve the local and general health’.Footnote ⁶⁸ He even included breathing and singing exercises at 10.00 am every day in the example given in his book of the daily programme for patients at his sanatorium.Footnote ⁶⁹ The body was understood to need access to clean, fresh air to fulfil its healthy potential and singing was an easy way to maximise the strength of the lungs and the volume of air inhaled.

Alongside this there were also perceived moral benefits of a closer relationship to nature as both breathing and singing were methods by which the human/environment barrier was constantly breached. As Konrad writes, ‘despite its alleged invisibility and imperceptibility, air is an essential part of the larger environment in which humans exist’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ingold similarly argues against seeing the material aspects of the world as mainly landscape and artefacts without the inclusion of air.Footnote ⁷¹ Materiality according to him is not just an expression of entanglements between people and ‘things’ but between people and mediums like air and water. This interrelationship between bodies, air and the environment is highlighted in the SCR song ‘An after dinner ditty’, where one of the lines describes how ‘As they strolled across the moorland, on the air their voices rang’.Footnote ⁷² Here the bodies are moving and physically interacting with the environment in several different ways or as Ingold states, ‘a living, breathing body is at once a body-on-the-ground and a body-in the-air’.Footnote ⁷³

On top of these basic tenets of bodies moving and breathing, we can also layer the changeability and vulnerability of the body to the environment which is perhaps highlighted most through accounts of the sensory experience of weather. As Ingold writes ‘we hear these textures in the rain from the sounds of drops falling on diverse materials, and we touch and smell in the keen wind that – piercing the body – opens it up and sharpens its haptic and olfactory responses’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although, as Howes has noted, ‘the body’ is not a singular thing; there are individual differences in the way bodies sense due to gender, race and class, and that multisensory perception is complex and nuanced.Footnote ⁷⁵ The air itself also has material qualities but so do other aspects of weather like rain and snow. Singing in our research is clearly also used to manage the bodily and emotional challenges created by the weather. For example, in 1926 Stephen Graham described how when walking in the rain ‘after five of ten miles one begins to sing’, ensuring one completes the walk ‘in the highest of spirits’ despite being wet through.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this way, singing is a form of motivation and emotional self-regulation in the context of embodied experiences of exertion and weather.

1.2 Resonations

Resonations can be both vibrations that are physically felt in the body or heard in the environment as well as metaphorical and symbolic. Writing about sonic resonances in the context of environmental history, Twidle and Elaff highlight sound as both a noun and verb; ‘both physical property (a sound) and open-ended process (to sound or sound out, to enquire into or investigate)’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In terms of a physical property, Michael Benninger writes that ‘for any instrument to produce sound, something must activate the sound (such as plucking a string on a guitar or blowing into a trumpet), something must vibrate (like the guitar string or the reed), and something must resonate (the body of the instrument)’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This singular act of the body resonated can have a wide-reaching affect. According to George Revill, ‘the physical properties of sound, pitch, rhythm, timbre seem to act on and through the body in ways which require neither explanation nor reflection. This appears to grant music a singular power to play on the emotions, to arouse and subdue, animate and pacify’.Footnote ⁷⁹ In its most simple terms when singing the body is the instrument and the resonations come from the exhalation of air via the chest and the head. The environment via the air can then be said to physically resonate within the body as well as outside of it or as Michael Stocker states ‘our sense of sound includes the embrace of our body by the environment’.Footnote ⁸⁰

In this Element we focus on group singing and there has been some recent scholarly research pointing to the particular health benefits of this activity. Although we cannot apply this directly to the past, it is worth considering the ways in which we currently understand these mechanisms to work in relation to both the physical body and the mind. For example, David Camlin, Helena Daffern and Katherine Zeserson have published research on the wellbeing effects of outdoor group singing on participants of three groups. From this they argue that one key element that makes group singing effective is the ‘phenomenon of interpersonal “resonance”’ as the basis of the shared experience, which, they argue ‘explains why it might contribute positively to the experience not just of social bonding, but also the underlying neurobiological mechanism of the experience of “love”’.Footnote ⁸¹ They quote Siegle’s explanation for this phenomenon that ‘when we attune to others we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships’.Footnote ⁸² From this they posit that wellbeing might not just be from the group participation element or the singing itself but rather that the production of musical effects reinforces ‘interpersonal attunement and consequent individual wellbeing, a mutually reinforcing and complex adaptive process’.Footnote ⁸³ As noted this is a contemporary study but there are clearly descriptions of ’fellow feeling’ which are reinforced through group singing within our historic examples and these will be explored more in Section 2.

It is also possible to consider in this context that broader resonances with nature and other species, as well as other people might further reinforce this process, particularly as one of the participants within Camlin et al.’s project stated that ‘somehow it was the mountains that were reverberating with us, if you see what I mean, rather than an audience’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The experience of the sound here is inclusive of the mountains which are viewed as an active participant. As the researchers note, ‘from the point of view of the participants, the way in which they come to feel a resonant connection with other individuals, with the group as a whole, with the music they are singing and its meaning, and their surroundings, appears to lie at the heart of what they feel is most powerful about the group singing experience’.Footnote ⁸⁵

In another example, Theorell has described how participants of choral groups self-report increased experience of joy and relaxation from singing together, as well as a sense of connection and cohesion with other choir members.Footnote ⁸⁶ Other studies measured levels of oxytocin (a hormone thought to have a role in social-bonding) before and after activities and found higher oxytocin levels after group singing compared with simply chatting together. The factors affecting feelings of social and physical wellbeing from singing are complex, and Theorell concluded that the current state of evidence on the health benefits of group singing was modest and often indirect.Footnote ⁸⁷ Another synthesis by Kang, Scholp and Jiang, citing Pearce et al., indicated it may be the extent to which participants felt integrated within their group, rather than the nature of the activity itself, that engenders perceived benefits.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, they also cited research by Stewart and Lonsdale that suggested ‘choral activities seemed to enhance the sense of belonging of the participants, co-ordinated within the singing itself to further improve the well-being and quality of life’.Footnote ⁸⁹ It should be noted that these synthesis articles mainly looked at group singing by formal choirs in indoor contexts. An exception is the Camlin et al. study which explored and compared the experiences of amateur adult group singers in both open-air and indoor settings. They found that ‘while group singing may contribute to individual health and wellbeing, the primary benefit participants across both groups identified is the way that it brings them to a closer, more profound, connection with others’.Footnote ⁹⁰ As these are contemporary examples they cannot be simply mapped onto the past but they do suggest that a healthful singing body can be achieved within a group in specific ways, which relate to resonances with others whether they are human, animal or part of the wider place or environment.

