Category: Inspiration

I can’t really write about walking without writing about maps. Hand drawn, Ordnance Survey, road, tube, physical, nautical, political, climatic, thematic, ancient, fictional maps, if you can think of it there is probably a map for it. A note before we proceed, everyone can learn to read maps, don’t believe any nonsense that some people just can’t, they just can.

Ordnance Survey (OS) Explorer maps are the best maps you can purchase of these islands. If anyone ever tries to persuade you differently, politely correct them and clarify that they should never raise the matter again. There are currently 403 available and you can spot them by their orange cover. They are 1:25000 scale, meaning what ever the distance on the map multiply it by 25000 to get the actual distance across the land. I encourage you to buy the explorer map of the area you wish to explore, open it on the table or the floor and pore to your hearts content. (Bing maps has a useful OS layer but is not available on mobiles devices and it’s not the same as studying a paper map.)

Maps are political even when they are physical. They have been used for 100’s of years to show borders, denote ownership of land and, often, imply the exclusion of one people in preference of another. (Ordnance means artillery, the original remit of OS was to map Scotland after the Jacobite uprising of 1745.) To be ‘put on the map’ suggests recognition. A map can explain why a border is in a particular place and they are often situated where there is already a natural boundary. A river, a range of hills or sometimes a change in flora have all indicated a change of ‘ownership’. When you live on an island, as we do in the UK, you have a big wet natural boundary, usually called the sea, but when you sail out of UK coastal waters there is no bobbing line of buoys on the ocean to inform you. Similarly when you cross the Welsh Marches on foot from England into Wales there is not a painted line on the fields or hillsides.

Maps are show us a version of what is really there but, in a sense, they are all fictional. Many fantastic books start with a fictional map. A map helps immerse the reader in the world that is being created. Treasure Island, Winnie the Pooh, The Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows, Toby Twirl, all these books have maps, often picture maps, that have become as cherished by readers as the stories themselves and the way we read those maps is the same as we would for real locations.

There are too many wonderful ‘real’ maps to do justice here but the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral is worth a mention and a visit. It’s a 700 year old map of what was then the ‘known’ world, from a European perspective, painted on vellum. Amongst many accuracies it includes several species of dubious provenance including the Sciapods, who used their one giant foot to shield them from rain and the cynocephalus who had a human body and the head of a dog.

Draw your own map or map a route for friends to follow. Remember though, as famous explorer Jon Bon Jovi said, ‘Map out your future – but do it in pencil.’ He really did. A good map can be trusted but they are rarely 100% accurate. By the time a map goes to print a row of shops might have been knocked down or a road layout might have changed. Generally, what you can see in front of you with your actual eyes is probably actually there. If the map you’re reading says there is a small stream at the bottom of the valley but when you get there it’s a raging torrent at the bottom of a gorge, no matter what the map suggests, the raging torrent is really there.

Investigate a map of a distant district, one you may never even visit, and you will start to be able to read the terrain, the vales and valleys, roads and rivers, schools and scree. Study an OS map of your own neighbourhood and look for the features you have not noticed before. Learn where the stream flows under the railway or where the high ground is. Studying old maps of your manor can inform you why a street has a particular name or where a farm used to sit. This will enrich your understanding and your enjoyment of you local environment.

So go and buy a map and explore the area in your head, then buy a map of your local area and go for a walk.

There’s much to enjoy in this correspondence between writer Alys Fowler (who you may know from her memoir Hidden Nature kayaking Birmingham’s canals) and artist John Newling (whose exhibition Dear Nature was on at Ikon before lockdown). It takes the form of six letters with photographs over April and May.

You can read them on Ikon’s website or download a PDF.

As a taste, in the second letter Alys talks about finding a lost pigeon, which her dog scares away before she can persuade it to live with her.

For a good hour, I mourn not having that pigeon as a friend. I look for her the next day, but she is nowhere. I hope that, refuelled on my chicken corn, she has gone home. That or she met another pigeon and now is living a wild life along the rail tracks.

