The West Midlands isn’t very well served for ancient monuments or stone circles. Those wishing to mark the solstices at such sites might have to travel out to the Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border or Mitchell’s Fold on the far side of Shropshire. But what about those of us in the urban centres unable to make such trips? One option is to make use of the municipal stone circles and megaliths which adorn many of our public parks, such as the stunning Bordesley Henge in Birmingham. This is something we’ve done in the past, but this summer we’re going to try something different.
Suburban Birmingham may not be famed for its neolithic sacred stones, but it does contain an abundance of another type of ancient rock. We are of course referring to the erratic boulders which were deposited here by glacier 450,000 years ago. These lumps of volcanic rock travelled from the mountains of North Wales during a severe ice age and now litter the parks, gardens, churchyards and roadside verges of 21st Century suburbia. (For our previous boulder walks see here and here)
Thanks to the efforts of the Erratics Project, the boulder locations have been plotted on a handy online map. From this we can see that some of the boulders of the western suburbs are arranged in something of a circular formation, albeit spread across many miles. And there we have it. The West Midlands DOES have a stone circle, completely unique and several hundred thousand years older than Stonehenge.
To activate this newly discovered ancient monument we shall walk the entire circuit, anoint each of the 16 stones and read aloud from Alyson Hallett’s “Stone Monologues”. We’re very grateful to the Great Stone Inn in Northfield for granting us access to the historic village pound, home of The Great Stone itself, the first erratic boulder of our walk. The 17th Century village pound was formerly used to hold stray animals but it’s now used for stray boulders and we can’t think of a better place to begin this momentous walk.
At 13 miles this is the longest public walk we’ve ever done so it’s just as well the Solstice happens to fall on the longest day of the year. The walk takes us out to the far western fringes of the city with great views of rural Worcestershire. As well as the historic stones, the route also takes in the Frankley Reservoirs, home of Birmingham’s drinking water; a ruined castle; a holy well; the Severn/Trent watershed; a 12th Century church, and some spectacular views of the M5. We encourage you to bring along a pocket-sized stone of your own for the journey.
Meet outside the Great Stone Inn in Northfield at 10am, Thursday 20th June. We aim to finish back at the Great Stone by 6pm for refreshments and a much needed sit down. Wear your sturdiest walking boots and come prepared for a 13 mile trek through suburbs, country parks and some semi-rural terrain. There will be stiles, steps and some moderate inclines. Bring sunscreen, a packed lunch and PLENTY of drinking water. Please don’t underestimate the challenges of an all-day walk on a summer’s day. Public restrooms are next to non-existent so we recommend walkers of all genders have strong bladders and/or be comfortable finding somewhere to go discretely in the wooded sections.
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Please let us know you’re coming by emailing: walkspace.uk@gmail.com
Nine films explore a dizzying array of responses to walking and landscape, both urban and rural. From Rachel Henaghan’s sensual, sensory delight, Elan, to Fiona Cullinan’s witty, super-short Roadwords, from Andy Howlett’s engrossing Escarpment, to Kate Green’s musical Mindwalk.
In Andrew Howe’sCinderloo we delve deep into history, Adele Mary Reed takes us on a visually delightful tour of Coventry whilst grappling with ideas about art and the commons. Fiona Cullinan shows us how it can be to walk as a woman in the world, …kruse takes a surprisingly eloquent pen for a walk, while Simon Jefferies’, WalkaDay is an upbeat celebration of walking and Walkspace.
Saturday 11th May, 7pm. Tickets £6.50 price includes a programme. There will be a licensed bar available all evening.
Walking Shorts is hosted by …kruse who hopes that if people enjoy this sort of thing it might become an annual event, perhaps with talks and walks thrown in too. If you have any queries or questions please email susankruse(at)yahoo(dot)com
Address: Playhouse Cinema, Leominster Community Centre, School Road, Leominster, Herefordshire, HR6 8NJ
Leominster is accessible by train from Birmingham either via Shrewsbury or Hereford. There is free parking at the Community Centre and in Broad st car park, behind the Community Centre.
Looking south from Windmill Hill (287 metres above sea level) in the heart of the Waseley Hills Country Park you can see Bredon, Malvern and Abberley, the three great ridges which dominate the otherwise gently hilly landscape of Worcestershire.
To the north and east inside West Midlands county sprawls the raised metropolis of Birmingham and the Black Country up upon the Midlands plateau. Due north of Windmill Hill the towers of Birmingham city centre align closely with the curve of the M5 motorway and the patch of woodland, Frankley Beeches, above a hill straight ahead. To the east lies the craggy boundary between urban West Midlands and rural Worcestershire that are the Lickey Hills. While on the western horizon the towns of the southwestern Black Country, Rowley Regis, Blackheath, Halesowen, Old Hill, Cradley, Lye and Stourbridge, cluster like the names of calling points a railway carriage or express double decker’s passenger information screen. Running up the slopes of Turner’s Hill, the vulcanised limestone, communications masts bedecked, highest point in West Midlands.
Atop Windmill Hill, the toposcope that illustrates all of this in engraved form, was the first calling point of Walkspace’s Severn/Trent Watershed Walk for Terminalia Festival 2024. Occurring on the 23rd of February each year Terminalia is a transnational festival inspired by a Roman god which explores boundaries in all their myriad, fluid, culturally contingent, forms.
Why Walk the Watershed?
This year, in conjunction with Andy Howlett (filmmaker, artist and Walkspace Co-founder), I was pleased to deliver Walkpace’s contribution to the event, which celebrated the Severn/Trent watershed, one of the Midland’s most important and defining geographical features. I have written before about how in broad terms the Severn/Trent watershed marks the boundary between the southern and west parts of the Midlands in the Severn catchment area which are considered more bucolic, even mystical, than the modern modern, industrial and postindustrial, heavily populated River Trent basin. It was this which encouraged Andy to reach out to me about co-producing Walkspace’s Terminalia Festival 2024 walk as he was keen to explore the watershed. Though whilst the walk was initiated and developed by Andy and I, many members of the Walkspace Collective contributed to the event on the day.
Walking between the two river’s starting points requires a short, but intense, amidst the muddy late-February conditions, hike across quite hilly ground. Rising only two and a half miles apart the River Rea flows north across Birmingham to the Tame, which in turn runs in a northeasterly direction to its confluence with the River Trent, through which it eventually flows out past Kingston-upon-Hull to the North Sea. While from a well behind St. Kenelm’s Church the River Stour trickles forth and commences its journey, wending its way across the southwestern Black Country and out into the Staffordshire and Worcestershire countryside, through Kidderminster and into the River Severn at Stourport. From there the water flows on and out into the Celtic Sea via the Bristol Channel.
The contrasting myths and histories associated with the rivers brilliantly illustrate the contrasting perceptions of the southern and western Midlands versus the north and eastern parts of the region. The Rea is feted as an industrial river. Its waters turned the mill wheels and cooled the metal which drove Birmingham’s growth and expansion as the Midland’s major metropolis. An expansion which led with a certain degree of irony, indicative of Birmingham’s utilitarian unsentimental character, to the Rea being culverted and covered over for large stretches of its course through Birmingham. By contrast, the Stour, flowing through some of the leafier parts of the Black Country and then down through mixed rural and urban terrain in northern Worcestershire, is chiefly associated with the mystical, allegorical, medieval Chrisitan myth of the murdered Merican boy king St. Kenelm. A tale which sounds like it would be more at home in the depths of rural Cornwall, Wales or Ireland, rather than on the skirts of the urban West Midlands.
Windmill Hills’ toposcope handily aligns with the Severn/Trent Watershed. As a cultural and historical appreciator of watersheds, rather than a geographical, geological and hydrological one, I had naturally assumed that crudely speaking water falling on the southern flank of Windmill Hill would eventually run into the Severn via the Stour. While water falling on the northern slope would flow via the initial conduit of the Rea into the Trent. As Walkspace member Robson observed things are not so simple, rather both the Rea and the Stour initially flow north, albeit one towards the east into Birmingham and the other to the west through the southwestern Black Country.
Having clambered down Windmill Hill, the fourteen of us in the party, Walkspace members, and members of the public alike, made for the Source of the River Rea, another of Waseley Hills Country Park’s attractions.
After a brief psychogeographical ceremony and a poetic recital by Andy, resembling in parts a rural North Midlands version of the KLF’s“It’s Grim Up North”, of many of the settlements along the Rea, Tame and Trent which the water would flow enroute to the North Sea, the party set-off to head west leaving Waseley Hills Country Park to cross the M5 into rural Worcestershire.