One aspect that is potentially less relevant for today’s singing groups, although not for all, is the role of the divine as a key element within the environment. The founder of the CHA and HF, T. A. Leonard, began his career as a congregational church pastor before deciding to ‘devote the whole of his energy and ability to the holiday movement’ which highlights how close these connections could be.Footnote ⁹¹ The first song in Songs by the Way published by the HF was ‘The Strength of the Hills’ by Mrs Hemans and includes this verse which depicts God within the air and other natural phenomena:

Here God is present within the mountains and forests and is the creator of air via his breath, so singing outdoors would have an added layer of emotional and spiritual resonance beyond that of the physical realm.

1.3 Emotions and Senses of Wellbeing

The interrelationships between singing, emotions and wellbeing have already been touched on in relation to group singing practices. However, the physicality of singing is clearly an important feature when considering senses of wellbeing. For example, as Feld argues there is a ‘special bodily nexus for sensation and emotion’ when sound, hearing and voice are brought together due to ‘their coordination of brain, nervous system, head, ear, chest, muscles, respiration, and breathing’.Footnote ⁹³ In the case of outdoor walking, movement is also brought into play as our groups were often walking and hiking together as well as singing.

In a 1926 chapter on ‘Marching Songs’, Graham reflects on the interplay between rambling and singing:

Although the regular beat of a marching song may help maintain pace and rhythm when walking, Arthur Sidgwick in 1912 posited that stronger drivers for the connection of walking and singing were the links to ‘the actual bodily condition of a walker, that perfect harmony which comes of a frame well occupied’ and the emotions engendered through rambling: ‘It is on the mood which walking induces, rather than on the rhythmical character itself, that the affinity between walking and music mainly rests.’Footnote ⁹⁵

On an SCR rambling trip to Ambleside in 1919 the description of singing of Come to the fair at an evening concert articulates the close association between air, breath and emotions, and highlights the additional meaning of air as describing a melody: ‘a lilting air, breathing the spirit of the week’.Footnote ⁹⁶ A ‘love of jollity’ was a characteristic of the early SCR: ‘Here boisterous good humour and kindly “divvlement” had free scope, and many a weary business man and toiler has temporarily forgotten his burden of care and gloom in the joyous revelry of our open air life.’Footnote ⁹⁷

In all of these accounts song is described as forming an important method by which the body moves and the mind responds to the external environment. As has been touched above and will be explored more fully in the next sections, it is also a way to build connections with other people, animals and places.

2.1 Group Singing and Identities

The songbooks published by open-air recreation groups provided a community resource, a shared repertoire of songs, but it is through the act of collective singing itself that these contributed to fellow-feeling and group identity. In an oral history project, led by the Moors for the Future Partnership and the Peak District National Park Authority in 2012, Linda Crawley recalled singing as an integral part of the culture and practice of the Woodcraft Folk in the 1960s.Footnote ¹³⁸ She compared this to a sense of being part of a singing family: ‘we all sang, we sang on the moors, we sang on the bus, we sang when we were having our lunch, we were like the von Trapp family singers sometimes’.Footnote ¹³⁹ As a living tradition, songs were not just learned through songbooks but from others as a form of both peer and inter-generational learning:

In a 1915 article for Comradeship, Henry Walford Davies described how songbooks themselves could facilitate these connections between people not just in the present but across time and generations:

Here, the songbooks are framed as a way of accessing fellow-feeling at distance, away from the companionship and settings in which communal open-air singing took place. Singing these songs was an act of remembering others, reconnecting with memories of shared experiences, and also perhaps an expression of longing and nostalgia for the ideal of a comforting past. Writing in 1926, Stephen Graham reflects on the interplay between song, memory, emotions and identity, and how these are brought to the fore through rambling and singing together in the countryside:

Many of the founding members of the SCR were part of the Clarion Vocal Choir’s Saturday rambling group and, therefore, were likely to have sung together already.Footnote ¹⁴³ Indeed, singing was depicted as something to be celebrated and rewarded – one of Ward’s ‘hints’ for ramblers in the club’s 1919–20 handbook suggested that ‘should the Leader sing a jolly song, the party have permission to treat him to his tea’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Group singing (and their shared repertoire) were also a way of identifying with the club. In an account of a ramble in 1921, a club member described the arrival of their founder, G.H.B Ward, announced through singing one of their club songs:

This was followed by a call and response of songs, with the resting ramblers singing one of the club songs back to Ward, who responded with a solo rendition of another club song (‘A Jovial Tramp am I’). In this way, the songs provided an intra-community means of communicating connection in the landscape. On the same ramble after lunch the group sang more of their shared repertoire, outside the Barrel Inn at Bretton, ‘to the evident amazement and, let us hope, pleasure of a few strangers who had halted for a modest refresher’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ It is clear from these descriptions that group singing was a well-rehearsed practice and a way of expressing their sense of togetherness when out rambling, in contrast with the ‘strangers’ they encountered in the countryside.

Another way that singing connected with group identity was through the circulation of new lyrics to existing tunes, which celebrated the exploits and characters of members of the SCR. For example, ‘A Toasting Song’, sung to the tune of the traditional song John Peel, included the following lines about the club’s founder:

Another song, ‘The Sheepskin and the Jumper’, gently pokes fun at the rambling attire of two club members: ‘Whiteley’s old grey jumper’ and ‘Diver’s sheepskin jacket’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Re-versioning songs was not a practice limited to the SCR; it also seems to have been common practice amongst members of various twentieth century climbing clubs. For example, the Manchester Rucksack Club’s The Songs of the Mountaineers, published in 1922, included over forty club songs, which the editor, John Hirst, placed in a separated section: ‘As a concession to readers on the fringe of our circle who may be a little aghast at our familiarities’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ However, it was not a practice shared or condoned across all open-air recreation groups. The scouting movement advised against re-writes arguing this ‘spoils the tune forever; and the result is not any more fun to sing than real amusing songs and choruses’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Singing was also a way of cementing shared bonds of fellowship and identification within groups beyond their open-air activities and holidays. Group singing was part of CHA conference and reunion events, and the SCR sang together at their club dinners.Footnote ¹⁵¹ As T. Henderson noted in the pages of Comradeship in 1914, music itself was part of the fellowship of CHA holidays ‘we make new friends not only of men and women, but of books and music’.Footnote ¹⁵²

