The Hidden Ways think nothing of walking seven or eight miles or more to a country dance in a village hall, and then walking seven or eight miles home afterwards. There was no alternative. Now, we sit and stare blankly out of a car windscreen or train window, and we see the countryside rush past as little more than the space between destinations. We are missing a great deal. Certainly, important moments in Scotland’s history happened in (very small) towns such as Edinburgh, St Andrews and Stirling. But in Walter Scott’s excellent phrase, that tended to be the big bow-wow stuff. Almost all of us come from generations of ordinary people who worked the land, and to understand something of their lives we should find a pair of boots and a map, and try to walk where they walked. The Hidden Ways began as a highly personal journey back into the twilight of the past, but I quickly realised that what I was doing might have a wider application, be a good way of connecting with the experience of a hundred generations of Scots, going back 2,000 or 3,000 years, far back into the darkness of the deep past, beyond the reach of genealogy or written records of any kind. Many modern roads overlie much older ways, tracks where people walked from where they lived to towns or villages, or between them. It occurred to me that if the faded map of roads no longer travelled in Scotland could be made vivid once more, then that would allow many people to walk beside the ghosts of an immense past, beside their people. And so work began, and the first steps were taken. Some of them turned out to be very surprising.
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31/01/2018 11:38