As many on the walk noted, the M5 is an important barrier in its own right. Indeed if Environment Agency maps are to be believed it runs quite close, even in parallel with the Severn/Trent watershed. Perhaps West Midlands residents are conditioned to associate the M5 with escape through years of West Country holidays? However, there can be no doubt that the majesty and thunder of the river of cars flowing beneath the motorway bridge aside, that the massive road does mark a barrier, both psychological and physical, between the West Midlands conurbation and the rural north Worcestershire countryside.
Beyond the M5 the walking party moved into open countryside. Heading downhill towards Dowery Dell then turning left to head up to the hilltop village of Romsley. It is simultaneously a freestanding ancient hilltop village and a suburbanised exurb of Halesowen and the rest of the leafy southwestern Black Country fringe.
It being February progress was slow across waterlogged fields. Little surprise in a part of the country with rich claggy soil that is the genesis for so many rivers. Then the hail started. A brief pause was made in the car park of the Swallow’s Nest pub, patrons scurrying between the hostelry and their cars eyeing the group with a mixture of respect and pity, before setting up again even further uphill to the southern edge of the village.
Romsley is high up as large villages in England go. The Swallows Nest where we paused stands 241 metres above sea level. Reaching the edge of the village and making good time, despite the mud and the weather, it being the coldest day for at least three weeks, we climbed to nearly 275 metres and the top of Romsley Hill.
Here something went a little bit awry with a footpath not adhering to the right of way, a common problem on the edge of settlements, where villagers tend to carve their own folkways. This lack of local knowledge occasioned a quick scramble across a couple of fields, down into a pretty valley ringed with trees opposite the Clent Hills, and then escape back into human settlement via gaps in a hedge onto a campsite shut for the winter.
Hastily getting back to where we should have been via the campsite’s access road, having deftly navigated a gate, swift progress the rest of the way to St. Kenelm’s Church was made. The walking route was mostly along the capillary thread of bucolic lanes which skirt the Clent Hills.
Reaching woodland beneath the larger of the Clent Hills spectacular views of the hilly southwestern edge of the Black Country came into view to the right. Handily the sun came out just at this point illuminating the varied urban, industrial, yet also highly green fringe of West Midlands county. Pleasingly most of the final stretch of the walk to St. Kenelm’s Church and the well which is the source of the River Stour was across a field with spectacular views towards the nearby conurbation.
St. Kenelm, a Midlands saint subject of a popular quasi-religious legend during the middle ages, can be glimpsed in a lovely, characterful carving on the front of the lychgate into the churchyard.
The church itself is ancient and evidently much added to over the years. Today St. Kenelm serves the parish of Romsley and the surrounding villages, the current building evidently Victorian in part, but with lots of far older components and embellishments. If Wikipedia can be believed the little church’s crypt is formed from the remains of a shrine which lay at the heart of the pre-Reformation cult of St. Kenelm.
After a late lunch, Andy recounted the legend of St. Kenelm outside the church’s porch, before the watershed walking party made its way down to the well behind the church which is the source of the River Stour. Here there was another psychogeographical ceremony, featuring a sheep skull (providentially discovered in a tree during the walk), spreading of flowers, and a recital of the names of the settlement which the water bubbling from the well would flow through on its way to the sea. A jar half filled with water from the River Rea was dipped into the well to capture water destined for the Stour too.
This event was the closing ceremony for Walkspace West Midlands’ Terminalia Festival 2024 watershed walk. Signifying the boundary between the Trent and the Severn had been well and truly crossed.
Here most of the party continued walking straight downhill in the shadow of the Clent down towards Halesowen and private cars, buses and taxis home. Along the way we passed through scuzzy, almost heath-like countryside on the northernmost edge of Worcestershire. This included skirting the fringe of Uffmoor Wood, a scrap of ancient woodland, surviving in the greenbelt just outside the Black Country. The footpath runs close to the gathering watercourse of the River Stour. This contributed to it being very wet under foot. Soon we reached the dual carriageway on the edge of Halesowen and were rapidly absorbed back into the West Midlands conurbation beyond.
A geographical quirk of living in the middle of the country is that half of our rivers flow northeast towards the Humber estuary and the other half flow southwest towards the Bristol Channel. The natural boundary that separates the two catchments is called a watershed. In the West Midlands the watershed lies along the ridge of the Lickey, Waseley, Clent and Rowley hill ranges. Rainwater that falls on the eastern side of these hills ends up in the North Sea via the Trent, whereas rain landing on the western side ends up in the Atlantic Ocean via the Severn.
For Terminalia 2024 we will celebrate this quietly mind-blowing feature by walking from the source of the river Rea to the source of the river Stour. The river sources are only 2.5 miles apart but the Rea springs on the east face of the hills and the Stour springs on the west so the two water courses have drastically different journeys, ultimately reaching the sea over 200 miles apart.
Josh Allen of Walk Midlands (and co-facillitator of this walk) argues that the watershed also forms a significant cultural boundary between the rural southern Midlands, “a land of Morris Dancers, part-timbered buildings, ancient earthworks, 12th Century churches and cider orchards”, and the industrialised northern Midlands, “pockmarked by former collieries and industrial sites, redeveloped as warehouses, retail parks and Barrett houses”. This is reflected in the very different mythologies associated with the two waters: the Rea as Birmingham’s founding river, and the Stour’s role in the fantastical legend of St. Kenelm, Prince of Mercia.
Meet Andy and Josh outside the visitor centre of the Waseley Hills Country Park (B45 9AT) at 12pm, Friday 23rd February. No need to book, just turn up. This is a four mile walk via Romsley and finishing up at Hagley Road on the southwest tip of Halesowen (B63 1DT). This is a walk in the hills so be prepared for some steep sections and muddy conditions. Walking boots advised! Bring a packed lunch and some water. Due to the time of year we can’t recommend ritual bathing but feel free to bring a votive offering of some sort. We aim to be finished by 3pm.
There are toilets and a cafe at Waseley visitor centre and there’s a Harvester at the end of the walk. We can stop half way for a toilet break in Romsley too.The 63 and 61 buses get you close to the Waseley Hills Country Park entrance for the start of the walk. The 4H, 142A and 192 buses can be picked up at the end of the walk for connections to Hagley Station and Halesowen Bus Station. We can advise anyone who needs to get back to Birmingham!
This walk is part of Terminalia, a one day festival of walking, space, place and psychogeography on 23rd February. Terminalia was the festival of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and landmarks. See what events are happening in other parts of the country here.
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 themes such as sustenance, displacement and extraction, but Dan Carins soon found there was something else bubbling up.Here Dan reflects on day one of our visit and the walk from Rhayader.This trip was made possible with the support of Elan Links.
We would walk from Rhayader to the bunkhouse not far from the top reservoir of the Elan Valley: approximately eight miles through beautiful Mid Wales countryside. We’d be there by the late afternoon and the others would go on ahead by car with our bags and the food we’d just bought. On a mild, sunny day in late September there would be plenty of daylight – there’d also be a kitchen, hot showers, wine and beds with pillows. There didn’t seem much else to worry about.
We five follow the path along a disused railway keeping a brisk pace, and we talk. The conversations skip and jump back, finding grooves of common interest among the frequency of observations. We spot a slow worm (or is it a grass snake?), a face in the front of a church made of windows and the door, maybe that’s a kite circling over a field. Someone runs off to take a picture of a river – a proper river! – and to scrump a couple of the largest pears we’ve ever seen. There are giant mushrooms growing on straight, tall trunks. Lambs’ ears growing alongside the path. There are pines – although we can’t agree on which species they are. I opt for Loblolly, only for the word; later I’ll conclude they’re Scots Pines. I say I’ll point one out when I see one.
I don’t see many, and the few that I spot were probably planted ornamentally – they appear at the end of large back gardens of the houses on the edge of town. Pines used to cover Britain from top to toe, but now I associate pines with Greece or Rome, after Respighi no doubt but I distinctly remember being struck by a row of majestic pines, dark green against a brilliant blue Roman morning sky, probably on the way to the forum – unless that’s the name of a TV sitcom that was old when I was young. With the other fruity chap who wasn’t Kenneth Williams. I spot another pine where the former railway disappears into a tunnel. Maybe it grew there naturally, left alone by farmers and protected by the ghosts of a Beeching line.
The halfway point will be the visitor centre at the first reservoir. We head past the car park straight for the dam further along the valley. It’s here we see the first water and begin to piece together the first blocks of understanding the significance of the trip. The valley below the dam wall, the water above it. The scars cut into the rock on the steep valley sides, the bulk of the dam wall. The sluice at the bottom of the dam, the mass of the reservoir behind it. The broadleaf woods we walked past on the valley floor, the firs high up in the hills behind the reservoir. Two old blokes in flat caps talk quietly nearby as they look out across the sun-dappled water.
