The old ways, p.3
The Old Ways, page 3
Two years after that visit, Roger died young and unexpectedly. Four years after his death I returned to Dorset to re-walk the same holloways, and found myself tracking our own earlier traces – the holly bush from which we’d cut sticks, the field selvedge where we’d camped for a night – and experiencing startlingly clear memory-glimpses of Roger himself, seen at the turn of a corner or ahead of me on the path.
Not all the early old-way walkers were savoury characters, nor were all their ideas appealing. The use of old paths to navigate terrains both real and imagined has attracted a rabble of delusionists, bigots and other unlovely maniacs. I’ve read with distaste the work of multi-purpose misanthropes, of nationalists peddling wrong-headed theories of race, and of nostalgists who demonstrate a preference for the biddable dead over the awkward living. I’ve read with bafflement the back-to-the-soilers for whom path-walking was (along with energetic morris dancing and long-term sandal-wearing) a means of cleansing the besmirched male soul.
But I’ve also met many walker-writers who avoided these thought traps and idiocies. Borrow danced gleefully around them all, weaving his cosmi-comic visions as he went. John Clare was fond of footpaths because they were ‘rich & joyful to the mind’: ways of walking that were also ways of thinking. To William Wordsworth, long-used paths were routes to adventure, leading into ‘the recesses of the country’. William Hazlitt walked radically, making marches from chapel to chapel to hear Unitarian ministers preach, and acclaiming footpaths as ‘lines of communication … by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive’.
The more I have looked, the more paths and tracks seem to thread their ways through the prose, poetry and art of Europe, America and – in particular – Britain over the past two centuries. They are there in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, in Paul Nash’s war-scapes, with their zigzagging duckboard walkways, in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1942 film A Canterbury Tale, in which the ancient Pilgrim’s Way is blithely churned up by tank brigades on manoeuvre, and in Bill Brandt’s 1950 photograph of a narrow stretch of the same path, where the Way appears as a foot-worn crevasse into the underlying snow of the chalk – a gap down which one might slip not just to another time, but to another realm and climate. I have come to love Eric Ravilious’s dreamy watercolours of the prehistoric tracks of the English Downs, and I have read and reread the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd’s accounts of how she came to know the Cairngorm massif on foot, following its ridge lines and deer tracks for years until she found herself walking not ‘up’ but ‘into’ the mountains. These are the consequences of the old ways with which I feel easiest: walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape; paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing.
Above all, I have been affected by the life and work of Edward Thomas: essayist, soldier, singer, among the most significant of modern English poets – and the guiding spirit of this book. Thomas was born in London in 1878 to Welsh parents, and from a young age he was both a walker and a writer. After making his reputation with a series of travelogues, natural histories and biographies, he at last began writing poetry in the winter of 1914, at the age of thirty-six. In an astonishing late outpouring of art, he wrote 142 poems in just over two years: poems that changed the course of poetry and whose branch-lines are being followed still. On Easter Monday 1917, aged thirty-nine, he was killed on the opening dawn of the Battle of Arras.
I first read Thomas’s poetry at school, in an anthology that included his best-known poems, ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘As the Team’s Head-Brass’. He seemed to me then an engagingly simple author, verging on the naïve: an elegist for a rural England of ploughmen, hayricks and meadowsweet that was vanishing even as he wrote. It would take me nearly twenty years to understand how drastically limited this account of Thomas was. He is still often thought of as a pastoral poet, celebrating place and belonging, but I now see that his true subjects are disconnection, discrepancy and unsettledness. His poems are thronged with ghosts, dark doubles, and deep forests in which paths peter out; his landscapes are often brittle surfaces, prone to sudden collapse. While he was drawn to the romantic figure of the self-confident solitary walker, he was more interestingly alert to how we are scattered, as well as affirmed, by the places through which we move.
Thomas possessed a pair of what Keats once called ‘patient sublunary legs’, and those legs carried him over thousands of miles of old paths, from the famous (Sarn Helen in Wales, the Icknield Way and the Ridgeway in southern England) to the local (Old Litton Lane and Harepath Lane, near his east Hampshire home). ‘The earliest roads wandered like rivers through the land,’ he wrote, ‘having, like rivers, one necessity, to keep in motion.’ Thomas used the old ways to keep himself in motion, for like Borrow – whose biography he wrote and with whom he closely identified – he was depressive. Like Borrow, too, walking was one of the few activities that could lift him from his depressions. He would cut a stick – holly was his favourite staff-wood – and set off along ‘indelible old roads’, ‘worn by hoofs and the naked feet and the trailing staves of long-dead generations’. Ancient ways were ‘potent, magic things’, on which he could ‘make time as nothing’ while ‘meandering over many centuries’. Hansel and Gretel being led into the wood, but dropping a trail of white stones behind them and finding their way back, came to his mind to be ‘one of the great stories of the world’.
To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses – between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal – occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms. Corners, junctions, stiles, fingerposts, forks, crossroads, trivia, beckoning over-the-hill paths, tracks that led to danger, death or bliss: he internalized the features of path-filled landscapes such that they gave form to his melancholy and his hopes. Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.
For paths run through people as surely as they run through places. The American historian and geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson – a man constitutionally wary of romanticism – puts it well. ‘For untold thousands of years we travelled on foot over rough paths,’ he notes, ‘not simply as peddlers or commuters or tourists, but as men and women for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape. The road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were.’
I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.
As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places – but we are far less good at saying what places make of us. For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?
