Walkspace

For May’s Erratic we teamed up with Flatpack Festival for a pilgrimage to Spaghetti Junction to celebrate its 50th birthday. We had a great turn out of 25+ people and the weather was kind, which all made for a delightful and profound day.

The walk began in Victoria Square and from there we made our way down to the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal which we then followed the rest of the way to Spaghetti Junction; a total distance of 3.5 miles. We took in the sights, basked in the sun and considered the significance of Spaghetti Junction as a “confluence of confluences”: a meeting point for two motorways, multiple trunk roads, three canals, two rivers and a brook.

Upon arrival we performed a sacred rite involving the music of Black Sabbath and water from the Grand Union Canal. This was in tribute to the artist Bill Drummond who witnessed a miracle here in 1973 and who chose this site to begin and end his ongoing twelve year world tour The 25 Paintings.

We finished with a picnic on the banks of Aston Reservoir before making our way back into town (by train this time) for the final night of the festival. We were fortunate enough to have the event documented by a professional photographer, the hugely talented Katja Ogrin and so we include some of her pictures below, alongside others taken on the walk. Thanks to all who came! Details of next month’s Erratic up soon.

Walkspace has a strong cohort of flaneurs, the “connoisseurs of the street;” urban roamers who stroll the streets and parks of the city. Who delve with delight into canalside tunnels and under brutalist bridges, who wander through suburban estates and industrial sites, who walk the concrete and tarmac ways in a quest for urban stories and strange erratics. Walkers who revel in the expression of human doing and being that a city is.

But there is a (very) tiny cohort of Walkspace members for whom urban roaming is trial rather than a joy. These are folks who delve into nettle infested woods, wander down rutted muddy tracks or stagger breathlessly up high tussocky hills. I am firmly in the second group. Having escaped 14 years of suburban and city living almost nothing could tempt me to walk its grey streets again, not even the pleasure of a Walkspace walk, with lovely Walkspace people.

(I really need to invent a name for rural flaneuring – considering all the livestock we encounter maneuring comes to mind)

So when Andy and Robson decided to host another Walkspace Erratic, I thought it would be fun to accompany the group, but at a significant distance. Herefordshire, where I live, has quite a few erratics of its own as ancient glaciers carved swathes across this landscape. I reached out to Kate Green, who I suspected is a fellow maneur and we hatched a plan to hunt down the Whetstone, a large erratic situated somewhere atop Hergest Ridge. We’d start our walk the same day and time as the Birmingham erratic walk and share pictures live on the Walkspace WhatsApp.

Hergest Ridge is the name of Mike Oldfield’s difficult second album and also a large hill, rising above the small town of Kington. It’s right on the border between Wales and England with Offa’s Dyke LDP traversing straight across its top. From the summit of the hill several barrows and hillforts can be seen on the neighbouring hills. Hergest Ridge has an elevation of 426m and if you ever fancy doing a spot of Marilyn bagging, Hergest Ridge should be on your list.

Kate drove us to Kington as I am still rather nervous of all the one-car-wide roads around here and we were joined on our quest by Dot, a small shaggy-haired bundle of irrepressible canine enthusiasm and joy. It was a steep trek from the carpark to the top of the ridge and while I laboured my arthritic joints up the slope, Kate went slightly mad and began spotting potential erratics left, right and centre. We knew the approximate location of the Whetsone (ie, it was on the hill) but we hadn’t really done any homework and just wandered erratically (ahem) over the landscape, enjoying the wind and space and the song of skylarks.

Soon Kate spotted more stones and we both began to flex our maneur muscles, tuning into the landscape of The Ancestors and divining a potential layout of tracks and stones that could be the remnants of an ancient stone circle. It actually got genuinely exciting as we discussed how the ancestors might have used the hill, imagining rituals and burials and ourselves following in the footsteps of those long dead, mysterious people who dotted the hills all around the Ridge with barrows, standing stones and hillforts.

All the while Dot bounded around, cheerfully sniffing and leaping onto the smaller stones, rushing everywhere with cheerful gusto. Despite only having six inch long legs I’m sure Dot covered more than twice the distance we did.

When we finally found the Whetstone itself I was astonished by how big it was. We wondered if it was completely natural, or if it had been carved in any way. Kate found a portion of the stone that seemed to form a perfect and comfortable seat. Maybe it had been a King’s Seat once? We knew the stone had played a significant role in the history of the local people and had once been a place where food had been distributed to lepers, which seemed rather hard on the lepers, considering its elevation.

It was really nice to be walking at the same time and on the same quest as the Birmingham based cohort and I for one would really like to do something like this again. Perhaps a canal versus river walk or a rural v urban industrial walk. Although quite honestly, any walk that includes Dot (and Kate!) would be a walk worth doing.

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…kruse is a neurodivergent, experimental artist and writer, whose practice includes drawing, writing, storytelling and phenomenological research. She is interested in the connections between landscape, mythmaking, magic and story. For more of her writing see her excellent Wayfaring blog.

We relaunched The Walkspace Erratics last Sunday with a delightful springtime boulder hunt. We took the name “Erratic” from the glacial erratic boulders which were deposited across the region in an ice age 450,000 years ago. Robson and Andy felt it was time to pay tribute and so devised a walk from Cannon Hill Park to Selly Oak Park via The University of Birmingham.

The boulders were formed in a volcanic eruption 450-460 million years ago and later travelled from the Arenig mountains in Wales to the West Midlands on an ice sheet. Eons passed, the ice retreated and the boulders now litter the alien shores of 21st Century suburbia. They can be found lurking in parks, graveyards, roadside verges, beer gardens and hidden in walls and buildings.

The word “erratic” comes from the Latin errare meaning to wander, roam or stray. The restless rocks are still on the move: many have disappeared since the great age of discovery in the 19th Century. The picture below shows the Cannon Hill Park boulder in 1901 and beside it is another, smaller boulder. The main boulder remains but its little cousin has upped and left. Forget Paris, the original flâneurs are here (for now).

The concept of “roaming heritage” doesn’t just apply to boulders though; Cannon Hill Park also contains erratics of a very different kind. The Golden Lion Inn hasn’t travelled quite as far as the boulders but it has moved further than most buildings are likely to. A rare 16th Century survivor, it originally stood on Deritend High street, two miles away. In 1910 it was dismantled and removed to make way for a road-widening scheme and then re-erected in its current location and used as cricket pavillion. It was listed in 1952 and then left to fall to ruin. The support scaffolding is now as much a part of the building’s heritage as the C16 timbers.

A few hundred yards away, beyond the crazy golf course, you’ll find two more “erratics” hiding out as flowerbed ornaments. These ornate stone structures are in fact spare parts from the Town Hall in the city centre. They’re called capitals, ie. the bits at the tops of columns, as seen here on the cover of Anthony Peers’ book.

The capitals may have only travelled a couple of miles but the Town Hall itself is a copy of the Temple of Castor and Pollux of ancient Rome. The leaves in the design are acanthus, a genus native to the Mediterranean and one of the most commonly occurring motifs in classical architecture.

To quote Crab Man: “Once you become sensitive to these ‘erratics’ you will begin to navigate a landscape from which such anomalies, large and small, repeatedly pop up.” (Counter-Tourism: The Handbook, 2012, pg 137)

The boulders cover far more ground than we were able to in a single day so there are plenty left for future walks. Stay tuned for more boulder action but in the meantime we hope you can join us for our next Erratic, a pilgrimage to Spaghetti Junction with Flatpack Festival on May 22nd.