A couple try to arrange a picnic on a table whilst their young child, wrapped up warm in a pink puffer suit, attempts to gain their attention. She tugs on her dad’s coat as he pours from a flask. The water in the reservoir makes another persistent tug, relentlessly lapping against the top of the dam wall. The sluice thunders below.
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From here, it all looks serene and entirely natural: God’s in his heaven – all’s right with the world. Isn’t that Robert Browning? I once set that poem to music: I was proud of it. No – that was Porphyria’s Lover: the preceding poem in my Penguin Poetry Library paperback from 1992. On a plinth, we read the list of numbers and dimensions from the construction of the reservoir and agree that there’s a lot of water behind the dam, and a lot of men and horses moved a lot of earth and stone to build it. We realise we should make a move if we want to keep to our timetable.
I relax more as the walking begins to feel monotonous. We follow a narrow road around the edge of the reservoir, which stretches out far into the distance. The firs I’d seen from the car park have huge scars carved through them: they’re plantations, of course. Suddenly a raven flaps above, making its ridiculous croak: I thought ravens only lived in the Tower of London, and it turns out I’ve been completely wrong for the 12 years since I took my son there. We spot a small white wooden box marked “FISHING RETURNS” on a gate and speculate as to its purpose. There are few people about. Did Fishing ever leave? Who was she? Thoughts like these pop in and out of my head: they’re welcome distractions. I imagine synapses lighting up as we spark from one subject to another.
When I’m walking alone, I find that the more interesting thoughts quickly bubble to the surface once I’ve stopped worrying about work and daily life admin. The same applies when I’m doing the washing up, or cooking – but walking is much more fun. I can make a walk last much longer. Walking in a group doesn’t have the same effect: either there’s no time for the bubbles to rise to the surface, or I remain guarded and awkward. Or: too many ravens. It makes me realise the sheer weight of the daily life admin, and the pervasiveness of my work. I wonder what might have been: what could I have discovered if I hadn’t wasted half my life thinking about employment numbers of now obsolete companies, or how I could have encouraged them to invest? Too late. My brain now feels sluggish, reliant on the vim at the surface of my memory – whatever’s most recent is what sparks my contributions to the conversation. I get by this way. I feel I never dive down deep and really submerge myself these days. It’s probably why I keep talking about the same things, telling the same stories, and mentioning the same books or music or events. There must be some shockers down at the depths.
We approach a bridge that crosses between two reservoirs, past the green cupola of what we call “the plughole”. It’s in the distinctive and unique Birmingham Gothic style, straight out of a Wes Anderson film: not quite British, not quite Austro-Hungarian; not quite fin-de-siecle, not quite anytime else. It reminds me of the Palais de Justice in Brussels, not necessarily because of its style, but more its incongruity: its oddness visible for miles around.
I learn afterwards that this bridge runs atop a submerged dam: it makes sense now, but at the time it simply felt like a footpath built for our convenience: so much infrastructure, so little time to appreciate it. I make a mental note to talk to the others at some point about heuristics, my new reductionist Answer To Everything. On the other side, however, I’m interrupted by a more immediate indicator of what used to be below the water: a small church built to replace the one now submerged on the valley floor. Maybe because it’s slightly elevated from the road, or maybe because it’s a building with a dedicated purpose rather than a more general road. Or maybe because there’s a panel by the road explaining the church’s history. Either way, we stop to ponder and think for a while about what may lie beneath. Apparently, Shelley’s uncle owned a property down there. I think of the plughole, and now this becomes a very tangible and probably very concrete, connection between here and all the way back home. It looks tiny as we begin to walk uphill. It’s covered in a metal grille.
I start to think about the monsters in that Douglas Adams novel that think if they close their eyes, they can’t be seen. Which book was it? What were they called? I hate the way my brain instantly tries to shut down gaps in detail and memory, rather than focus on the problem in hand. I’m worried about what lies beneath, not about The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Bingo! That’s the one. If we can’t see a submerged church, is it still there? Is it still a church? What was lost – for them, or for us? I see a reservoir below me. Before, it wasn’t there, and instead people would have seen a wooded valley either side of a river. Would they have had the same thoughts? Or would they be thinking about getting to church on time, and whether their bonnet was fastened securely enough? We don’t think much about what might have been, but we think a lot about what might be: ask anyone objecting to a planning application for new houses on greenbelt who lives in a house that was built on greenbelt. Ask National Trust members: preserving a particular point in history, rather than what was there before it. It’s called loss aversion – finding a £ in the underground generates less excitement than the annoyance we feel when we lose a £. We keep walking, and I keep my eyes peeled for pine trees.
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We speak about the project we’ve been asked to complete. I’m minded to prepare some drawings of the reservoirs and dams. Only, drawing water is incredibly difficult. Drawing moving water sounds impossible, especially since my drawing skills don’t extend far beyond buildings and trees. I think about inserting drawings of cross-sections into a model valley made from card, to create a sense of movement, place and scale. This quickly turns into a simple V-shaped structure once I realise how difficult making a paper model of a valley will be. I’ll worry about the purpose later: for now, I’m eager to think of what I can draw.
Pine trees feature highly, but I need broad vistas. I scout the horizon. I’m grateful for this: before I started drawing, I would look around, and up, but I’d be looking for the economics, the human geography. I’d be looking for the implications of public policy on the built environment. I’d be looking because of my work. Whilst interesting, it also feels remarkably limiting – or futile. So what if I notice the layouts of factories along the Colne Valley, or observe the customers of retail outlets in North Norfolk? They might help me relate to someone at an event or talking to consultants. But ultimately, no one cares. Meanwhile, I’m not paying attention to whoever I’m with because I’m too busy noticing the flows of stock or material, and observing people spending money they don’t have. Starting to draw gave me a different incentive to pay the same attention to detail, but with a far more modest and practical purpose: subject matter for sketches. At this point I’m less interested in aesthetics and composition, and more about whether I have the technical skill to draw places faithfully enough to resemble the real thing.
And so I look. After a while, it stops me thinking. And when I stop thinking, more thoughts rise to the surface. Different thoughts. Thoughts that were lying further beneath the surface and which haven’t seen the light of day for a long time. These in turn, give me new perspectives on what I’m looking at, which generate novel thoughts. There must be an awful lot buried down there.
I’ve been reading about how stress and trauma can alter the shape and form of our brains as we learn to obfuscate, ignore memories and associations, and try to skirt around the past or to ignore it altogether. What was past is past – how we remember it is plastic, as are our brains. We assume that the past is singular: that fact is fact, truth is truth and history is history, like we think time is precise and measurable against a universal constant. But if our brains change shape and form, then so must our memories, and so must our pasts.
Is their knocking relentless, those memories against my skull, but so quiet I don’t notice? Or do they remain silent, waiting to be unearthed? It often strikes me how memories can appear so suddenly, apropos of nothing – or so it seems. Had the “so it seems” always been there, a frantic semaphore, desperate to bag my attention? For how long? Does it get tired? Or had it in turn been triggered by something else? Do we knock holes into our brains by repeatedly ignoring memories: like the shapes eroded into tree canopies by dozens of buses passing each day – we grind them down until they disappear. But their outline will give them away, like how rain won’t fall underneath a man wearing a cloak of invisibility.
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I’m sure dreams operate in a similar way: we create our dreams after we wake, grabbing memories from whatever is near at hand. This to me explains why some people’s dreams, when they recount them, last for ages: it strikes me as implausible that people were dreaming for this long. The silence of the surroundings lulls more and more memories from the depths as I walk. We’ve grown quieter now: possibly increasingly anxious of the lateness of the afternoon and how much further we still have to walk; possibly due to the seemingly endless stretch of regimented fir trees (they’re not Scots Pines, that much I know) creaking alarmingly in the breeze.
The reservoir narrows on our left as we continue. It’s not far now. I think of the volume of the water, the force this must exert on the dam walls, the calculations required, and the compasses and slide rules the clerks and engineers must have used in stuffy, gaslit offices back in Birmingham. Weight and mass and volume. Resistance. All of which must equal an opposite force = a lot of stone hewn from the valley walls, a lot of navvies and horses hewn from villages and towns. That gentle lapping now feels more mechanical: did they calculate for erosion and decay? How long will the dams endure?
We spot the others coming by car the other way. We realise how long we’ve been taking, and how bored they must be waiting for us: they’re off to try some bouldering. They tell us it’s only around the corner. My arthritic toe hurts.
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I have a sense of what lies beneath. Or rather, I have a sense there must be something below the surface. I know there are leaks which erupt now and again. I know I have triggers, and I know there are topics of conversation that are taboo or make me tense. Maybe I was too young. Maybe I’ve created monsters that aren’t there, for lack of anything interesting to say. I think again of the grille covering that plughole, and of the void behind it: 70 miles of slime-covered pipes drawn up by dusty Leonard Bast clerks taking the water to my taps, or the black hole of trauma. Which could it be?