I’m very interested in pigeons. I am fascinated in how they transcend so many different spaces for us. They are feral and domesticated, prized, fattened (a fancy pigeon eats a very refined diet) and despised. They have raced, travelled over boundaries as spies carrying messages, won medals at fairs for their plumage, been food for working families, a source of manure, psychological test subjects and even taught to recognise breast cancer. They can apparently spot it as accurately as any oncologist.   

Meeting the pigeon sent me back to reread the multispecies feminist writer Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). Do you know it? It is about how we must find new way ways to reconfigure our relationship to the earth and its inhabitants in the midst of spiralling ecological devastation. She writes of pigeons;

“Everywhere they go, these cosmopolitical pigeons occupy cities with gusto, where they incite human love and hatred in equal measures. Called ‘rats with wings’ feral pigeons are subject of vituperation and extermination, but they also become cherished opportunistic companions who are fed and watched avidly the world over.”

Haraway is interested in species that are boundary crossers for us: occupying more than one place in our minds and thus are able to cross over and create threads of stories of how we, as multispecies, as kin, might get on better together.

Alys Fowler. Letter 2/6 Monday 9 April.

I picked this out because one of the walks we were hoping to run before lockdown scotched them all was a guide to Stirchley’s pigeon communities with Megan Henebury. When I first discovered Megan’s obsession with the noble pigeon it seemed odd, in a good way. Now it appears I’ve been living a sheltered life. We must run that pigeon walk and soon.

I could have excerpted any number of bits from these letters though. Wonderful stuff. Thanks Ikon!

Photo at top by Alys Fowler.

I’ve seen some comparisons of the Black Lives Matter protests with the tumultuous events of 1968, some wondering if we’re witnessing the start of something similarly historic. While comparisons can threaten to diminish rather than strengthen, it might be empowering for those marching to make some connections and know history has their back.

Andy went on the Birmingham protest on Thursday and posted some footage from within the crowd.

Andy writes:

Amazing scenes at the #BlackLivesMatter rally yesterday. When it began the last thing I expected was to end up marching over the Hockley Flyover but there you go. Incredibly all that was planned was a stationary protest so this wild procession somehow came about spontaneously. Huge energy, overwhelming solidarity from car drivers and onlookers and not a single police officer in sight. An unforgettable experience. Let’s hope it never happens again.

I found myself reminded of footage filmed by an ATV news cameraman on 5 May, 1968 of protests in Victoria Square. Ian Francis of the Flatpack festival showed it last year when talking about his new book, This Way To The Revolution, a look at art and activism in Birmingham in 1968. The footage isn’t online but he has published an excerpt of the book covering that moment on the Flatpack blog.

It’s a crisp, warm Sunday afternoon in central Birmingham. Demonstrators are filing into Victoria Square in anticipation of a visit from Prime Minister Harold Wilson, due to give a speech in the Town Hall at 3pm. There’s an eclectic array of placards on display: students in donkey-jackets proclaim ‘Yankee Aggressors Out of Vietnam’ and ‘Wilson is an Optical Illusion’; smarter and more orderly, a large group of Indian and Pakistani workers carry signs reading ‘Black and White Unite and Fight’ and ‘Prosecute Fascist Powell’; bringing up the rear, a group of dancing, singing African protestors attack the ‘Nigerian genocide’ in Biafra. There’s a large crowd of curious onlookers, from school-kids to old ladies, and on Galloways Corner at the top of the square a pocket of fascists is chanting “Send ’em back!” Among them is Colin Jordan, a former Coventry school teacher and prominent British nationalist. 

Black and White Unite and Fight – Flatpack blog

He goes on to outline the people and organisations that were active then and what they were fighting for. It’s sobering to see what has and hasn’t changed.

I also found myself thinking of this photograph from Vanley Burke‘s excellent photo book By The Rivers of Birminam published by the MAC for his exhibition there and available from their shop when it re-opens.

I love its sense of place, that these people are clearly marching in a residential Birmingham street, identified by the skyline, and that they belong there.

Vanley has been documenting the lives and experiences of the Afro-Caribbean community in Birmingham since 1967 which has of course involved protests, demonstrations and riots. By The Rivers of Birminam juxtaposes them with portraits and candid shots of people just being people, lending a depth and humanity to a community that has been wildly misrepresented over the years.