2.2 Boundaries and Limits

Another common thread across the SCR and CHA was that the communal activities and notions of fellowship were open to men and women together – an ethos that was not universal across outdoor recreation organisations at this time. The scouting movement had separate groups for girls (rosebuds/brownies and guides) and boys (cubs and scouts), and many climbing clubs did not accept female members until later in the twentieth century. For instance, the Manchester based Rucksack Club only admitted women members from 1990.Footnote ¹⁵³ Indeed, one of the distinctive characteristics of CHA and HF holidays was a notion of equal fellowship across gender and social standing, informed by a belief that ‘irrespective of class, education or worldly possessions, the deepest joys are to be found in human friendship and fellowship’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ As Leonard wrote to CHA members in 1910:

The annual handbooks of the SCR indicated that women were involved (albeit to a much lesser extent than men) in the running of the club and leading some of the club’s scheduled rambles in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, the exploits and characters of female members of the club were celebrated in the lyrics of some songs in their songbook:

However, there were still activities that were off-limits to women members. Women were asked not to take part in some of the club’s hardiest outings, including some Midnight Rambles and winter Revellers Rambles, and it was not until 1955 that the first formal women’s Revellers Ramble took place.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Whilst not mentioning singing specifically, the historian Melanie Tebbutt has suggested that the incorporation of poetry and literature within Ward’s ethos for the SCR spoke to a ‘need for emotional release more usually constrained by the conventions and expectations of contemporary manliness’ and an alternative, more complex, expression of masculinity.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Whilst rambling on the rugged hills and bleak moorlands of the Peak District was associated with more traditional ideas of masculinity, for Ward this was tempered by a very different manly expression of feeling through song and brotherly companionship with his fellow (male) ramblers, informed by Romanticism and the socialist writing of his friend Edward Carpenter. This combination of nature, song and manly companionship could be powerfully moving, as this extract from the 1916–17 SCR handbook, cited by Dave Sissons, Terry Howard and Roly Smith, illustrates. It was written by club member Harry Inman about walking with G. H. B Ward:

When writing about fellow-feeling, publications from both the CHA and SCR refer to this in masculine terms. For example, in a piece about ‘our coming of age ramble’, the author (The Wee Mon) described ‘the same old Clarionese spirit of brotherliness’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Similarly, in an article from Comradeship, T. A. Leonard described the CHA and HF as providing ‘simple fraternal holidays’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Whilst these possibly reflect writing styles of the time (where the masculine was taken to represent all people), there are further pieces that explore the expression of ideas of ‘manly’ and ‘gentlemanly’ ways of being in the context of behaviour in the countryside and at holiday centres. We will come back to this theme in Section 3.

Just as the wider activities of groups like the SCR sometimes reflected inequalities in the reach of fellow-feeling along lines of gender, their open-air singing practices and associated publications reflected a fellowship that was perhaps not universally welcoming. The selection of songs across the historical songbooks, for instance, suggests possibilities for both inclusion and exclusion. The CHA and HF songbooks included sections of hymns which may have been unfamiliar to those who weren’t of Christian faith. As already noted, the SCR songbook included many rewritten songs, referencing the exploits of members of the club itself. One can imagine these may have been experienced as cliquey and less than welcoming by new members. Some iterations of songbooks from the co-operative holiday movement included songs made popular through blackface minstrelsy. Although popular with some audiences at the time, we now understand these as perpetuating harmful stereotypes of blackness and they must be considered in the broader context of complex histories of the othering and marginalisation of people from global majority backgrounds within rural landscapes and outdoor recreation.Footnote ¹⁶²

There is also some evidence that songbooks (and the songs within them) were employed to promote aspirations for fellow-feeling beyond the groups they originally served. In contrast to the perhaps inward-looking and national focus of the community singing movement, some aspects of the singing practices of outdoor recreation groups served to extend fellow-feeling beyond national borders. CHA songbooks were requested (and in some cases supplied free-of-charge) by soldiers in military camps during the First World War.Footnote ¹⁶³ Even earlier, a 1912 issue of the CHA magazine Comradeship described how ‘demand for our songbook increases yearly’ and copies had been sent to a missionary-led School in Africa: ‘thus the circle of our influence widens’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In addition, song selection sometimes indicated international connections. Another outdoor recreation holiday organisation, International Tramping Tours, which T.A. Leonard was involved in forming in the 1930s, included numerous songs from other nations in their songbook, sometimes in languages other than English so that there was ‘no excuse for not joining in when our friends abroad are singing’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Whilst the SCR songbook did not include songs from other countries, articles within their handbook suggested they welcomed, and celebrated, ‘foreign’ members in a spirit of ‘international brotherhood’, including visitors from Egypt, India and Germany.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

2.3 Fellow-feeling with Nature

In the foreword to the SCR songbook, Ward described one purpose of the book as ‘the emulation of the birds who give praise to Nature by their full-throated, joyous song’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ This evoked a form of fellow-feeling with nature: with other-than-human actors and dimensions of the countryside. A similar comparison was made in the introduction to a scouting songbook: ‘Nature expresses itself in music and song. Scouts can follow Nature’s example.’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Both of these examples also emphasise how this fellow-feeling was brokered through an emotional connection and the expression of these emotions through song. Through singing people actively responded to and contributed to emotional, imaginative and sensory encounters with the other-than-human. As the historian Michael Guida has highlighted:

There was a sense that, if done in the right way and choosing the right songs, open-air singing complemented and was in harmony with the natural elements of these soundscapes. The example that opened this Element – describing evening singing around a campfire on a CHA holiday – illustrated this with the human voices portrayed as ‘fitting delightfully’ with ‘the whisper of the wind and the beck’s bright flowing chatter’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

The other-than-human is also represented in some of the lyrics of songs included in open-air songbooks. For instance, ‘The Clarion Ramblers’ Marching Song’ (with new words by H. H. Diver set to the tune of ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’) places the ramblers in northern moors, with attention to many natural aspects of this rural setting, including sounds. The song mentions heather, ‘mountain sheep’, grouse, cotton grass, rivers, and ‘where raging torrents roar’ and ‘where the birds’ sweet music trills’, and described how