It turns out to be much further than “around the corner”, but we eventually arrive at the bunkhouse long before the sun sets. We cook. We eat. We sleep. We talk some more. Over the next day, those dam walls get bigger and bigger the further and further we walk up the valley.
“The lost city. I never knew another person had seen it. The black towers. The flames in the windows. I never knew how to get there. But it has to be through another city, like this one. Do you think we could find it together?”
Passing between different worlds is a recurring theme in the work of the late Birmingham based author Joel Lane. Life and death, dreams and reality, cruelty and compassion – all are fluid in his dark and disturbing universe. References to veils lifting and doorways opening appear frequently in his tales of misfits and outsiders desperate to transcend their surroundings.
Canals also feature prominently; in particular the Grand Union Canal which passes through Digbeth. In Lane’s world, the canals are places of transgression, excitement and danger but also a connection point to an ever-present industrial past.
“What are the canals, do you think? A bit of random heritage, a scar tissue under the roads? I can tell you it’s more than that. It’s a palimpsest. A map of industry… and beneath that, the key to another world…”
Whether you’re a diehard Joel Lane fan or if you’ve never heard of him, this twilight walk around the backstreets and towpaths of Digbeth will connect you to another world. A world of artist communes, ghost barges and strange rituals.
This walk is part of The Witnesses Are Here: a weekend celebration of the life and work of Joel Lane hosted by Voce Books and Influx Press, 11-12 November. Tickets are £8 for the walk or £20 for the entire weekend.
The Witnesses Walk starts and finishes at Voce Books, 54-57 Allison Street on November 12th.Arrive at 3:45pm for a prompt 4pm departure. We aim to finish by 5:30pm with the option of going to a pub for a post-walk pint.
This is a walk event taking place at twilight & taking in a series of urban terrains, including canal towpaths. Please dress accordingly for the time of year & we advise wearing suitable footwear.
Grand Union Canal cutting just north west of Hatton in Warwickshire. Authors Photo January 2022, all rights reserved
Just over two years ago I embarked on a voyage of discovery in a part of the UK where there is only one scrap of coastline. A project called Walk Midlands (NOTE: that this is distinct from Walkspace, of which I am a proud member). This sees me – usually on a Friday – embark on a walk somewhere in the English Midlands, which I then write-up and share with the world via the Walk Midlands website, social channels and in the form of a monthly digest via the Walk Midlands Newsletter.
The project is first and foremost a practical walking guide for those interested in day walks that they can do without a car in the English Midlands. It is also a kind of reflection upon how we live now, a means of telling stories from history and a mediation on the landscape and topography of the central part of England, that comprises the bulk of the mighty River Severn and Trent catchment areas.
River Trent in south Derbyshire looking east towards the disused cooling towers of Willington power station near Repton. Author’s photo March 2022, all rights reserved
It is a natural extension of my practice as a journalist and creative non-fiction writer as well as my commitment to a form of politics where, to improve the world around you, you first have to understand it. This comes through in the choice of walks, which provide routes for non-drivers to access historical sites, culture and beauty spots across the English Midlands. As well as in the introductions which frame the walks, short, accessible, magazine style texts which explore all manner and facets of the Midlands region.
It is these components which attracted me to Walkspace. If one thread unites the medley of walking artists and other creatives comprising the collective, it is an orientation, perhaps even a compulsion, towards using walking as a means of tilting the everyday world 90 degrees and looking at the familiar askance. Walk Midlands, I hope, does it in spades and provides all those who appreciate and are intrigued by the English Midlands with a new route to explore it every week.
Why walk the Midlands?
There is a story I have told many times about Walk Midlands’ genesis. Like many of the best stories it has the benefit of being true. It goes like this: in the summer of 2021, struck down with a bout of COVID-19, thankfully not very ill but having to isolate, as the days of quarantine passed so the desire to go out walking grew in my mind. While confined in this way a project swam into focus which would give me an excuse to go on walks each week; that project became Walk Midlands.
I set out on my first walk, a triangular shaped stroll from Kidderminster to Stourport-on-Severn and back via Bewdley as soon as my time in isolation ended seeking to walk off the effects of ten days confinement. This walk was undocumented, but convinced me the basic concept of a website with a new walk each week, somewhere interesting in the Midlands, doable by public transport, was viable.
View looking north along the Malvern Ridge, right on the boundary between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, with British Camp and The Beacon clearly visible. Author’s photo August 2021, all rights reserved
My next two walks, along the Malvern Hills ridge between Ledbury and Great Malvern, and tracing the route of the “Lost Lapal Canal”, followed soon after. Looking back at those early walks now – and other ones created near the start like Halesowen to Tipton – it is readily apparent that I had not quite got the style right. Interestingly, I think that it first came together when I segued to the East Midlands and out into bits of the rural West Midlands which I did not know very well, if at all. It was the experience of discovering the feel, stories and what is interesting about places like Wirksworth or its neighbour Cromford (for instance) which I knew only from web pages before visiting, which taught me how best to structure the individual posts. Making them effective in terms of what would be useful to have photographs of, how to write the walk notes, and explain regarding the public transport connections, etc. It is fair to say that voyaging in more “distant” parts of the region taught me how to write about more familiar places.
I had several reasons for wanting to get to know the Midlands region and help others do so too. The most simple was basic curiosity. Having got into walking, I was keen on getting to know the “near abroad”. A concept writer, filmmaker and retired restaurant critic Jonathan Meades has spent the best of three decades exploring, making many BBC TV series, consisting of taking off-kilter deep dives into provincial England along the way.
The late, lamented The Crooked House pub, located just inside Staffordshire on the edge of the Black Country. It features prominently at the start of Jonathan Meades’ “Get High” (BBC2, 1994). Author’s photo March 2022, all rights reserved
And there was also a political motivation, rooted in the politics of the late 2010s, shaped as it was by the Brexit vote and the wildly different electoral outcomes of the 2017 and 2019 Parliamentary General Elections. Like many people this whirlwind, and the onslaught of COVID with all the separation that induced, left me wondering how much I actually knew about the country which I had now inhabited for a whole generation’s worth of time. This led me, returning to the concept of “near abroad”, to decide that given there is no way anybody can get to know as tightly packed, variegated and fissiparous a country as Britain in its entirety, that instead I should strive to better understand nearby parts of the country. Albeit beyond the archipelago of southern and central Birmingham, other regional city centres, and university campuses which I broadly consider my usual habitat.
Walking and storytelling
A third motivation, also political in character, relates to the walks on Walk Midlands themselves. Each walk is preceded by a contextual essay, typically pretty short and to the point, but in other instances more expansive. These usually take the form of a story, typically historical in nature. My primary intention with these is a form of light infotainment for readers. Hopefully they get enjoyment from reading the pieces and finding out a bit about facets of places, probably not too far from where they live, which they could visit on foot.
View from the top of Kinder Scout in northern Derbyshire looking south and west. Author’s photo April 2022, all rights reserved
And there is a serious component to this exercise too. Browsing Walk Midlands you will encounter stories about the role of extractive industries, the factory system, and the industrial revolution in the creation of the modern Midlands. As well as those like the followers of the (probably fictional) General Ned Ludd, who purportedly hailed from Anstey just north of Leicester, who have challenged capitalism since it emerged fully fleshed in the 18th Century. Alongside an older, yet also highly contemporarily resonant history of resistance and rebellion to the privatisation and enclosure of public space, from the “Midlands Revolt” of 1607, through 1932’s Young Communist-led Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, to 1992’s 40,000 strong Castlemorton Common Rave. This is not to say stories associated with some of the Midland’s famous monuments to aristocratic, ecclesiastical and capitalist wealth and power are not told. They are present and correct, their stories narrated from the standpoint of the people whose labour – whether in the Midlands or overseas – generated the resources and wealth which made their construction, and ongoing upkeep possible.
View across Castlemorton Common west towards the Malvern Hills. Author’s photo May 2022, all rights reserved
Perusing the walks and getting out on foot to visit key locations, gives readers a better sense of the extractive and exploitative processes which have shaped the contemporary Midlands over millennia. Regimes of power which have damaged ecologies and the regulatory systems of our planet alike, while also restricting freedom and ensuring material want amongst the majority of people. Through the decidedly middlebrow medium of a local walking website, Walk Midlands helps readers discover how this is played out in their region. While also, more positively showing how people in the Midlands, whether individually or collectively, have always come together and resisted.
Walking the Midlands without a car
Another unabashedly political facet of Walk Midlands is the fact all the walks are doable without a car.
