This year, Walkpace contributed a public walk to Terminalia Festival which celebrated the Severn/Trent watershed, one of the Midland’s most important and defining geographical features.
Category: Walk Reports
After a good walk it's nice to document it for posterity and as inspiration for others.
In late September 2023, eight Walkspace members took part in a micro-residency at the Elan Valley in Wales, the source of Birmingham's drinking water. We undertook our journey in the manner of a pilgrimage, carrying with us a jar of Birmingham tap water to return to its source. We had thought we might respond to […]
The Darkest Road
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While researching his second book, based on Birmingham's partially lost Roman Road, Jay Mason-Burns finds the ghosts of Icknield Street are sending him on a more personal pilgrimage.
Award-winning writer, theatre director and bookseller Clive Judd shares an extract from his current work-in-progress.
For the second walk in our Wandering Rocks series we visited Birmingham city centre for more glacial boulders, geological curiosities and further examples of "beached heritage". The "wandering rocks" of the title refers to the erratic boulders which travelled to Birmingham from Wales on an ice sheet 450,000 years ago. The catalyst for this walk […]
For the final Walkspace Erratic of 2022 we visited Bordesley Henge in Birmingham to mark the Winter Solstice. Bordesley Henge is a municipal stone circle situated in Kingston Hill Park and is believed to date back to the 1990s. Six standing stones form a ring on top of a mound, up which a spiral footpath […]
This piece by Andy Howlett was originally written in April 2021 and appeared in Back to the Future, "a forward looking journal about past-futures, modernism, architecture, and town-planning in Birmingham." Upon learning of the death of the pop-artist sculptor Nicholas Monro it seemed fitting to repost it here in tribute. Every word of it is […]
For May's Erratic we teamed up with Flatpack Festival for a pilgrimage to Spaghetti Junction to celebrate its 50th birthday. We had a great turn out of 25+ people and the weather was kind, which all made for a delightful and profound day. The walk began in Victoria Square and from there we made our […]
…kruse and Kate Green went on a parallel erratic boulder hunt on the Wales/Herefordshire border. …kruse reports.
We relaunched The Walkspace Erratics last Sunday with a delightful springtime boulder hunt. We took the name "Erratic" from the glacial erratic boulders which were deposited across the region in an ice age 450,000 years ago. Robson and Andy felt it was time to pay tribute and so devised a walk from Cannon Hill Park […]