Walking together is often a radical act with a long history. I hope these two examples from Birmingham’s past are of use to the current generation.

Following an arbitrary line is a tried and tested technique for the curious walker. The landscape and its contents will reveal themselves in a sequence determined by your line. Pick a start, an end and draw line between them. Follow that line and keep you eyes and ears open.

Kate Green spent the last year walking a line that was drawn from the Welsh mountains to south Birmingham by Victorian engineers when they were trying to figure out how to bring water to the rapidly growing city. Birmingham’s waterways are a bit puny due to it being one of the highest points on the British isles and in the 19th century it was festering with disease in dire need of sanitation.

Thankfully the Elan Valley is 52 metres higher than Birmingham. A pipe angled at a gradient of 1:2300 will transport water over a day and half using gravity alone from the waterlogged mountains of mid-Wales. Building started in 1896 lasting a decade, and that’s why we rarely have a hosepipe ban in Birmingham!

But I digress. Kate, who describes herself as a short interdisciplinary artist with dark hair, decided to walk the Elan aqueduct primarily to gather and share stories. She does this by writing and performing songs in a style that would have been popular during the build, drawing parallels between its creation and the present day. For example the navvies that built it were itinerant workers, moving their families from one job to the next. A century later the workers repairing and maintaining the pipe are predominantly migrants from Europe.

Her project has seen her run workshops, coffee mornings, exhibitions and performances along the towns and villages near the pipe, all fed by a steady walk eastwards. They’re documented in The Pipe Chronicle, a cod-Victorian newsheet.

We got to meet Kate and her infectious personality when she presented Walking The Pipe at the Plymouth walking conference in November last year. Rather than a lecture, is was wisely run as a singalong performance in the evening when beers had been consumed. We’ve been singing “This is the damn, this is the damn, that feeds the thirst of Birmingham” ever since.

It’s rare to find art that is both high-concept and high-nerdery while also being fun and accessible. Walking the pipe is a gem.

Kate has produced a songbook and zine-style collection of her newsletters. A formal Walking The Pipe book is in production. Contact her for details.

Trees are our companions, man. That said they do not generally walk with us, unless you have been lucky enough to take a stroll with an Ent in your local Fangorn Forest. They do however live where we live and ‘breathe’ the air we breathe.

Some of the first to signal the arrival of spring are cherry trees. They burst into flower, like the earth venting clouds of pink and white blossom, billowing from between buildings, from behind houses and in parkland. A few weeks later horse chestnut flowers look like the gleaming spires of a city in the branches.

Trees change quickly at this time of year. Four weeks ago most trees were still quite bare, now they are in leaf or at least in bud. As they do so they soften the landscape in which they grow. The dark silhouettes of winter blurred by new growth. When you can get farther afield go to see trees on hills, where the weather is naturally a bit harsher. These trees are often two or three weeks ‘behind’ their cousins in the relatively protected valleys and cities.

If you look a a patch of woodland from a short distance you will run out of words to describe the different verdant greens of each species of tree. Adam Nicolson, in his brilliant book The Making of Poetry, describes spring as having ‘rhapsodic freshness in every molecule’. Some leaves are not even green, there are bright yellows and deep reds as well. Visit a local tree once a week from the start of April to the end of May, throughout the year in fact, and you will see it transform. The effort the tree exerts in spring is worth pondering. A mature oak is thought have around a quarter of a million leaves, all of which it replaces every year!

Charles Simic sensuously describes leaves in his poem, called Leaves,

… Watching leaves,

The way they quiver
At the slightest breath of wind,
The way they thrill,
And shudder almost individually,
One of them beginning to shake
While the others are quiet, …

and later, in the same poem,

On this oak tree casting
Such deep shade,
And my lids closing sleepily
With that one leaf twittering
Now darkly, now luminously.

The dappled shade of spring leaves, now darkly, now luminously, enable carpets of bluebells, wood sorrel and wild garlic to flourish.

When summer arrives you can almost watch as trees wilt on long hot days. All the effort of Spring replaced by a staid endurance in the dusty summer air. Trees provide their own shade. Stand under a big tree on a hot day and the cooler air is lovely, don’t fall asleep though, you might wake up in Faerie.

