On walking
If you were to ask me "Why do you go walking?" I might reply "It's good exercise" or "I don't drive." Words I have used to describe walking - commute, exercise, travel, explore, freedom, challenge, escape, holiday, view and countryside - hint at an explanation. Individually these experiences accumulate to form a lasting impression that changes or refines my opinion about many subjects, and this is a curious side-effect of distance walking that draws me back to contemplate walks long after the fact.
To put it another way, walking is a series of revelations strung together in a long unbroken line. Components such as fitness, endurance and navigation lead the walker along this path but they are not the end, they are a means.
I like distance walking because of its (sometimes brutal) honesty. It feels good to be eroded by the land and by the weather, and by the rocks and trails I walk on. My layers are peeled away. Stripped back. Sheared off by force, voluntarily or otherwise. Pretensions are sanded down to the raw under-tissues of honest reflection. Questions are laid bare to their simplest forms: stop or go? Sit or fall? Can, or can't? Yes or no? Steps are gateways. They open doors. They turn on lights that flicker upon new angles of understanding. Endless new perceptions and perspectives are revealed.
There is a freedom in movement that invites contemplation. This offers an escape for body and mind although escape from what and to what are entirely relative. Perhaps focus is a better word (or escape to focus?). There is a physical relief derived from motion, a satisfaction in rhythm, comfort from repetition, a release through the simplicity of the act of plodding along.
Walker Richard Long described it thus: "I actually enjoy camping and being on my own and the whole business of lighting fires, or choosing a camp site or sleeping on the ground. I always get my best sleep on some stony patch somewhere. I love the whole ritual and rhythm, the simple rhythm of being on a walk, like getting up with the sun and making breakfast and walking all day and being very tired in a very physical simple way. Apart from anything else it’s just a very good way to live life." (Quoted in Tufnell 2007, p.63.)
Some walkers like Richard Long consider walking as art, a visual language. The physical remains of walking were first noticed (by me) in a working windmill where the millers carried sacks of flour up and down wooden stairs and had through generations worn the wood away into the u-shapes of feet. This is often seen on towpaths where the continuous action of boots has cleaned and polished protruding nubs of rock and tree root. The point of impact between boot and earth is the brush marking the canvas. Physical force is the artist. The surface of the earth is the art, forever in motion, perpetually changing. See this in the shiny smoothness of a gate where many hands have worn and polished the surface of the metal. See this in game trails laid down by animals in a forest, or where they have arched through hedges or smoothed against trees. Richard Long famously walked 33 miles a day for 33 days from The Lizard to Dunnet Head, leaving a stone by the wayside every day in a long unbroken line. In an interview he reminded us that those stones are still there 20 years later, and are only considered to be art because he mentioned that they exist although none of us will ever find them. These impressions might not be pretty but they make me think - there's a lot going on.
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| Calleva |
After walking all day through fields of flint, it's easily possible to muse at the Roman ruins of Calleva and imagine what has gone before, to see the artist's impression of a restructured ancient fortification on an information board and think "Gosh, I wish I'd seen that." The walls of the town are made from the same flint that litters the fields for miles around. After the fort was abandoned, pieces were pulled out of it and re-purposed into houses and a nearby church. What's left are the crumbling walls and the outline of the foundations and these are steadily being worn away into the ground until they are a scar in the landscape that will slowly heal. Before the fort was built, the flint lay in a calcified bedrock underneath the surface of the earth which was slowly broken up by the slow actions of water and continental movement. Before that, the flint was formed by the layering of sedimentary particles settling on the bottom of a sea which covered the land. Before that, the sea was land, the land was sea, and so it went on until the formation of the earth, and before that, the creation of the solar system, all the way back to the beginning of all matter. The ruin of the Roman wall is the latest in a series of rearrangements, a stage in a cycle that's stringing out through the depthless space of time, arranging and being rearranged exponentially with no certain purpose or end point in sight. There is something circular and wondrous in that view, in that expression of matter spinning on and on through the ages, reinventing itself and being reinvented: matter, solar system, planet, land, sea, flint, town, ruin, matter.
To walk across a county or a country is to shape something and to be shaped by it. It is to be reminded that one is a living part of a greater whole where the smallest observable details are as profound as the fathomless dimensions of space. To notice the blue sheen on a magpie's wing and the iridescent green of its tail for the first time was as significant as the sunrise. Walking is a tool that enables me to focus on these matters. There is no purpose to it, other than the joy of being alive, of being in the moment as Richard Long called it, or, as Mike Stroud put it, mind travelling, or again what Mark Moxon called the hiker's high, which are distractions from the drawn out burn of a long hard day on the trail. Walking enables these incredibly profound moments; that's one of the reasons why I keep at it. And then I trip on a root and shake myself back into the present: I'm by a river, or on a skinny trail in the middle of nowhere in particular, there's six miles to go and I'm tired and worn, but I've managed the worst of it, I'm over the hump, and in a couple of hours there will be a warm shower, a cold beer and a hot meal, a comfy chair and a comfy bed, and the warm glow of the embers of the day still burning happily in my mind as I drift off to sleep with the echoes of the trail thudding on my feet. That's the rose-tinted view. Sometimes there won't be any cold beer, or a comfy chair, or any sleep. Things will hurt. But so be it.
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