Nan Shepherd, in her slender masterpiece The Living Mountain (written in the 1940s and first published in 1977) described how she came to know the Cairngorm massif on foot, following its ridge lines and deer tracks for years until she found herself walking not “up” but “into” the hills. Walking was essential to her method; bodily sensation enabled highly specific kinds of knowledge and vision, and encouraged an openness of encounter and an immediacy of experience. “My eyes,” wrote Shepherd beautifully and simply, “were in my feet.” The walking artist Richard Long – who once walked a shattering 33 miles a day for 33 days, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, creating an artwork nearly 1,100 miles long, with the landscape his medium and his feet the incising pen-nib, pencil-lead or brush-tip – signs off his letters with a red-ink Chinese-style stamp that shows the soles of two feet, each of which has an open eye embedded in its centre. Many of these artists have also been inspired by the sense that time is experienced differently while walking old paths and tracks: that it might fold or pleat in strange ways, bringing discontinuous moments into contact, and creating historical correspondences that survive as territorial imperatives, ghostly multiple exposures or spectral voices. Walking, in this tradition, becomes an act of archaeology or of séance. Edward Thomas wrote in his poem Aspens of hearing, at the cross-roads of a path, the “clink, the hum, the roar… the whisper” of a vanished village. In Thomas Hardy’s novels, stretches of a path can carry memories of a person, as a person might of a path. The English downlands were, to John Masefield, “thronged by souls unseen / Who knew the interest in me, and were keen / That man alive should understand man dead.” One February afternoon, I received a phone call from a friend, telling me that a set of Mesolithic footprints had been discovered on the intertidal mudflats at Formby Point near Liverpool. I caught a train to Formby, and arrived in time to walk the length of the footprint trail. That walk, no more than 30 yards and two minutes long, was the most extraordinary I have ever made. The prints had been left by a man and a woman, who some 5,000 summers previously had been strolling side by side, northwards along the foreshore at around four miles per hour. Their tracks had been pressed into the silt, baked hard by the sun, and then preserved for five millennia by the gradual deposition of subsequent layers of mud and sand. They had been exposed by the scouring action of a strong tide two days before I saw them, and a day later they had vanished, erased by the waves. Walking alongside the tracks, I also passed the slots of red deer and roe deer, the glyphs of cranes, and a gaggle of smaller human prints: children, mud-larking while their parents foraged, centuries before the first Egyptian pyramid was built. The uncanniness of the experience was not one of time-travel (a sudden whisking back to the Mesolithic) but rather an eerie feeling of co-presence between the ancient and the current. My research had begun in Cambridge, and it brought me back to the city in unexpected ways. In the Hereford Library archives, in a ribboned bundle of papers fetched from an iron-doored strongroom, I found a map from the 1930s, hand-drawn in red and black ink on sheets of tracing paper, and showing the supposed existences of an ancient ley line running from Avebury in Wiltshire to Midsummer Common in Cambridge. The map was the work of a member of the Old Straight Track Club, an organisation founded by the intriguingly lunatic Alfred Watkins in the 1920s (Watkins later authored a littleknown 60-page book on the Archaic Tracks of Cambridge, which explained how to hunt leys in and around the city). Eventually, too, I returned also to the Icknield Way and to Edward Thomas. The poet imagined himself in topographical terms. Landscape gave form to his melancholy and his hopes. Paths connected real places for him, but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses – between the conceptual, the ghostly and the personal – occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. Walking was to Thomas a means of personal
myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them. I realised that to write adequately about Thomas, I needed to approach him not biographically but, as it were, bio-geographically: to re-tell his life and thought through and in terms of the landscapes by which he understood himself, and also to re-walk the paths he had followed. “The hill road wet with rain,” he wrote finely in a late poem, “In the sun would not gleam / Like a winding stream / If we trod it not again.” Thomas is undergoing a revival at present. He has been the subject of an excellent recent biography by Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France. Oxford University Press is issuing his selected prose in six vast and meticulously edited volumes. This coming winter, Richard Eyre will direct at the Almeida in London a play about Thomas’s friendship with the American poet Robert Frost, which developed while the two men were “talks-walking” (Frost’s phrase) together in the Gloucestershire countryside. Thomas always was modern before his time. Now, as we prepare to fight the Great War over again in memory, he and others like him have things of value to tell us about how we imagine our relationships with landscape and nature, how paths run through people as well as through places, and the surprising worth of the ways we walk.
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton) is published this month.
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