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A B S T R A C T. This article explores how walking in a particular type of terrain, the moorland area of north Derbyshire known as the Dark Peak, contributed to a localized sense of place which was framed by regional and national discourses and also testified to broader social and cultural uncertainties strongly shaped by gender and class. The punishing physical values of such wild upland areas offered challenges of stoicism, hardiness and endurance which were central to late-nineteenth century ideals of manliness, as masculinity was increasingly defined by forms of sporting activity which encouraged character-building battles against nature. Sensibility is not readily associated with this robust discourse of adventure. The 'wild ' outdoors, so easily seen as an extension of the public, masculine world was, however, of far greater complexity. More than a focus for physical activity and trespass 'battles ', it was a place where emotion and the elating intimacy of open space gave expression to needs which also intimate the masculine anxieties of the era.A substantial literature has emerged in recent decades on the relationship between landscape and national identity. 1 David Matless and Catherine Brace, for example, have highlighted the centrality of landscape and notions of particular southern countryside, like the Cotswolds, to ideas about England and Englishness. 2 The idea of the rural as the bedrock of Englishness, particularly Manchester Metropolitan University, Geofffrey Manton Building, Manchester M15 6LL. m.

In 1938, the Reverend Digby Bliss Kittermaster, who became chaplain at Rochester Borstal after retiring as a housemaster at Harrow public school, started a diary in which he recorded everyday interactions with inmates and staff. The reputation of the borstal system was at its height in the 1930s owing to Alexander Paterson's reforms, based on the structures and character-building ethos of British public schools. Young people's voices were rarely heard in this progressive discourse of borstal reform and Kittermaster is unusual for articulating them, recording what he heard, teasing out the contradictions of Paterson's reforming aspirations and the reality of humiliation and intimidation that borstal boys often experienced. Kittermaster's public school background made him well placed to question the rhetoric of the public school reform model. His complex personal perspective suggests how humane emphasis on individual potential was subverted at Rochester by coercive structures of traditional prison improvement. Kittermaster's growing frustration at his own powerlessness supports a more nuanced interpretation of how the borstal system has usually been depicted in the Paterson era of reform, especially in relation to damaging mental and emotional costs to inmates and staff, which have been largely neglected in the scholarship of borstal in the 1930s.

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