There are less bespoke songs in Songs by the Way, but the selection of religious and folk songs often include references to rural and countryside environments, and in some cases, the sense of harmony between human and natural society. For instance, ‘In Derry Vale’, references ‘the singing river’ in the opening line, and ‘The Hunt is Up’ describes the response of nature to the sound of the hunting horns:

All of these give the sense of open-air singing as part of mingled rural soundscapes, although these examples indicate perceptions of the countryside as a largely unpopulated space for nature – (something we explore further in Section 3.1). The notion of singing as a point of connection between human and the other-than-human perhaps also connects with older traditions of singing amongst agricultural workers, as described by folklorist Steve Roud, which included milkmaids singing to cows to calm them and encourage milk yield and the chanting of bird-scaring rhymes.Footnote ¹⁷³

Along with fellow-feeling amongst the men and women who were members of outdoor recreation groups, and building a feeling of connection with nature generally, there were elements of fellowship through open-air singing which were specifically rooted in the rural landscapes that these groups knew and loved. It is these connections with place that we explore in the next section.

3.1 Sensing the ‘Countryside’ and the Rural

Open-air leisure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was often framed as a way of escaping the town or city: ‘Rambling is, to the rambler, a conscious escape from High streets to Hills, from Monotony to Moors, from Noise to Nature’ (emphasis in original).Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The countryside was defined in opposition to the urban and the industrial – offering clean air, space, tranquillity in noise and pace of life, and the potential for embodied connection with nature through healthy physical exercise. As cultural geographer David Matless has outlined, the idea of a ‘landscaped citizenship’ in the early twentieth century was defined in opposition to an idea of vulgar, anti-citizenship – epitomised by out-of-place urban behaviours – and rooted in an inherent ‘desire to control potentially disruptive bodily effects’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Numerous articles in the SCR handbooks from the early and mid-twentieth century included complaints about out-of-place town behaviours (and by association town people) in the countryside. Explicit in this is a contrast between the influences of the urban versus the rural on the moral character of individuals and its implications for wider society; spending time in the countryside and connecting with nature were portrayed as benefiting both physical and spiritual health, allowing people a more natural and authentic sense of self:Footnote ¹⁹²

There is also a sense of timelessness in this characterisation of the countryside, in which perceived ‘natural’ soundscapes played their part:

In reality, however, the twentieth-century English countryside was not exempt from the influence of modernity. It was a collection of working and lived-in landscapes, with soundscapes comprising entangled human and other-than-human dimensions. As Michael Guida reminds us, this included singing:

Histories of the perceptions of soundscapes in rural environments have received less scholarly study that those in urban settings, but the descriptions found in texts and oral histories provide some insights into these.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ A partial portrait of the complex soundscapes of the countryside between Sheffield and Manchester can be drawn from oral history accounts of living and working in the South Pennine moorlands in the mid and later twentieth century, collected as part of the Moor Memories project.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ These accounts illustrated how the moors were far from quiet: with various sounds contributed by farming, military training, industrial exploitation, the work of mountain rescue and ranger/warden teams, and game shooting. Each of these activities brought distinctive noises that formed part of the sensory experience of being in these landscapes.

During the Second World War, moorland access for leisure was limited because of military use of the moors for training. This brought with it a range of sonic elements including the sounds of the troops themselves, vehicles and heavy machinery such as tanks, and from target practice, often with live ammunition. They were also sites of bombing and plane crashes, which brought distinctive sounds (along with sights, smells and potentially upsetting encounters with casualties):

The sonic impact of military activities resounded long after the war ended; live munitions remained on the moors and contributed to soundscapes when detonated by bomb disposal teams or set off accidentally – as John Littlewood describes in relation to an incident during controlled burning.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The locations of unexploded shells and bombs were often noticed by hikers and workers in the landscape and their detonation could have dramatic effects:

As a working landscape, technologies of labour and transportation were also part of these soundscapes. For instance, Peak Park Rangers and Mountain Rescue Teams described using flare guns to communicate across distance in the landscape. Heavy industry such as quarrying and mining introduced industrial noises into the landscape. For example, John Littlewood described using gelignite (explosive) whilst working in a clay-mine as a young man.Footnote ²⁰¹ The mid-twentieth-century rise in popularity of motorcycles presented a new challenge not only in the potential for physical harm to both landscapes and other path-users but in terms of a sonic assault from ‘the racket of their engines’.Footnote ²⁰² In a piece on trial-motorcyclists in Derbyshire, Ward wrote, ‘we always like sport, but we love Peace better than War-noise on God’s good hills’.Footnote ²⁰³

Outdoor leisure itself brought new dimensions to countryside soundscapes. Post-war, and after the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was passed, the numbers of people going out into the countryside to walk swelled. The sound of these group rambles would have been immense; Guida cited an account from a South Shields MP suggesting there may have been as many as 800 people on Southern Railway rambles.Footnote ²⁰⁴ The impact of these crowds was not limited to moors and hillsides. Many people made their way into the countryside by public transport meaning that people congregated at the same time in cafes and around train and bus stops, and noise – including singing and rhythmic stamping of hobnailed walking boots – continued on buses and trains:Footnote ²⁰⁵

Whilst the numbers of people on rambles in the earlier twentieth century may not have been in the region of 800, photographs of SCR members in the landscape showed large group rambles (for instance, a photograph held by Sheffield City Archive shows eighty-one men and women on their thirtieth-anniversary ramble in 1930) and CHA holiday centres typically accommodated between fifty and seventy people.Footnote ²⁰⁷ These large groups would have significantly contributed to the sounds of the countryside when talking and singing on rambles.

In the early days of the Peak District National Park, Byelaws for behaviour on access land were issued, one of which related to the use of ‘transistor radios and noisy instruments’ and forbid people to ‘make of cause or suffer to be made any noise which is so loud and so continuous or repeated as to give reasonable cause for annoyance to other persons on access land’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ However, there was a subjective element in how these were interpreted and enforced in practice:

New technologies brought new sensorial dimensions to the landscape which were not universally welcomed and heightened tensions between different groups enjoying the countryside in different ways. Traditional instruments and singing may have been tolerated, but technologically amplified music was frowned upon and grouped with other forms of behaviour deemed to be anti-social: ‘Nice people who wouldn’t dream of leaving litter about or carving their names on trees can be dreadfully anti-social by assaulting us with transistor radios in the Centres and even on excursions!’Footnote ²¹⁰ Concerns around the impact of modern technologies on rural landscapes continued into the later twentieth century, with the CHA magazine noting that ‘Noise problems grow worse’ in 1980:

Here, the landscape sought out by ramblers is an idealised countryside: a tranquil place, sensorially free from all signs of contemporary (and especially urban or industrial) society.