In autumn the colours of the leaves seem to compliment the lowering sun, it’s like someone planned it. They didn’t. Autumn colours are the result of the trees no longer photosynthesising. The leaves lose their greenness and, as decay sets in, change to yellows oranges, reds and browns. The shorter, cooler days make the trees realise it’s time to start hunkering down. Walking through still autumn woodland is one of the delights of the season.

Winter trees stand stoic against the cold, their dark branches punctuated by crows. The view through woodland is no longer ‘hindered’ by leaves so you can often see views unavailable the rest of the year. Many of the original map makers of these islands did their best work in winter when they could see further from trig points. Trees are basically hibernating in winter although it’s called dormancy. By not maintaining their leaves they are saving energy for when it’s needed.

And so back to spring. All the recent evidence suggests that humans, that’s most of us reading this, get tangible mental and physical benefits from spending time in woodland. So spend some time amongst trees. Watch them ebb and flow across the year and go for a walk.

Since the start of lockdown I have been walking for an hour, around sunset, almost every day. This is great time of day to watch wildlife and the unseasonably mild spring has made it a daily delight. Animals are of course, entirely unaware that the world is a bit more unsettled than usual just now. I find that somehow reassuring. In these uncertain times a feeling of ‘kinship’ with non-human earthlings can help, even if the feeling is not mutual.

Some of those earthlings, the avian ones, are quite easy to see. Birds often gather together as this slightly improves their odds if we, or any other animals, decide to hunt them. If you’re missing crowds go and watch gathered water-fowl, pigeons, gulls, sparrows and crows all go about their work. More solitary are blackbirds, grebes, jays, woodpeckers, robins, wrens and herons, the latter can often be seen on the canal. 

I have seen a falcon, a Peregrine I think, hover over it’s prey in one of the less built-up suburbs. Birds of prey are still rare in cities but can be seen quite often in the edge-lands, where the distinction between urban and countryside blur. Watching one hunt is a mesmerising.

Ted Hughes brilliantly describes a hunting hawk in the first poem of his first collection, with the same title, The Hawk in the Rain.

… but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.

I encourage you to read Hughes’s bird poems, he usually writes with a directness that is accessible and conjures tangible images of many different creatures. 

Less direct is Hughes’s collection Crow which tells tales of the mythic trickster crow of many cultures. Look for the deep iridescent blue on the backs of crows and ravens. You can spend the rest of the day trying to decide if it was indeed blue or a colour as yet unknown to science. Watching crows along the canal squabbling over a discarded chicken takeaway is one of natures true wonders.

Waterfowl, ducks, geese, swans and moorhens, seem to like a good old-fashioned punch up at dusk so it’s a good time to observe them. There is no doubt a good evolutionary reason for this boisterousness but, to my unknowledgeable eye, they appear to simply enjoy a row. They settle down again as night creeps in.

Gulls are ubiquitous in town and country and, of course, by the sea. That said you can leave the ‘sea’ part out of their name, most gulls have never seen the it and, apparently, they think it’s a myth. Read Landfill by Tim Dee, it’s a lovely look into their lives and how those lives are linked to ours. Wood pigeons and their tough inner city cousins, with their often mangled feet, make interesting viewing. When startled, you may have noticed, pigeons ‘batter’ almost straight upward to evade a threat. This is thought to be because they used to live on mainly on rocky ground in the ‘olden days’ and this was a way of evading lizards and wild cats that stalked that terrain. 

In Birmingham there is a growing population of starlings in the city centre. Their seemingly anarchic ways and punk feather-styles make them a good lunchtime distraction.

Farther off red kites glide over Wycombe and the Chiltern Hills and can be seen easily from the train to London. Kites are often a bit scraggy looking but are still majestic and they are slowly moving to new grounds so keep your eyes to the skies. 

I haven’t even mentioned the dawn chorus! Get up really early and listen.

During the current time we, perhaps, feel less connected to our fellow humans. We might also be less at the behest of our usual daily timetable. Take advantage of that time, if you can, and connect with the feathered fauna that live near you. Feel part of something, no matter how passively, and go for a walk.

Partly inspired by our Fiona’s piece on great tits.