Walkspace

I recently wrote regarding my preference, and indeed need, for solitary walks over hill and vale.

Having said that in recent years I have come to enjoy some of the pleasures of walking with a companion or companions. I have gained accomplices for both local walks and those taken farther abroad. 

A conversation at work revealed a colleague who likes to do hill, moor and mountain walking. So I have spent the last two or three years, exploring the Peak District, Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons and the Welsh Marches with an able collaborator. Those walks have become important and are missed.

More recently and more locally I was introduced to a someone through a mutual friend with an interest in walking in all its forms. Before all this ‘bother’, said friend and I would walk about once a month from the car park of the British Oak pub, in fashionable Stirchley. The walks thus far have been to ‘local’ places that caught our attention. This has included an angry wall in Highbury Park, a couple of moated sites from the Civil War, some entirely invisible burnt mounds in Woodlands Park and following Icknield Street, the Roman road built around 2000 years ago. When conditions allow we’ll be walking to, or from, Birminghams omphalos in Duddeston, the concrete fish at Fox Hollies and, at some point, the length of one of Birminghams rivers. As poet Roy Fisher noted of rivers of Birmingham, there are ‘Two. More or Less.’. 

Both these types of affable regular walking put me in mind of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which Robert Walton, the ‘narrator’, writes to his sister Margaret of his adventures in Arkhangelsk, northern Russia – 

But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. 

Walton has secured the services of dependable sailors for his trip but craves some one he knows to share his adventure. Some one with whom to look at the sun setting over the ice fields and exchange a glance of mutual recognition.

I read Frankenstein many years ago and have forgotten most of it but, for all my preference for solo wanderings, this section always resonated with me. The acknowledgement that, sometimes, the view is somehow ‘more’ when shared. 

Lastly, all these words about walking are making my feet itch. I will be out this evening for my hour a day, letting my feet lead the way. So, if you can, get out of the house and go for a walk. If you’re isolating with others sometimes it is OK for them come with you. Share the experience, make an effort take joy from a walk with a comrade.

To be clear, I still prefer walking alone but now it would be a much closer contest!

@robson72ep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@robson72ep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay safe.