3.2 Contested Ways of Being in the Countryside

These examples illustrate how, across the twentieth century, some sensorial dimensions have been welcomed and expected, whereas others were perceived as out of place, and in discord – rather than in harmony – with ideal or appropriate countryside soundscapes. Attempts to regulate or constrain singing (and other sounds) in the countryside can be seen as a way of shaping expected behaviour and appropriate ways of being in rural landscapes. As Guida noted, boisterous singing was tied up with conversations in the press, and amongst more traditional middle-class walking groups, around who were ‘true ramblers’ and what kind of behaviour was deemed appropriate to truly appreciate being in nature.Footnote ²¹² For instance, Ward made a strong distinction between ramblers and hikers, dedicating a short article to this topic in the 1951–52 SCR handbook in which he described the best use of the term ‘hiker’ ‘is to apply it to our now young parasites, hangers on or spongers’ and ‘the wilful damage-doers’.Footnote ²¹³ Elsewhere, he described the hiker as ‘little less than town nuisance wherever he goes’ and ‘almost as great a danger to general “Access to Mountains” as the medievally-minded moor-owner’.Footnote ²¹⁴ Here, the inappropriate behaviour of those who were outside the rambling fraternity were seen as not just disruptive but potentially having a negative impact on the aims of many outdoor recreation organisations in campaigning for greater access to the countryside. There is also a paternalistic overtone of desiring to shape and manage the behaviour of urban working-classes as a means of improvement for themselves and society as a whole, as previously mentioned in Section 2. Ward argued that people ‘lack education in the art of spending their leisure time’ and that ‘a rambler made was a man improved’ (see Figure 6).Footnote ²¹⁵

Figure 6

Cover of the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers Handbook 1925–26, featuring a photograph of a man standing atop a cairn with his fist held in the air. The tagline on the cover reads ‘A rambler made is a man improved’.

Credit: Sheffield Local Studies Library.

Within the scouting movement, singing was framed as part of the movement’s aim to ‘improve on the dullness and artificiality of modern life’ through providing scouts and guides the opportunity to experience and create beauty and develop the artistic part of their nature.Footnote ²¹⁶ One of Leonard’s drivers for founding the CHA was a perception that ‘people – more particularly those who worked in the Lancashire Mills – needed to learn how to spend their holidays’.Footnote ²¹⁷ Writing specifically about the CHA, but with a sentiment that can be applied to many of the outdoor recreation groups of this period, Snape has argued:

Elements of these behavioural codes would of course eventually be written down and targeted at recreational (and often urban) users of rural spaces by organisations such as the Ramblers Association, the Open Spaces Society, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, and consolidated in a national Country Code, launched in 1951.Footnote ²¹⁹ However, what we can see in groups such as the SCR and CHA is the translation of ideas of countryside citizenship at a smaller scale – within the specific communities of their groups.

The CHA aimed to offer an alternative to what Leonard perceived as the ‘demoralising influence’ of ‘inane and trivial’ holidays spent at seaside resorts like Blackpool, which were portrayed as unhealthily overcrowded, costly, and lacking ‘any rational idea of enjoyment’.Footnote ²²⁰ However, he did not want this to be ‘at the expense of bringing the Blackpool spirit and Blackpool noise into the countryside’.Footnote ²²¹ Similarly, Ward wrote that ‘good ramblers select a better place for their summer holidays’ than Blackpool, and also railed against ‘Butlinism’.Footnote ²²² Open-air singing played a role in these debates both in terms of the songs chosen and the way they were sung.

In December 1910, Leonard wrote in Comradeship about the rise of a level of exuberance amongst members which was, for him at least, at odds with the ethos of the CHA and responsible ways of being in the countryside. The ensuing debate illustrated the challenges in striking a balance between a desirable level of enthusiasm for collective singing and undesirable ‘rowdiness’. The link to ideas of appropriate citizenship here was made explicit as he described the ‘singing and rocketting’ at railway stations as ‘unmannerly’ and complained of ‘the uncontrolled way we let ourselves go on mountain tops and other quiet sanctuaries of natural beauty, to our own loss and to the unspeakable annoyance of strangers who may be there’. He saw this as a new development in the movement:

This can be read as an early example of concerns around bringing undesirable elements of urban-life into rural settings, which were epitomised in debates around the hiking craze of the 1920s and 1930s and were seen to detract from the benefits and freedoms that rational and moral enjoyment through rambling could bring.Footnote ²²⁴ The modern songs chosen and the rowdy way in which they were sung reflected ways of being in the landscape perceived by some members of rambling groups as inappropriate. For instance, the historian Ben Anderson has cited extracts from 1931 Manchester Ramblers’ Federation’s Rambler’s Handbook, in which Edwin Royce complained of hikers ‘hanging in ape-like festoons on (apparently) precipitous crags moaning – with ukelele distractions – the latest banality in the approved whining tenor style’.Footnote ²²⁵ The language used and the characterisation of inappropriate behaviour as animalistic here underlines the portrayal as this kind of behaviour as uncivilised. Boddice and Smith have also highlighted this, writing about Smithfield Market in the nineteenth century, as a ‘moral re-framing’ of behaviour set in the context of ideas of what constitutes a civilised society, which extended to a desire to control the sensory elements of behaviour ‘including the production of smells, sounds and sights, in public and commercial spaces’.Footnote ²²⁶ In our context, the public space is the rural leisure landscape of the hillside, path and trail.