There is a practical reason for this which relates to the fact that I possess neither a driving licence nor a car. This was one of the practical drivers of the project. For years there were places in the Midlands which I had wanted to visit, but which due to my lack of a car or ability to drive seemed out of reach, meaning I was dependent upon talking automobile friends into accompanying me. Nearly a quarter of British households lack access to a car, so I figured that I was far from the only person who would like a website explaining how to get to far-flung sites and attractions by public transport and on foot.
Bus stop next to the village hall in Millthorpe, northern Derbyshire. Author’s photo October 2022, all rights reserved
Underneath Spaghetti Junction between Aston and Gravelly Hill in north Birmingham. Author’s photo April 2022, all rights reserved
Decisions about how we get about and the transport technologies our society is constructed around are political. Fundamentally determining whose needs and interests lie at the heart of decision making, whose needs are subsidised and whose are ignored. My lack of ability to drive and access to a car is simultaneously due to a learning disability I possess, which would make it pretty tricky for me to learn to drive, and a personal choice: a conscious decision to reject the polluting and atomising impacts of personal automobility.
In this way Walk Midlands’ inherent bias against the driving and driver-centric way in which so much of our society is organised becomes political. How could questions about access and the distribution of resources not be? Just contrast the vast resource in terms of tracts of land given over by the National Trust and English Heritage at their properties and beauty spots with the intensely squeezed financial resources local councils have to subsidise patchy, often to the point of non-existent, bus services outside major urban areas.
What I have discovered walking the Midlands
One of the key things of course, when I embarked upon the Walk Midlands project, was getting to know the region better, and on the most straightforward of levels I feel that I have been repaid in spades.
Looking north towards Staffordshire’s Weaver Hills. Widely accepted to be the base on the Pennine range which run for over 300 miles from the English Midlands to southern Scotland. Author’s photo June 2023, all rights reserved
Earls Barton parish church in southern Northamptonshire. The tower pre-dates the Norman conquest. My Grandma’s family lived in the village for generations as did she till her 18th year. My Grandma and Grandpa married there in 1951. Author’s photo February 2022, all rights reserved
Other discoveries relate to the varied fabric of the region. The difference between the culturally vibrant centres of Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and their hinterlands. Hinterlands which are a mixture of incredibly affluent, seriously in need and very everyday in terms of how they feel to a visitor passing through. Whether in Wirksworth, Ledbury, Edwinstowe, Upton-upon-Severn or Ironbridge the small towns of the Midlands can also be vibrant, sometimes quirky, but in a very different way to the major cities, or lively small ones like Worcester or Shrewsbury.
Side street in Wirksworth mid-Derbyshire, the town is the county’s ancient lead mining capital and home to a major annual arts festival. Author’s photo November 2021, all rights reserved
Rural parts of the region are now distinguished in my mind by the quality of their walking infrastructure and the amenities in their villages. Worcestershire has copious footpaths and is a patchwork of little villages; it is one of the most scenic, deeply mythical and interesting of the Midlands counties, but its network of stiles, waymarks and footbridges across the county’s copious ditches are often very poorly kept. Neighbouring Shropshire, Warwickshire and Herefordshire are far better on this score.
Most of Worcestershire’s villages are now utterly lacking in amenities; by contrast little Herefordshire next door, far more sparsely populated, tends to have tiny community shops dotted here and there serving locals and passing walkers alike.
It is a similar story with public transport. Despite the horrendous cuts of the last decade some counties like Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire have managed to retain fairly comprehensive, reasonably frequent networks. Shropshire, Herefordshire, Staffordshire and Northamptonshire present a very mixed picture, while Worcestershire, again, seems to now be largely without buses outside of Worcester and the larger towns.
Walking watersheds and administrative regions
Individual local attractions and the quality of public infrastructure and amenities in the era of public austerity and internet capitalism aside, perhaps the most incisive thing I have discovered walking the Midlands is a stronger sense of how the region should be chunked up.
There is a certain logic to the traditional division, crystallised by the creation of government regional offices in the 1990s, but in practice dating back at least as far as the Norse Invasions in the 10th and 11th Centuries, of talking about the East and West Midlands as distinctive entities. However, I have in writing up Walk Midlands walks chosen to present readers with the hazier, less definitive, unofficial sounding “eastern Midlands” and “western Midlands”.
Footpath waymark in the Wye Valley just south of Ross-on-Wye (well over 20 years old) bearing the name of the short lived Hereford and Worcester County Council. Author’s photo February 2023, all rights reserved
Administrative divisions are a useful frame of reference and explain a little bit about the provision, or lack of provision, of public amenities. However, they’re ultimately just lines on a map. A mixed inheritance that is the uneasy marriage of Medieval landlordism and the modern bureaucratic desire to create easy to file units. One Walk Midlands walk, an admittedly relatively lengthy and at times circumlocutious 11 miles from Tamworth in Staffordshire to Moira in Leicestershire, passes through four counties, and crosses a regional boundary, twice.
Moira Furnace in north western Leicestershire near the heart of the National Forest. It only briefly operated as an iron furnace in the early 19th Century, but survived and was restored along with a short stretch of canal in the 1980s. Author’s photo February 2022, all rights reserved
Far more important I now feel is the division between the land comprising the Trent watershed and that where rainfall ends up in the River Severn. Crudely speaking the Trent and Severn watersheds comprise respectively the more northern and eastern and the more southern and western halves of the area commonly considered the English Midlands.
As a rule the counties which drain into the Severn, such as Herefordshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, are more sparsely populated and agricultural in terms of both their traditional and contemporary cultures. By contrast the land drained by the River Trent comprising counties such as Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and the vast majority of the West Midlands conurbation, is more industrial and urban in terms of past and present alike.
Of course this is a crude schema, Shropshire has a long history of coal mining, while the Midlands section of the Pennines is firmly in the centre of the Trent catchment area. Lincolnshire, however, offers a case in point, being a sparsely populated agricultural county drained partly by the Trent, albeit one where agriculture is perhaps more mechanised and industrial in terms of its scale than anywhere else in the UK.
Contours of Banburyshire, Greater Nottingham and the conurbations bookending Staffordshire
Exploring the Midlands slowly and meticulously on foot also leads to other schemas materialising for dividing up the region. The jokey local name “Banburyshire” for the uplands, partly in the Cotswolds, in the far south of Warwickshire, south western Northamptonshire and northern Oxfordshire, turns out to have a lot of grounding in topographical fact.
Likewise, Nottingham is officially only the fourth largest city in the Midlands, despite having the feel of a far larger place. This discrepancy is explained by the fact that the city lies at the heart of a decentralised conurbation, sprawling to the north of the city and west into Derbyshire, which in practice is actually home to around 700,000 or 800,000 people.
Rainborough Camp near the southwestern most tip of Northamptonshire. Firmly part of the “Banburyshire” topographical region embracing the northern Cotswolds, north Oxfordshire and south west Northamptonshire. Author’s photo December 2022, all rights reserved
Being from the eastern half of West Midlands county it is easy to read, hear and consume visual media about just how varied the Black Country is while seldom experiencing it. However, whenever I go out and about on foot, I am always amazed by the sheer plethora of Black Country sub-regions. Dudley’s green fringe is very different from the tightly wound towns of north Sandwell, southern Wolverhampton and Walsall, which in turn are quite unlike the semi-rural area to the north of Walsall.
Yet they are all equally Black Country, as are Bearwood and Smethwick, which almost feel like they should be in Birmingham, and nearly were, yet are very distinct places in their own right. Stoke-on-Trent and its surrounds, underappreciated yet utterly brilliant, at the far end of historical Staffordshire from the Black Country, bizarrely also feel like they’d be at home nestling somewhere above Wolverhampton and Willenhall. Yet they are also their own place, Midlands and northern, much as Derbyshire’s High Peak District or the areas around Chesterfield, Bolsover and Worksop are.
Walsall Canal Basin looking towards Walsall New Art Gallery. Author’s photo January 2023, all rights reserved
Where next?
In truth after two years of walking the Midlands, heading out at least once a week pretty much every week unless I have been away, there is nowhere I have visited I wouldn’t go back, nowhere without its charms, fascinating quirks and lovable character. Nor do I have any favourites, though there have been places where I have been keen to devise further routes so that I can get to know them better.
I hope to keep walking the Midlands and sharing the routes I devise and the stories I am drawn to for a long time to come. Hopefully I am not jinxing it but I have relatively few tales of scrapes to impart. Walking to Croft Castle from Leominster I was chased across a field by a herd of marauding piglets. The last bus (at 15:38…) out of Upton-upon-Severn once failed to turn up, necessitating a taxi ride back to Malvern with a friendly cabbie who was keen to talk about the brilliantly bonkers Monarch’s Way.
