Author: walkspace

I like to walk alone. It’s my preferred ‘method’ for walking. Either from the front door or, before lockdown, farther afield. I like to cover the miles and this is easier done alone. Companions can be distracting. Add just one like-minded wanderer to the mix and mph drops by around 25%. If that like minded wanderer is interesting and enlightening I find I use up most of my limited brain-power on conversation, leaving very little left for the walking, looking, seeing (slightly different from looking) and thinking. 

There’s a real sense of adventure, no matter how small, in going it alone. The beguilingly big hill, the unfamiliar sector of suburbia, the mosaic of moorland, the wild wood all create a sense of completion when you open the front door at journey’s end. The feeling of ‘I’ve done that’ is valuable to me. To steal a word often used by the excellent John Rogers, a really great local-explorer, the walks I take are ‘restorative’. 

There is a contemplation, a sense of wonder and oneness to solitary walking that I don’t get in the company of others. I have find a comforting insignificance in sitting alone on a hillside watching the day wheel by.  

To quote some oft used lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron – 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

Like young Harold it is not that I do not like my fellow humans, some of them are quite pleasant, it’s just that I can enjoy the world with out them. In fact it’s more acute than that, sometimes I need to enjoy the world without them. 

This is not unique to me, of course. Most of us at some point will desire solitude of one sort or another. Perhaps it is more important now when solitude, or at least a lack of socialising, is a necessity. Some of us will be holed up with loved ones or house mates who we might not be used to spending so much time with. That personal space, a chance to turn off and on again, is important so take it if you get the chance. (In case you were wondering it’s entirely acceptable to say to your fellow lockdown-ees ‘I am going for my daily walk and no, you can’t come.’)

I prefer to walk alone. I encourage you to do the same. 

@robson72ep

In this time of lockdown many of us will be doing a lot of our walking vicariously through books, films, podcasts etc. so we thought we’d offer some suggestions for ambulatory entertainment to help scratch the walking itch.

First up is the new film by “wandering artist” Andrew Kötting, The Whalebone Box, released today on MUBI.

Synopsis: Some time ago, a whalebone box that was found washed up on a remote beach was given to writer Iain Sinclair. Once touched the box can change lives. In 2018 filmmaker Andrew Kötting, photographer Anonymous Bosch and Sinclair take the box on a reverse pilgrimage from London back to the Isle of Harris.

I haven’t watched it yet but it’s Andrew Kötting so you can’t really go wrong. Watch it here and check out the other Kötting titles available while you’re at it.

A fellow Walkspacer tipped me off about this episode of the Weird Studies podcast Green Mountains Are Always Walking. Hosts JF and Phil exchange ideas about the weirdness of walking in a conversation that meanders between zen monks, novelists, Jesuits and more. Again I must confess I haven’t got round to listening myself yet but that’s what weekends are for.

As for actual physical walking you can do yourself (currently limited to 1 hour a day) we direct you to the words of Phil Smith over at Triarchy Press for some inspiration. Phil’s piece Walking in a Time of Virus suggests some ways we might make the most of our daily state-sanctioned strolls.

“Part of what needs to be broken here is the idea that natural beauty or history is exclusively (or even more intensely) present in special sites, usually with big car parks and information boards. Every street you walk down is a treasure of geology and materials, each window is a museum of symbols, every tree is a drama of buds, enkissings, wounds and blossoming. For once, many of us have the time to teach ourselves about these things.“

That’ll do for now. If you have any recommendations of your own get in touch!

Stay safe.

I just happened across this by accident but the BBC is showing a new five-part series in which explorer Paul Rose walks the 630 miles of the SW Coast Path – Britain’s longest national walking trail. The first episode just went out and you can catch it on iPlayer here: Coastal Path.

After walking a couple of bits of the SW Coast Path last year (photo is from Lizard to Kynance Cove), and reading The Salt Path (highly recommended), I’ve become a bit obsessed by SWCP. Hopefully this show will do it justice.

The latest issue of Craig Mod’s Ridgeline, his excellent newsletter about walking to which you should all subscribe, appeared in my inbox with the above title and got me all excited because it would make the perfect manifesto for Walkspace. Walking as tool for creating something new, be it ideas or actualised work. Walking as a coherent and defined platform that enables an anticipated outcome but allows for serendipity and surprises.

Of course, letting my mind race ahead like that meant mild disappointment as Craig was giving the title to a talk at a tech conference where the audience build digital tools on digital platforms, but that’s OK.

The talk is worth watching because it summarises a inspirational walk Craig did last year where he tried to find a good balance between being connected and being alone. He would be travelling with a camera and a phone but he would set strict rules on how he would use them. Some, like having to take a portrait of a stranger before 10am, forced him to have encounters he might not have. Others, like restricting him communication with the outside world to one SMS text message a day, enabled him to, as he says in the talk, “be present in the world while connecting with my community in meaningful ways.”

Along the 1,000km walk over 43 days Craig would send a photo and a text message which would be relayed to anyone who had opted in to receive them. These recipients could reply but Craig would not see the replies until he got home where a large book containing his photos, messages and all the replies would be waiting for him.

As someone who uses walks to take photos (or uses photos to take walks) and has experimented in the past with platforms like Twitter or Instagram to document a journey, I often struggle to know what to do with the documentary detritus, or whether capturing the walk detracted from the walk itself. Cross City Walks is a perfect case in point – was it made or broken by the way I co-opted it as a tool/platform?

Casting the walk as a tool could be a useful way of mitigating this. A tool is, fundamentally, matter which has been shaped to facilitate an outcome, be it a hammer to bash in nails or a rocket to get you to the moon. If you know why you’re undertaking a walk (and that can be a big “if”), how can your act of walking be shaped to facilitate that?

Subscribe to Craig Mod’s newsletters and explore his extensive writing on his website.