We can also see, in these examples, the employment of sound, including singing, as a way to distinguish between ramblers (as a specific form of open-air enthusiast and citizen) and other visitors from towns. Inappropriate behaviour is depicted as detrimental to all involved: to the ‘true’ ramblers who may be incorrectly associated with their rowdy counterparts, to the people who live and work in the countryside and to the misbehaving persons themselves who miss out on the potential benefits of being in the open air. The urban-ness of these visitors is characterised as preventing them from perceiving and appreciating sensory aspects of the rural environment: ‘Their ears are closed to the numerous calls borne across the country air and their eyes see but very little of the country they traverse, simply because, mentally, they have not left the town at all.’Footnote ²²⁷

It is no surprise that the instrument brought along by these rowdier visitors (and criticised in ramblers’ publications) is the ukulele – emblematic of the music hall and cinematic entertainments of the town. Again, we see here the positioning of behaviour and music associated with urban life as out of place and inappropriate within the open-air movement. This is set in stark contrast to the ‘unobtrusive’ and ‘thoughtful’ rambler who ‘adjusts himself as far as possible to the countryman’s world … the idea of carrying the noisy atmosphere of the town into country places is repugnant to him’.Footnote ²²⁸ Even subtle signs of urban backgrounds such as the ‘nasal twang’ when singing, which was observed as a ‘habit, especially with Town scouts’, were to be gently mocked and corrected by leaders within the scouting movement.Footnote ²²⁹

However, within the co-operative holiday movement at least, deciding at which point open-air singing went from being enthusiastic to inappropriate was neither straightforward nor an objective matter. In December 1912, a CHA member wrote in defence of ‘the hilarity and breeziness that should be the possession of noble-minded youth’ – which was not to be confused with ‘uncontrolled rowdyism’ – and admonished the association for being too restrictive and authoritarian in its expectations of ways of being in the countryside:

For this member, singing as part of outdoor recreation was one of the few ways he could be himself and enjoy a level of freedom and personal autonomy not experienced in his urban, working life:

It is possible that open-air singing provided a valued outlet for expression of both self and emotions for these young people. Certainly ‘breaking into song may be a sign of emotion’.Footnote ²³² As Steven Graham asked, ‘what is a tramping day if it does not liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky’.Footnote ²³³ Feld has noted that sensory experiences in the present can evoke emotions and recall past experiences and through this connection of ‘ear and heart’ with a ‘lost repertoire of music’ a sense of freedom is regained.Footnote ²³⁴ In a similar vein, Steven Graham reflected that songs which came to mind and voice whilst walking were often ‘something remembered from childhood and school days’:

Could the act of collective, enthusiastic singing, alongside strenuous rambles, be seen as a way of channelling the exuberant energy of youth in what was deemed to be healthy and acceptable ways as well as reconnecting with the innocent freedom of childhood? Certainly, J. L. Paton suggested it was ‘the fun there is in altogetherness’ that was at the heart of the founding of the CHA, and that this fun could be ‘noisy’, ‘the explosive sort’.Footnote ²³⁶ Walford-Davies, too, suggested that singing could also be an outlet and balm for the anxieties of a generation during wartime: ‘a good songbook is like a bosom friend because it responds to many phases of ourselves, and gives timely relief to the varied feelings it expresses’ and ‘there was never a time when song was more needed than today’.Footnote ²³⁷

As we have seen, the experience of escape and freedom from the rigours of industrial and urban working lives were an important part of the ethos of outdoor recreation groups at this time. However, there were limits counselled on the appropriate expression of this freedom. Just as there were respectable expectations of the behaviour of mixed groups of men and women on CHA holidays, which frowned upon ‘familiarities’ such as rambling with linked arms or resting one’s head in another’s lap – ‘of which ashamed C.H.A. friends (real jolly holiday folk of the right sort) occasionally tell!’ – so were there attempts to constrain and shape the way people expressed themselves through song.Footnote ²³⁸ As the author of another letter in Comradeship in 1912 highlighted ‘shouting of songs on a mountain top is a natural expression of elation to one group, it absolutely spoils the enjoyment of another’.Footnote ²³⁹ One way that this was addressed was through guidance around how to approach group singing. The combined CHA and HF songbook, Songs of Faith, Nature and Fellowship, gave detailed seven-point instructions around how best to learn and sing new songs, with point four advising ‘don’t be afraid of trying the slower and quieter songs. These form a pleasant relief from the “hullabaloo” style’.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Similarly, advice for open-air singing within the scouting movement cautioned that ‘shouting must be absolutely taboo, even in jolly choruses’.Footnote ²⁴¹

Further comments by Leonard in the pages of Comradeship highlighted tensions between ‘the rollicking good humour and high spirit of our Guest Houses, which is the natural outcome of healthy exercise, stimulating companionship, an abundance of fresh air and sunshine’ (which was welcomed) and a minority of guests who indulged ‘in midnight parades with singing and accessories, which are not always, we fear, spontaneous outbursts of fun, but a sort of hollow and objectionable ritual’.Footnote ²⁴² For the CHA these behaviours were enough to ban some offenders from holiday centres. These letters clearly speak to a tension within the movement, which itself reflected wider conflict between different groups enjoying the countryside in different ways, and for whom singing was part of the outward expression of identity and emotion. Returning to notions of fellow-feeling discussed in section two, this was not only a process of negotiating ways of being in the countryside but of challenging the norms within the community of the CHA itself, and perhaps of tension between different ‘generations of feeling’ within the emotional community of the co-operative holiday movement.Footnote ²⁴³ As Edith Turner has noted:

Although Ward also wrote against the rowdy behaviour of some Peak District visitors, he tended to define this in terms of physical violence and vandalism.Footnote ²⁴⁵ In his foreword for the SCR songbook, he appears to take a more inclusive approach to enthusiastic singing outdoors: ‘let us raise our voices that their echoes may resound from Pendle Hill to Kinderscout’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ He did, however, complain about loud singing of ‘dance songs’ and playing of ‘instruments’ on the platforms of railway stations in rural locations, arguing this represented ‘silliness in public places’.Footnote ²⁴⁷