I got lost once, in the early days before I had invested in the Ordnance Survey Explorer app, trying to find the ruins of the Dowery Dell Viaduct, but luckily stumbled upon the Elan Valley pipeline and used it as navigational aid to get back to near the M5. More recently I slipped over repeatedly in the mid-March snow at the top of the spectacular, deeply underappreciated Bardon Hill, but there again that is what waterproof trousers are made for.
Looking south from Bardon Hill in northern Leicestershire on the western edge of Charnwood Forest. From the top of Bardon Hill you can see into every Midland county. Author’s photo March 2023, all rights reserved
There’ll be some hopefully interesting individual walks and monthly themes coming up in the near future. And I have a longform writing project planned for 2024, which will extend what I have been doing with Walk Midlands over the last couple of years, as well as opening up some new directions. Don’t hit backspace on your browser.
I am walking Brum’s oldest known road, a Roman Salt-way, Icknield Street (also called Ryknild). From the city’s southern margins to its northernmost reaches, I am tracing the route of this ancient track in three sections. This first walk is from Hawkesley in the south, through to the Roman camp at Metchley, the earthworks of which lie on high ground in the surroundings of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Selly Oak.
I begin on Icknield’s darkest stretch, amidst the old hills of north Worcestershire near the auspiciously named Grimpits Farm in Wythall. I spent a lot of my teenage years hanging with friends around these parts, drinking, smoking, larking about like many a youth, hazy days, when the world seemed brighter and everything was possible. The road here is narrow and sinuous, snaking its way up the rising escarpment like a primordial serpent, wreathed by ancient hedgerows and forgotten histories.
It’s easy to lose yourself down here. I find myself drifting through the happiest memories, wandering uphill as the sun glimmers through unkempt hedgerows and nervous thickets populated by blackthorn, hazel, ash, and oak. The outskirts of Hawkesley lie yonder on Primrose Hill. I fall into conversation with a local, fishing for attention, he’s a metal detectorist and conspiracy theorist it seems. He speaks enthusiastically of the Roman coins he’s found here, stamped with the imperious profiles of Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian. His aspect darkens as he details his attempts to get permission to gain access to local fields that flank this stretch of the salt-track, he suspects they may harbour secrets of a lost Anglo-Saxon waystation. He mutters darkly about landowners not wanting people prying on their land, sniffing out their illicit greenhouse crops. “It’s an ill weed that blows”, he grins toothily, waggling his detector like a spliff.
Along this darkened road, I’m taking blurry, slow-shutter photos of scenes that I encounter. I hope this reflects how the route and our collective memory of the road has been lost, worn away by the footsteps of time. This erosion of memory has personal echoes, this road is drift through my own personal history, the roots of Icknield Street run deep in my family. Time moves unerringly onward, discarding the transient, making the permanent seem ephemeral. This journey is important to me, a pilgrimage of sorts, touching the heart of what I’ve lost. The solidity of my world was shaken asunder when my Dad, Patrick, passed away suddenly last year. He was born and grew up in one of back-to-back courts, just off a stretch of Icknield Street, where the memory of it surfaces (allegedly) in Ladywood, central Birmingham.
I cross the City limits into Hawkesley, where the road suddenly forgets itself, becoming Walkers Heath and then Broadmeadow Road, sashaying along the southern ridgeline toward Kings Norton. These rough edgelands, a mix of golf courses, care villages and catteries, wash up against the white cliffs of concrete tower blocks, the road cutting between like a scar. Like the Anglo-Saxon God of War, it’s a bit Grim, threadbare nature in an unwinnable conflict against the dissolutions of Man.
A ramshackle assembly of farm buildings, tucked in behind the council cemetery, long derelict and abandoned, someone set fire to it last week. The guy who lived there was (long rumoured to be) an SAS commando back in the day, he was one of the soldiers who stormed the Iranian Embassy back in ’81, “grenade!”. He would watch his amply stocked fishponds like an avid hawk, eager to make a killing off the locals by charging for fishing access, whilst menacing those who didn’t pay with eager fists and a sawn-off shotgun. I don’t linger long, this area’s rep’ makes me twitchy, and there are strange noises emanating from that burnt-out barn……
The Road crosses over the top of Parson’s Hill, becoming Lifford Lane at the back end of Kings Norton, where industrial units bump gums against gnashing rows of terraced housing, jostling for primacy, gasping for air…… Breathing my beloved in, Breathing, breathing her nicotine, breathing, Breathing the fall-out in…….. You can smell the council tip long before you see it, the air around the road feels chewy with particulates. These conflicting edges, imposed by us are dirty and fascinating, gleaming allotment greenhouses glare uneasily across the ever-busy road at the noisome dump. The irradiated air is thick with Ravens and Gulls, eager to take their pick of the leavings.
At the brow of Lifford Lane, Icknield Street once flowed beneath, it’s under here somewhere, beneath the road, beneath the old rail line and the canal, the salt track is here, I can feel it! The northerly route that I’m following is a best-guess, an approximation of where Icknield Street once tracked, based on the oft-disputed opinions of eminent historians and local diarists. I’m looking for a road that may not even be there, following a likelihood, listening for topographic rumours hidden amidst unreliable texts and tucked in somewhere beneath my feet.
The road loops over the old rail and canal bridge on what was Stirchley Street, now the Pershore Road. The traffic is heavy and boorish as more memories flood my senses. It’s a bittersweet nostalgia for dead shops, old friendships and departed family, a lost Stirchley from my childhood. My Dad used to walk us up here on Saturdays, visiting the cake shop before strolling up through Cadburys to watch model yachts and steamships bobbing about on the lake. These days Stirchley is shabby chic, popular with the hipsters in their denim aprons and tote bags. I don’t have much truck with it, but the beer’s alright.
The ghosts of Icknield Street draw me close to Dad’s house and his old haunts, the Co-op where he shopped (now a Morrisons) or the café where he breakfasted, supping weak tea as he did his bingo. I’m a bit windswept and misty eyed, I find walking induces a kind of hypnotic reverie, where memory, dreams and misremembered stories, blend like the confluence of many rivers. Memories of my Dad flow like his laugh into his stories of people and places that have been lost or that I’ve never seen, giving room for imagination. Much like the route of the road, the stories of Dad’s early life have become fragmented in the re-telling and as I have gotten older, I’ve found to my cost that over time even my ‘memories are uncertain friends’.
I turn onto Umberslade Road, heading up hill. There was a huge dairy here when I was a kid, it’s a car park these days, much like everything else it seems. The road climbs sharply towards the Studentville of Selly Oak, past Muntz Park and the old Dell where I had my first kiss, her mushy lips tasted like cola cubes…. I’m a stone’s throw from Dad’s old house. I did a paper-round up here, Cherrington and Gristhorpe Roads, always good for Christmas bonuses and chocs. Most of the roads around here are populated with Edwardian terraces, parallel lines of tightly knit red brick homes, huddled like limpets on the landscape.
I wonder if patrolling legionnaires felt something akin to me as they neared home, at the junction with what is now Raddlebarn Road, a clearing through the gathered woodland there would, perhaps, have afforded views across the valley to the fires of home burning bright at Metchley Camp. Below them, a wide fertile prospect of arable fields and grazing livestock. Today, Heeley Road offers the most likely alignment of the Roman road, edging downhill into central Selly Oak, glad-handing with the A38 by the Bristol Pear. These days it teems with different crops, wheelie bins lined up in cornrows around rusty skips full of undergrad cast-offs, HMOs for the herds, the livestock guzzling their San Miguels down the Goose.
Dad’s absence hangs heavy over me around here, memories of his presence are palpable everywhere I look. Grief is complicated and fractured, full of one-sided conversations and unrequited wishes. His adherence to Catholicism and my own rejection of it was the source of many disagreements. But still, as I walk, I find myself softening, my eyes drenched in those places that remind me of him and his story. Dad was well known around the Parish, Nuns were always at our door, beatific foot soldiers of the Legion of Mary, brandishing her statue like a holy weapon. They terrified me, do they even have feet??? He was Pat the Painter, 50 years a decorator, man and boy. The homes and tower blocks he worked on, the churches he worshipped in, the shops he favoured, the memories he inhabited, they’re all here, looking back at me as I walk the Road. My reasons for tracing the roman route have belied this deeper need within me, I suppose. Deeper than merely documenting a lost road, I’ve ended up taking a final journey, hand in hand along a darker route, the ghost road guiding my way.
To get across to Metchley Camp, from what is now the A38 Bristol Road, the route of Icknield Street would likely have cut straight through Selly Oak, beneath what is now the railway and canal embankments. Any evidence of the road has been lost here, long ago. I am forced to choose a slightly longer route, crossing over the railway line through Selly Oak station, over the road and then down on to the Worcester Canal towpath. This is home turf for me, familiar skin, I live just up the road. The Titanic Caff, the epitome of the greasy spoon truck stop Café, used to hang off the edge of the bridge here, in corpulent defiance of gravity and land hungry developers. For decades it fed weary factory workers from the Birmingham Battery and a plethora of local industries that once thrived around here. Industry and greasy spoons have been washed away, replaced with sky-high factory dorms, pine fresh battery farms brim-full of spoon-fed students. This is the way we live now.
