The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

To track these tracks, to leave your own prints beside them, is to sense nothing so simple as time travel, a sudden whisking back to the Mesolithic. No, the uncanniness of the experience involves a feeling of co-presence: the prehistoric and the present matching up such that it is unclear who walks in whose tracks. It’s this combination of intimacy and remoteness that gives these trails their unsettling power. They are among the earliest texts, from a period of history devoid of recorded narrative. Following them, we are reading one of the earliest stories, told not in print but in footprint.

There are two intertwined histories of modern wayfaring. One involves the wilful wanderer, the Borrovian or Whitmanesque walker, out for the romance of the way. The other – a shadow history, darker and harder to see – involves the tramps, the hobos, the vagrants, the dispossessed, the fugitives, the harmed and the jobless, bodging life together as they ‘padded’ it down the roads. Ten miles a day was the statutory lot of the ‘padder’; ten miles a day would eat up the ground.

Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone.

Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone.

Ravilious ‘always seemed to be slightly somewhere else, as if he lived a private life which did not completely coincide with material existence’.

‘There’s a Sanskrit word, darshan,’ Jon said as we gazed up at Konka. ‘It suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth; with a physical manifestation of the holy.’ I hadn’t known the word, but I was glad to have learnt it. Darshan seemed a good alternative to the wow! that I usually emitted on seeing a striking mountain.

Jon’s heroes are the plant-hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward, the poet Gary Snyder and the legendary field biologist George B. Schaller, with whom Jon had become friends.

he has made scores of what ecologists call ‘foot transects’: data-gathering treks, which in Jon’s case sometimes lasted months. Foot transects make possible an otherwise unattainable acquaintance with a region: the walker records and locates what he or she sees – species, scat, scrapes, weather, erosion – and the accidental encounters born of the transect’s line are part of its virtue as a method.

As I watch [the world],’ wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles.’

poetry: Antonio Machado’s ‘No hay camino, se hace camino al andar’ – ‘there is no road, the road is made by walking’.

‘Wander’ comes close, with its word-shadow of ‘wonder’, as does the Scots word ‘stravaig’, meaning to ramble without set goals or destination, but best of all perhaps is ‘saunter’, from the French sans terre, which is a contraction of à la sainte terre, meaning ‘to the sacred place’; i.e. ‘a walking pilgrimage’. Saunter and sarha both have surface connotations of aimlessness, and smuggled connotations of the spiritual.

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess. Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest, warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance.

important work is her least known – an eighty-page prose meditation

Babies – from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space – have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.

Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.

told a story about Tory Island, twelve miles off the Donegal coast, to which I had gone two summers previously. One night while I was on the island I heard a man shout, ‘There’s a dolphin in the harbour!’ and I ran down to the jetty to find an astonishing sight. A Labrador dog was in the water, barking and paddling in circles, while around the dog played an eight-foot dolphin, blue in hue when on the surface but green-grey at depth. So I joined the two of them, stripping off to my shorts and then walking down the harbour steps and into the clear grey icy water of the sea. For fifteen minutes or so I swam with the two creatures. The dolphin was curious, familiar. It lay on its side beneath me, nuzzling my ankle, or bottled up to watch me with black cheeky eyes. Once it retreated to a distance of ten yards, then disappeared, before rising up sharkishly. Its skin felt blood-warm to the touch, and smooth as neoprene. Later, an islander told me that the dolphin had been coming to the harbour for a year and a half, seeking company after the death of its mate, whose corpse had washed up on Tory’s south shore. The dolphin had befriended the dog, with whom he now often swam. He also said that he had once seen ‘upwards of a thousand dolphins’ in Tory Sound, all heading westwards. The parents and their children leapt together in perfect synchrony, he said, ‘as though each child were stuck to its mother’s side’.

A small open boat is sailing out to St Kilda – or to Rona, or the Blaskets (choose your distant island) – when, far out of sight of land, it passes through a herring shoal so profuse that the surface of the sea seems firm enough to walk on. The herring brings the predators: whales, dolphins and gannets, gannets in their thousands, thumping down from the sky into the sea all around the boat. ‘Suddenly,’ said Ian, ‘there comes a noise like a firearm being discharged. Pack!’ A gannet has dived by error into the open boat itself and there it is, up near the bow, stone dead, its body limp and its beak driven clean through the timber of the hull, its great wings, six feet for sure from tip to tip, splayed on the thwarts. Twenty miles from land in the big Atlantic waves and with a hole in the hull; well, that should have been death to the boat and its people. But then they realize that the gannet’s impact has been so powerful that it has plugged the hole it made. ‘So they sail anxiously on, with the head of the gannet buried like a bung in the hull.’ At last they reach the island, Hirta, in the Kilda group, with the weather worsening and the waves building. The islanders gather on the shore to help them in, and they see to their astonishment, as the boat’s bow is lifted up by the last big wave, the black beak of the gannet sticking out like a short sharp keel.

was analytical: his mind gathering data from sources and

He has tracked mutations of sea tales – ‘Three Knots of Wind’, ‘The Blue Men of the Minch’, the ‘Selkie’ and the ‘Fin-Men’ legends – as they have been carried about over the centuries, making their landfalls here and there, finding retellings in different accents and different places.

There are, White writes, ‘events of the mind’ that could have occurred only on these Atlantic coasts, where ‘strange winds of the spirit blow’: another version of the idea that so attracted Edward Thomas, of inner landscapes being powerfully shaped by outer.