In the context of these debates, the publication of appropriate songs to sing in the countryside through the various songbooks from outdoor recreation groups could be seen as another way of shaping and regulating ways of being in the landscape. For instance, Sarah Mills has noted that many of the songs included in the Woodcraft folk’s songbooks ‘were incredibly self-affirming and drew most powerfully on distinctions between idealised rural landscapes and the (im)moral landscape of the city’.Footnote ²⁴⁸ As such, they were part socialisation and articulation of the model of citizenship that young people within the movement were encouraged to embody. Certainly, Ward saw that the socialisation of youth through rambling clubs was a means to address the issue of ‘vandalism in paradise’.Footnote ²⁴⁹ With regard to rowdyism, he urged ‘action to prevent thoughtless behaviour in the countryside rather than keeping people out’ and highlighted the role of singing in this too: ‘Let us not have one rambling club but fifty, and a song on every journey and light hearts to the end.’Footnote ²⁵⁰ Similarly, Anderson has described how the Manchester Ramblers’ Federation sought to ‘persuade rather than force “hikers” into becoming “ramblers”’ through education (signage, handbooks and talks) and guided experience (from volunteer Warden-Guides in the landscape).Footnote ²⁵¹

In shaping townsfolk into the rambling model of moral outdoor citizenship, these groups aimed to influence people’s character and ways of being beyond the time they spent in rural environments, with the implication that they would take this behaviour back into their lives in urban centres. In Ward’s song ‘A Mountain Thought’ he wrote:

3.3 Place Connections and Connectedness

It is not just singing in rural landscapes that builds meanings of and connections with place but the type and lyrics of songs play a role here too. The HF introduced a 1929 edition of Songs by the Way with the following advice:

Ward outlined in the foreword to the SCR songbook how he favoured English folk songs as they had ‘the very breath of the countryside in its jingling rhymes’.Footnote ²⁵⁴ The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of two entangled movements one focused on outdoor recreation and access to the countryside led by a range of local and national groups, the other a revival of interest in folk-song led by high profile collectors such as Cecil Sharp.Footnote ²⁵⁵ For some these reflected contemporary Romantic and anti-modernity discourses that positioned the rural as central to English identity and heritage.Footnote ²⁵⁶ Commenting on the proliferation of organisations set up in the late nineteenth century to preserve and protect aspects of nature, heritage and landscape, Charles Frake has noted:

Thus singing folk songs whilst in the landscape could be seen as one way people connected with a perceived heritage of the countryside, and a nostalgia for an imagined ideal of English rural life. In this way the connectedness is with an ideal, rather than real, place. It is a connection with an idea of the countryside – a perhaps very white, middle-class, male (and anti-modernity) perspective – rather than an engagement with the countryside as it actually was at the time: as a living, working and in many ways modern and industrialised landscape.

We can also see a tailoring of songs to the local landscapes known to outdoor recreation groups. For example, many of the parodies and re-written club songs from groups such as the SCR and Rucksack Club referenced local places frequented by ramblers and climbers. In the SCR songbook there are songs describing the joys of being on moorlands in all weathers, and what appears to have been the club’s signature song ‘Land of Moor and Heather’ is a rewrite of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, with a chorus that celebrates a love for ‘Derbyshire the free!’ Other songs mention specific places (villages, public houses and landscape features) within Derbyshire and the local countryside. These would have been well-known to regular ramblers within the group. Sometimes, the places mentioned were further afield (such as Helvellyn and Crib Goch) but still connected to group experiences of these places, for example, through recalling club holidays and rambles in the Lake District and North Wales respectively. Even in the songbooks of nationally focused organisations, there are songs dedicated to specific places (e.g. ‘Richmond Park’ and ‘The South Country’ in the scouting movement’s songbook).Footnote ²⁵⁸ We can imagine that these songs enabled those that had rambled in these landscapes to express and cement their personal and group connection with these places. For those that had not experienced these places directly, the songs offered a way of knowing them set in the context of the group community and culture.

In SCR songs the home-grown lyrics don’t just express a love for and connection with the local moorlands, but also have a political angle. Many bemoan the lack of access to these landscapes, encourage trespass and point out the injustices of the current state of land ownership. They look to a future where through determined and collective action the northern moorlands are opened up for free and easy access for people from local urban centres. For instance, ‘We’re Twenty-One Today’, with new words written by W. H. Whitney, included the lines:

Published more than two decades before the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, one can imagine how evocative it may have been to sing these songs on SCR rambles along the limited public footpaths, in full view of open moorland where there was, as-yet, little public access. Singing has often been part of collective place-based activism associated with historical campaigns for greater public access to the countryside. For instance, socialist songs were sung on both the Kinder and Abbey Brook trespasses in 1932.Footnote ²⁶⁰

In this section we have explored how singing in rural landscape was both a way of developing and expressing the meaning that these places held for the people who spent time within them. We have also seen how singing was part of articulating and shaping expectations of appropriate ways of being in the countryside, often set in contrast with modern urban life. However, where, how and what people sung could also challenge these, sometimes restrictive, expectations and be a provocative act – expressing strong emotions, desires for freedom and political aspirations.

Until now we have focused mainly on the historical material, where some aspects of the meaning and emotions form personal experience of communal singing in the open-air may not be readily accessible from analysis of archival sources. In the next section, we bring our research into the present day by discussing the resonances and dissonances with the past via present-day interview data collected using go-along methods and looking forward to how this approach can open up research areas for other scholars and ask wider questions about the ways in which we relate to places using sound and the body.

4.1 ‘Greater than the Sum of Its Parts’

Our case study of present-day open-air singing is drawn from a go-along interview with a singing group (Lakeland Voice) who incorporate walking in suburban and rural landscapes within their practice in the summer months of June and July, as well as singing and walking trips away.Footnote ²⁷⁰ Their singing walks typically took place in the evening, covered about four miles, and included several stops to sing along the way (see Figure 7). Routes were chosen with a number of qualities in mind: the aesthetics, accessibility and suitability of places to sing, and centred on a similar area to our historic groups: the north west of England. With their consent, one of us (Flint) joined the group on one of their scheduled singing walks in July 2023, to experience firsthand what it is like to sing and walk together in the landscape and to speak with members to learn about their experiences.Footnote ²⁷¹

Figure 7

Photograph of members of the Lakeland Voice choir walking.

Credit: Abbi Flint.

Below, we explore whether and how these contemporary experiences resonate with historic material, and how these offer an alternative lens through which to enrich our understanding of open-air singing in relation to our three core themes of the body, fellow-feeling, and place.

4.1.1 The Body

The choir started their singing walk with warm-up exercises for both bodies and voices, and the choir leader articulated how singing and walking/being outdoors were seen as complementary, embodied activities:

The two sort of complement each other … if I’m with some friends we’ll stop and we’ll sing – informally. Raising spirits you see … the two complement each other very nicely – the singing lifts your spirits and the walking opens your lungs up, and engages the body in the singing.