The canal remains, a gentle if sullen companion along the towpath as I leave the road behind me. There the old Dingle runs down to the water’s edge, where drunks and ne’r-do-wells once loitered after closing time, fumbling in the shadows, Friday night knee-tremblers threppence a go. The noise of it all falls away, memories flow into the waters below, washing away such nostalgia. This towpath is a favourite haunt, part of my morning commute. Its familiarity is part of its charm, a quiet corridor of nature and calm. The weather veers between sunshine and showers as I traipse slowly onward in mindful contemplation, a penitent sinner on the pilgrim’s way to Metchley.
On the stairs up to the road by University train station, a disembodied voice proclaims, “alight here for the Queen Elizabeth hospital”. I’ve arrived at last, Metchley Camp. Off Vincent Drive, surrounded by birch trees and covered by meadow grass, the earthworks of Metchley lie quiet, lost in reverie. Passers-by pay little mind to its antiquity, there’s places to go and things to do. I walk through the long grass, taking it all in to stand within its walls, listening for buried echoes as the rain falls. The grass is the deepest of greens.
You wouldn’t know there was something ancient, old, buried here. There’s too much else going on. Modern infrastructure dominates the view, there’s the hospital, a medical school, the train station, cranes, construction and the ever busy road dividing the site. The Roman camp was excavated on several occasions during the 19th and 20th centuries, documenting the remains of a once sizable garrison and trading outpost that was, in relative terms, quite short-lived. Later the site was covered over and gently re-landscaped, preserving it for future generations.
A shabby footpath here, which has seen better days, bisects the site at ninety degrees, close to the University bus-stops. It marks the approximate location of Metchley’s main street, the Via Accampamento, perhaps. Today it’s a popular spot for staff and students dining al-fresco on long sunny days, blithely intermingling with the sounds of Roman revelry echoing down through the years.
I kneel, a penitent son, pressing my hands against the path’s surface, a moment of quiet reverence for the road, lost but now found, at Metchley. Standing at last, my knees crackle and pop like Rice Krispies. We made it this far Dad, in nomine patris. As the rain starts to fall, my cheeks are wet in the breeze.
The main benefit of Walkspace – and the reason for starting it – was simply to gather weird walkers together. After attending a walking conference in Plymouth, we figured that between us we probably knew enough people in the Midlands who might be interested in walk-based arts, too. So we made a list and reached out to people across the region.
We’ve had a pretty solid response from that original seed. In three years we grew from three to nearly 50 members (now back down to 30 committed members) and formed a central hub for anyone interested in walking as a creative practice.
Our community of creative walkers hailed from all kinds of backgrounds, reflecting the universal act of walking (or moving, since not everyone walks). There are, in the group, artists, writers, poets, photographers, filmmakers, academics, conservationists, ethnoecologists, horticulturalists, sociologists, journalists, mindfulness teachers, musicians, performers, producers, curators, pavement plant chalkers and long-distance walkers.
All we asked as entry criteria were that members:
live in the West Midlands region (so we’d have a chance to walk together)
use walking in a creative way
share what they were up to with other members
We don’t want there to be a hierarchy. Anyone can run a walk (a Walkspace members walk or a public ‘Erratic’), write for the website, social media or newsletter, pitch ideas to the group, or ask for help, support or collaboration. But for practical reasons, there is a small committee to keep things semi-organised and think about overall direction .
In three years, it’s become a functioning community of quiet lurkers, dip-in-occasionally types and more regular interactors. It blooms into life seasonally with ideas and projects like desert flowers, but also hibernates for days and weeks at a time. And that’s fine.
The point is, we are no longer alone in our various weird walks. We’ve found fish of the same stripe.
2 A place to find collaborators and audience
What’s been interesting to see is the forming of various collaborations. Many of us have now met in person on various members walks or at online member salons where we’ve shared what we’ve been doing walkwise. There’s also a group WhatsApp for everyday chat. Getting a sense of people beyond their member bios has created a lot of connective tissue, inspiration and friendship.
The first time we met up, for example, I vividly remember long-distance walker and artist Daniella Turbin getting out her highlighter criss-crossed OS map on a beer garden picnic table and impressing everyone with her plan to walk in every single kilometre square. We then visited her on her walking art residency at the New Art Gallery Walsall, went on a walk together and virtually tracked her year-long walk around the UK – which was documented via Daniella’s Instagram. In the background, we also acted as an informal online support crew should she need us.
That’s just one journey within Walkspace. There’ve been plenty more examples of mutual support and collaboration happening as a result of Walkspace. For example:
Filmmaker Ben Crawford found a key interviewee in Kate Green for his film From The End of the Road (Ben also roped a few of us into a Dazzle Walk to serve as a visual thread through the film – pictured above).
Interdisciplinary artist Kate Green called out for a team of willing testers for her WalkCreate commission – and so, on a day out to Leominster, we wandered in non-linear ways to understand the challenges facing people with dementia.
Artist …kruse and photographer and mindfulness teacher Laura Babb responded to a call out for walks for Birmingham’s first Urban Tree Festival that I helped organise for a tree charity.
Visual artist Andrew Howe, musician Bethany Kay Hopkins and walking artist Andy Howlett came together on a funded project as Walkspace to celebrate a Dudley nature reserve.
In Parallel Walking, we embarked on a walk-based cultural exchange between Walkspace in Birmingham, UK, and Jalan Gembira collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, funded by British Council.
Ultimately, in June this year, we held our first group exhibition, – Walkspace 23 – showcasing the works, walks and creative practices of 20 Walkspace members.
It’s been great to see members joining up and doing their thing – individually, together or even en masse. And, of course, many of these walks and projects are publicly oriented, interacting with other arts orgs, reaching different communities and introducing different ways of walking to a wider audience.
3 A support system and a resource
Originally we thought Walkspace might become a peer learning platform. And that has happened to some extent, although in informal ways. With many different experience levels, skills and backgrounds in the group, there is usually someone to ask for advice or connections. (Personally I’ve learnt a lot from chatting directly with more experienced artists and been given some very useful feedback and support on my first Arts Council application.)
Members learn ambiently through contributing conversations, walk photos and links on the group chat. And there’s a big social element to the members’ walks (Handsworth stone circle walk and picnic, pictured), where people can practice leading walks in a relaxed environment.
Support can also be practical. We’ve been walk marshals, joined walk experiments and promoted member projects through our social channels. For Megan Henebury’s A Figure Walks, for example, we acted as a safety and support crew as she walked the length of the River Rea IN the River Rea – and also created documentation with Pete Ashton following along with a camera. You can read all the Walkspace posts on this project here.
I also think we’ve supported people to join who might not see themselves in a traditional ‘arts context’ to play a part in the collective. It’s been interesting to read the blog posts of Robson, one of the long-distance walkers in the group, for example. And one day I’ll get up early enough to join the Walkspace member who is secret pavement chalker.
4 A place for artistic development
As a personal example of Walkspace’s value, my experience as part of a collective has been pretty transformational. Before Walkspace I was a walker for health and fitness reasons only, doing my daily 10,000k steps to a soundtrack.
Through Walkspace, I started to develop into a more creative walker: working individually, collaboratively and collectively, personally and publicly, and being mentored through an emerging walking art practice by generous fellow members.
It’s been quite the journey from 2020 to here – from initial walk experiments, to local walk ‘n’ talks, to leading walks, to getting walk commissions, to creating live art walks, to an international walk exchange, to presenting at 4WCoP on how women walk, to being part of the group exhibition. Sometimes I look back in wonder at the projects I’ve been involved in, such as:
Extreme Noticing under Lockdown – a collaborative Walkspace video essay about starting a walking collective during a pandemic.
Night walks – group walks by new moon, full moon and in the snow, tapping into the power of invisibility.
Birmingham Dazzle Walk (pictured) – testing city surveillance with fellow Walkspace member …kruse using the cloak of female invisibility in middle age (counterbalanced by a follow-up collaborative Crone Walk of high visibility).
Parallel Walking– in which three Walkspace artists and three Indonesian artists explored their motor cities in parallel, resulting in an exhibition and digital zine.
All of these were made possible in no small part due to Walkspace.
5 An opportunity to go on a collective journey
At our our last big online salon we asked what the group has meant to members:
“It’s been amazing – I’ve met someone that is now going into a new collaboration”
“It’s a chance to meet other walking artists and understand the range of practices.