Hayden Lorimer’s fine proposition that at the shore of the sea ‘a different order of persons and powers in the world … become[s] palpable, taking place through fields of variations, relations, sensations and affects, life felt on the pulse, in the turning of seasons, in mass movements of water and air, in depths and surfaces, inhalations and exhalations, in the quickening and slackening of energies, in the pacing and duration of encounters, in the texture of moods and casts of light, in washes that are biochemical and tidal, and in currents that twine the personal and impersonal, substantial and immaterial’. Hayden Lorimer, ‘Forces of Nature, Forms of Life: Calibrating Ethology and Phenomenology’, in Taking Place: Non-Representational Geographies,

Hayden Lorimer’s fine proposition that at the shore of the sea ‘a different order of persons and powers in the world … become[s] palpable, taking place through fields of variations, relations, sensations and affects, life felt on the pulse, in the turning of seasons, in mass movements of water and air, in depths and surfaces, inhalations and exhalations, in the quickening and slackening of energies, in the pacing and duration of encounters, in the texture of moods and casts of light, in washes that are biochemical and tidal, and in currents that twine the personal and impersonal, substantial and immaterial’. Hayden Lorimer, ‘Forces of Nature, Forms of Life: Calibrating Ethology and Phenomenology’, in Taking Place: Non-Representational Geographies,

White, On the Atlantic Edge, p. 47.

In his superb work on Atlantic cultures, Facing the Ocean, Barry Cunliffe speculates that the ‘restlessness of the ocean’ might itself have been a prompt to travel, and more pragmatically points out that the pursuit of migrating fish and the uneven distribution of elite resources would have stimulated a need for reliable sea travel.

We think of paths as existing only on land, but the sea has its paths too, though water refuses to take and hold marks. Sections of the Icknield Way may have been first trodden into the chalk 5,000 years ago, but the sea will not record a journey made on it half an hour previously. Sea roads are dissolving paths whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake, a brief turbulence astern. They survive as convention, tradition, as a sequence of coordinates, as a series of waymarks, as dotted lines on charts, and as stories and songs. ‘…

In Old English the hwael-weg (the whale’s way), the swan-raˉd (the swan’s way); in Norse the veger; in Gaelic rathad mara or astar mara; in English the ocean roads, the sea lanes. There are thousands of them, and they include the Rathad chun a’ Bhaltaic – the Road to the Baltic – that runs from Cape Wrath towards Russia by way of the Orkneys; the Brancaster Roads off the north Norfolk coast; and ‘The Road’, the channel that divides the islands of St Mary’s and Tresco in the Scillies.

In Old English the hwael-weg (the whale’s way), the swan-raˉd (the swan’s way); in Norse the veger; in Gaelic rathad mara or astar mara; in English the ocean roads, the sea lanes. There are thousands of them, and they include the Rathad chun a’ Bhaltaic – the Road to the Baltic – that runs from Cape Wrath towards Russia by way of the Orkneys; the Brancaster Roads off the north Norfolk coast; and ‘The Road’, the channel that divides the islands of St Mary’s and Tresco in the Scillies.

routes of the sea roads – the astar mara in Gaelic

astar mara in Gaelic

astar mara in Gaelic

It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place where we are born,’ he wrote in 1697, ‘thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.’ So did Roger Deakin: ‘Why would anyone want to go to live abroad when they can live in several countries at once just by being in England?’ he wondered in his journal. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau: ‘An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.’

The eye that sees the things of today, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams,’ Thomas had written, ‘is itself an instrument of antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to apprehend … and perhaps … we are aware of … time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher.’ It was an idea to which he returned often in both his prose and poetry: that there are certain kinds of knowledge which exceed the propositional and which can only be sensed, as it were, in passing.

For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

The American historian and geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson – a man constitutionally wary of romanticism – puts it well. ‘For untold thousands of years we travelled on foot over rough paths,’ he notes, ‘not simply as peddlers or commuters or tourists, but as men and women for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape. The road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were.’

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his dark and mystical Songs of Travel (1896) – which take their tempo from the rolling tread of the long-distance walker. The ornithologist W. H. Hudson pioneered a pastoral psychogeography, tramping for months along England’s footpaths, waiting for what he called the ‘charm of the unknown’ to set his rods quivering (his journeys shaped in part by Borrow but also by earlier English mystics like Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan and Thomas Browne). At the turn of the century Hilaire Belloc strode from France to Italy, and wrote his bombastic pilgrim’s tale The Path to Rome (1902). John Muir walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Florida Keys in 1867, veering as he went between extremes of hunger and of ecstasy; seventeen years later a young man called Charles Lummis tramped across America from Ohio to California and claimed that he had made ‘the longest walk for pure pleasure that is on record’. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892, inspired by Muir’s convictions that the walker’s bodily contact with the wild world benefited both walker and world, and that ‘going out … was really going

George Borrow, who inspired the surge in path-following and old-way romance that occurred in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and America, the effects of which are with us still. Borrow took to tramping in the 1820s, and he followed paths for thousands of miles through England and Wales, across the Channel into France, Spain, Portugal and Russia, as well as south to Morocco, coming to know the cultures and peoples of the road: the Romanies, the nomads, the tramps, the guildsmen, the shepherds, the farmers and the innkeepers.