(Choir leader).

This quote also picks up on the connection between sociality, singing and emotional feeling, in particular, happiness. The choir leader went on to illustrate the entangled nature of emotions and singing and the difficulty in pinpointing whether one is ‘singing because you are happy or are you happy because you are singing’. This was framed as connecting with longer traditions of singing outdoors, particularly associated with physically demanding work (e.g. sailors); ‘partly so that they could do fairly boring repetitive work in time but also so that it could lift their spirits in what would otherwise be a probably very unpleasant life’.

In terms of a physical practice, the choir generally stopped walking to sing, but at a couple of points they combined the two. For example, they sang a song about ‘swinging along the open road’ whilst walking along. There were also connections with notions of resonance, particularly in relation to the physical context of the environment, and the impact this has on the embodied and emotional experience of singing. For instance, noting the different resonances and feelings evoked from singing to an open sky or under cover:

I think it sometimes can be quite hard when we’re singing out in the open like tonight because your voice disappears so you can’t as easily hear the other parts. You need to do that to make sure you’re harmonising in the same tune … erm … so it can be, you know, you can easily slip, shall we say … so, to have an enclosed area is more successful. So, like under a tree, you know, something like that is more successful.

(Choir participant)

Singing in the ruins of buildings and in caves had provided memorable and favourite places to sing, described as ‘magical’ and ‘special’. One participant recalled the distinctive experience and interplay with the other-than-human when singing in a cave (see Figure 8):

Because of the acoustics … You don’t have to get it right for it to sound very nice [laughter] and when you stop singing you’ve still got the sound, obviously reverberates for a while, and then you hear the drip drip drip of the water from the cave.

(Choir participant)

As a walking choir the group have had to negotiate encountering livestock, tricky paths in low light or wintry weather, and issues around accessibility and individual mobility. We encountered two stiles which prompted conversation about access difficulties on the singing walk: one a narrow squeeze stile, another a series of steps built into a tall stone wall with no handrail. At another point in the walk, a section of path had slipped into the river requiring a steep step-around. At all these points members of the choir stopped to help one another, offering suggestions of alternative routes, a steadying hand or to hold walking poles whilst people negotiated obstacles. Often accompanied by warmth and humour, these instances reflected the sense of friendship, community and embodied care for one another. One participant spoke of how this sense of care meant she had ‘done much more than I thought I could … Or I’ve … perhaps something I wouldn’t have done. They’re very supportive’.

Figure 8

Photograph of Lakeland Voice singing in Rydal Cave in Ambleside.

Credit: Alan Cleaver.

4.2 Reflections and Resonances

The relationship between walking and singing is very different in our contemporary case study compared with our historical groups. Whereas the SCR, CHA and HF were outdoor recreational groups who drew singing into their activities, the walking choir began as an indoor choir, and incorporated walking into their practice after the choir leader experienced ‘a choir singing outside the mountain refuge singing, singing to the night as the moon was rising’ on an overseas walking holiday. However, there are parallels here with Leonard’s inspiration for singing on CHA rambles which, as Douglas Hope described, were influenced by his own experiences of people singing whilst rambling when he spent time in Germany.Footnote ²⁷² The choir leader also connected the choir’s practice with historical traditions of singing outdoors in both leisure and work, including by sailors and ramblers.

This Element has focused on the interplay between body, feelings and place when singing in the open air. In contrast to the archival material, the exploration of a contemporary walking choir, in situ through a go-along interview, enabled us to probe more deeply into the individual as well as the collective experience of group singing, and the complex motivations, emotions and aspects of self and memories these involve. Through this we can see common threads across historical and present-day experiences in terms of the capacity for collective, open-air singing to inspire fellow-feeling and community, and that singing outdoors can forge memorable connections with place. Although the composition of co-created soundscapes in the past and present were very different, we also get a sense that in each there are natural elements which are welcomed and in harmony with group singing (e.g. bird song and the sound of rivers), and elements more associated with town and industry which are perceived less positively (such as the sound of traffic and trains in the present, and the sound of transistor radios and motorbikes in the past). Reflecting on insights from the go-along interview also prompts questions for potential future studies. For instance, how were decisions about what and where to sing made by outdoor groups in the past? What was the balance between singing whilst moving and when stopped in the landscape? And, how might the notion of ‘care’ be a fruitful lens for exploring connections between fellow-feeling amongst members of groups and the environments they spent time in and how this linked to place-connectedness?

In this Element, we have focused on open-air singing in the context of outdoor leisure on foot, but the thematic focus on the body, senses, feelings and place can apply to a wide range of other open-air singing contexts. As part of the In All Our Footsteps project we ran two public engagement events sharing our research into open-air singing in the early twentieth century, and audience members generously shared their own experiences of singing. Their experiences spoke to a huge diversity of group and individual practices which included singing outdoors on boats and quaysides, whilst cycling, on political marches, whilst camping, at festivals, in voluntary working groups, in parks and on allotments. Clearly, this is a practice that resonates in the present and still has value and meaning for people today and there is much scope for further study of these varied open-air singing contexts.

4.3 Conclusion

Our discussion of the connections between singing and place, and ideas of appropriate behaviours and ways of being in the countryside, illustrates the importance of understanding the social and cultural context of emotional and sensory histories. As Coates eloquently writes, ‘noise is to sound what stench is to smell (and what weed is to plant)-something dissonant, unwanted, out of place, and invasive. But notions of noise, sound, and silence-like any other cultural phenomena-are invariably historically contingent, varying according to time, place, and human constituency’.Footnote ²⁷³ Drawing together experiences and accounts of collective outdoor singing from the archive and the present day, we hope to have illustrated the complex, plural and sometimes contradictory ways that singing, sociality, wellbeing and landscape intersect. Singing outdoors can be an expression of connection with one another, with nature and the other-than-human, with memory and identity, and with senses of wellbeing and spirituality. It can also be a political and provocative act; it can serve to build fellow-feeling and include or marginalise and exclude. It can be a free expression of feeling and desire, or a way to shape and channel energy and emotions within normative conceptions of the countryside and outdoor leisure. By understanding the diverse ways in which the human voice, through song, has engaged with being in landscape in the past, we open up potential for more inclusive and multi-sensory approaches to landscape access and engagement in the future.