“I value the social walks – a rich experience of walking and talking”
“It’s made me write about not being able to walk, to seize the opportunity to explore that because I’ve been missing something”
“Creating a great community is like tending a garden”
“I like that is has a loose structure but is also fertile ground for collaboration”
“Being part of a cohort is huge, to get to know each other and collaborate – it’s a precious resource”
At our next meet-up, so that we can continue on our collective journey together, we’ll be asking the following question:
Where do we go from here?
The next steps are about to be decided – with our first ‘AGM’ happening this weekend.
We’ve been approached to run walks, to collaborate on projects and to work with more formal organisations on occasion – and yet we are still informal and loose, and that is part of the charm for many of us. As one member put it, Walkspace is “sliding into being an entity, an organisation – and that’s where things get tricky”.
Whatever path we end up taking, it needs to be one that is viable, sustainable and creative for the membership. And one that we decide to walk together.
In late-August 2022, I took a walk with my good friend James Glover from Worcester to Stourport-on-Severn. The twelve-mile walk replicated the Saturday bus journey I would take each week as a kid with my mom and my brother to visit my grandparents. A year to the date, I decided I would close the loop by walking in the opposite direction, taking the pathway from the amusement park in Stourport and along the Severn Way in the direction of the city. The following is an extract of a new piece inspired in some part by that walk.
Taking another photo, now, of a sign pointing confidently in the opposite direction to the orange horizon image still on my phone from last year, and to the Bewdley walk I took only two weeks ago. I drop the image into the Walkspace WhatsApp group.
–Stourport to Worcester along the Severn Way. Dodgy knee has decided to make an appearance but hoping it holds up.
Strike out, buoyed by the returning messages, best wishes and good lucks, from the members of the collective. I have only recently joined and it’s the first time I’ve thrown one of my walks into the chat. I am also flying solo. No James to rely on with his astute way of nudging a narrative out of a landscape, a necklace of interconnected stories and historic points of interest. No Ben either to lean ideas against, emotional ballast against the spectres of the past. I’ll have to do it myself.
Beyond the lock at Stourport, and the first small indication of the crude potential of this walk. A wall, where a series of bricks have been marker pen inked, a kind-of mind map of contemporary conspiracy theory, with accompanying links to YouTube. I take the customary photo and send it on to Ben.
–Good start to the walk, eh?
The Severn rolls its way along to my right, a thick brown soup boiling a watery pathway between two muddy verges. I dip under a canopy of trees, leaving in my wake an old factory which would once have been the operational headquarters of one ‘T. P. Activity Toys’, manufacturers of plastic slides and playhouses and other colourful pre-school play equipment. Now though, the name of this former fun provider is in a state of manic disarray, its erratic pattern of letters arranged along the river facing flank, giving the overall impression of someone having shaken up a bag of Scrabble squares and thrown an indeterminate handful at the wall. ‘Countdown’ for the Late-Capitalist.
Half hour in and I hit the first in a series of caravan parks, but where one might expect to discover flashy, gleaming static units, I find a graveyard of grubby, green and brown cuboids, their axles propped up by a tower of slate grey breeze blocks. The atmosphere of the place is rural-American. Ranch-like. It’s curiously unpeopled, too, like the abnormal pastoral landscape of the walking simulator ‘Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’. I imagine a golden orb of light drawing me through this awkwardly arranged pop-up village to a site of past memory. Light striking into form. Human. Voices revealing themselves like ghosts in the air. I imagine being treated to some crucial crux point in the narrative, brief, charged, voices becoming light, fading away back into orbic form as Jessica Curry’s soundscape, all cello and oboe and choral verse and soaring, textured emotion transforms the landscape into something other, something peopled in an entirely new sense. I imagine peeling off back to the river’s edge in search of the next trace of the narrative jigsaw, piecing together the ‘what happened?’, the ‘why did everyone leave?’ and the ‘where the fuck did they go?’
There are more macabre tales that could be motioned toward in this place, too. Stories entirely in line with the current, insatiable desire for true crime documentary and podcast serial. I’m not immune to this either, capitulating to the mental ‘what if?’ of this already weird encounter with place. Three or four thrillers start writing themselves in my mind. Detective stories without a detective. Think Claudia Piñeiro in the rural English Midlands. Some sad bod searching for another lost soul. The criminal, the perp, or at the very least, the fingered suspect twitches a mucky net curtain, the ripples of their watch caught for a second by the protagonist, the (non) detective, as they tip-toe through the lush expanse now commandeered by whoever it is that has decided to construct a life here. We all have to get by, somehow? Don’t we?
When it comes to caravans, I perhaps know more than your common-or-garden member of the cos-playing middle-class. The haunted visage of these, now surely decommissioned-for-commercial-use dwellings takes me back to my teenage years, twelve to seventeen, living in a ‘mobile home’ on a retirement park for the over fifty-fives.
–We don’t live in a caravan, okay love? These are static homes. They don’t even have wheels.
Mom’s wrong. They do have wheels.
–You can’t take one of these on holiday, can you?
It’s this kind of tangled logic that I’ll spend the best part of the next twenty years attempting to unpick. Still, Matthew and I love this place. The Village of Mobile Homes. We’ve visited a few times, riding around the park on our bikes with the only other kid to have found himself ensconced in what is quite literally a post-work environment. We’ve been running through the fields flanking the (not) caravans, ever since New Year’s Day, nineteen-ninety-eight. The day after the incident in the Stourport branch of ‘Road User’ where my brother, nine-years-old, watched on as our mother’s partner chased some robbers down a busy High Street, diving into the open door of the getaway car like some sort of Midlands-based John McClane. The car accelerated away with this brave (or insane) retail worker sticking out of its side, his now dangling legs resembling those of the guy bitten off the bog by a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park. It all happens in a flash. The body of mom’s beau, spat out into oncoming traffic, and rolling his way down the road like an empty crisp packet. A brave (or insane) attempt to reclaim a hastily snatched handful of Blaupunkt stereos. Matthew’s seen it all through the window of the shop. He’s still holding the plastic shop phone in his hand, responding dutifully to the last instruction he’d been given.
–Call the police.
Pre-Millennium tension. Pre-teen dreams. Pre-the move to the (not) caravan park in Warwickshire. Alex dumps me after a four-week, whirlwind romance. Rumoured interest from Katy, the mad lass who climbed on the school roof for no other reason than why the hell not? Vague interest on my part in Carla, despite my best-mate Matt’s constant warnings that, in hisexperience, she’s ‘as coldas afridge’. And definite, confirmed interest from Siobhan who, due to her kindly nature and the fact she’s a tad taller than most of us lads, we have nicknamed ‘The Friendly Giant’. What complicates things here, is that Siobhan is Terri’s cousin. Terri who, here’s a theme, ditched me in the school holidays. Terri, who I’m still raging about, not because I’m particularly damaged emotionally at the age of eleven years old by her sudden uncoupling from our tryst, after all we did only kiss the once, and it wasn’t even really a kiss, more a brief coming together of faces, and after all we did only go for one lousy walk together in the summer holidays, and I stuttered and, uh, stumbled and, uh, spent most of the time unable to unfix my gaze from her, uh, not really any of that but more the fact that, due to getting together with Terri in the last few weeks before the move to big school, it meant that there could be no repeat of last summer’s end-of-school-year-barbeque-cum-disco where I danced all night with Lizzie, the true source of all the light in my life since that memorable day she arrived at the school, in Year One, and was forced to sit next to me and was weirdly confident and canny with a put down and didn’t really seem to like me at all. With Terri now on the scene, an ill-advised ‘yes’ in response to a question I’d never solicited, there was now little chance of finally revealing to Lizzie what, in hindsight, was clear all along. That despite her nascent relationship with Luke, the best footballer in our class, the lad who Keith, the manager of Worcester Juniors, had tried in vain to lure into the squad after he gave up playing for perennial champions Nunnery Wood, using me, a child, as a sort of go-between, to pass messages on to and to woo, and also despite that weird four year period in the mid-nineties where she, Lizzie, and every single girl in the entire fucking world was obsessed with that knobhead Robbie Williams, despite all of this I was still truly, madly, and very much deeply in love with her. And, come to think of it now, I would really like more opportunities to dance with Lizzie at the summer disco to UB40 and go fishing in Laugherne Brook like that time when Luke and the rest of the crew I hang out with (mainly in trees) had gone home, leaving us, Lizzie and I, in worryingly close proximity, crouched on the bank and peering into the crystal clear water, spotting minnows and on the look-out for trout, that time we fished together for around two hours (in memory, let’s be honest it was probably ten minutes) and then walked back to the estate, me to two-forty, her onwards up to the new-builds by Grove Farm.
Night of the disco, and Lizzie runs up to me on the school field as the sun sets in the summer sky. She gives me a big hug and whispers, softly in my ear.
Walkspace 
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