From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. ‘I can only meditate when I am walking,’ wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the ninth book of his Confessions, ‘when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.’ Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself ‘so overwhelmed with ideas’ that he ‘could scarcely walk’. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as ‘employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy’ and Wordsworth of his own ‘feeling intellect’. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject – ‘Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value’ – and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: ‘Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake.’ In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.
The proposition that cognition is both motion-sensitive and site-specific pre-dates Romanticism, though it was Rousseau who made it famous. It is now a familiar suggestion, and one which we are wise to be sceptical about when it is asserted as a rule. Sometimes walking is the mind’s subtle accomplice; at other times its brutal antagonist. As you will know if you’ve ever walked long distances for day after day, fatigue on the path can annihilate all but the most basic brain functions. After twenty miles you’re wall-eyed, inanely watching loops on what John Hillaby once called ‘the skull cinema’.
In non-Western cultures, the ideas of footfall as knowledge and walking as a mode of thinking are widespread, often operating in particular as a metaphor for recollection – history as a region one walks back into. Keith Basso has written of how, for the Cibecue Apache, the past is figured as a path or trail (’intin), trodden by ancestors but largely invisible to the living, which has to be re-approached indirectly via the prompts of certain memorial traces. These traces – which include place names, stories, songs and relics – are sometimes called by the Apache biké’ goz’áá – ‘footprints’, ‘tracks’. To the Thcho people of north-western Canada, walking and knowing are barely divisible activities: their term for ‘knowledge’ and their term for ‘footprint’ can be used interchangeably. A Tibetan Buddhist text from around 600 years ago uses the word shul to mean ‘a mark that remains after that which has made it has passed by’: footprints are shul, a path is shul, and such impressions draw one backwards into awareness of past events.
The ideas that walking might be thinking or that feet might know are, at first encounter, foreign and puzzling. We don’t tend to imagine the foot as an expressive or perceptive appendage. The foot lacks the versatility of the hand. It has that irreversible big toe: the best it can do by way of grip is a clumsy scissor action with the second toe. The foot feels more of a prosthesis, there to carry us about, not to interpret or organize the world for us. The hand, surely, is always subtler than the foot – we speak of manipulation but never of pedipulation. Yet Richard Long – who once walked thirty-three miles a day for thirty-three days, from the Lizard in Cornwall to Dunnet Head in northern Scotland – signs off his letters with a red-ink stamp that shows the outline of two feet with eyes embedded in their soles, gazing out at the looker. Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape; touch as sight – these are notions to which I can hold.
For Ludwig Wittgenstein, following lines of enquiry on foot as well as in the mind was integral to his philosophy. Studying in Cambridge under Bertrand Russell, he would stride up and down Russell’s room in agitated silence, sometimes for hours, covering miles in a room of yards. ‘Are you thinking about logic or your sins?’ Russell asked once, half jokingly, of his striding student. ‘Both!’ answered Wittgenstein instantly. In 1913 Wittgenstein retreated to Skjolden, a tiny village on a remote Norwegian fjord, and spent a long dark winter there, contemplating logic and walking the paths that bordered the fjord and led up into the mountains. The landscape – ascetic, decisive – matched the thinking he undertook, and in the course of that winter he solved a major philosophical crux concerning the symbolism for truth functions. ‘I can’t imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I did there,’ he wrote to his sister years later. ‘It seems to me that I had given birth to new thoughts within me’: ‘Es kommt mir so vor, als hätte ich damals in mir neue Denkbewegungen geboren.’ The word Wittgenstein used for ‘thought’, Denkbewegungen, is a coinage that might be translated as ‘thought movements’, ‘thought-ways’ or ‘paths of thought’: ideas that have been brought into being by means of motion along a path (Weg).
In one of Thomas Clark’s quiet poems, a walker along a seashore reaches a place where stone steps ‘carved out of rock / go down to water’ next to a mooring. The poem accepts their invitation to descend, and the walker imagines ‘step[ping] down into the sea / into another knowledge / wild and cold’. The allusion is to Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem ‘At the Fishhouses’, which passes into the ‘clear gray icy water’ of a Newfoundland harbour; water that is ‘like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’. Bishop in turn casts backwards, I think, to Wordsworth in 1815 writing of how one accesses ‘the depths of reason’: a profound realm ‘to which the mind cannot sink gently of itself – but to which it must descend by treading the steps of thought’. The three poems become restatements of each other – a print-trail or series of steps of their own.
The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, ‘each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints’. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of communication’, each track having its corresponding Song. The Australian continent, as Chatwin put it, could therefore be visualized as ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” was readable in terms of geology’. To sing out was – and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation – therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.
The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, ‘to get knowledge, to be cultivated’. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of ‘to follow or to find a track’ (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning ‘track’). ‘To learn’ therefore means at root – at route – ‘to follow a track’. Who knew? Not I, and I am grateful to the etymologist-explorers who uncovered those lost trails connecting ‘learning’ with ‘path-following’.
In the months after my solstitial night-walk in the snow, I decided to make tracks of my own: to set out on foot along the old ways, and discover what might be learnt by following them. So on a late-May morning I left from my Cambridge home to walk what is often claimed to be the most ancient land route in Britain, the Icknield Way, which Edward Thomas had walked and bicycled a century earlier.
It was the first of my foot-journeys, most of which are recounted here, and they involved the traveller’s usual mix of excitement, incompetence, ennui, adventure and epiphany. The Icknield Way was my entry to a network of old routes criss-crossing the British landscapes and waters, and connecting them to countries and continents beyond. Along the way – along the ways – I broke more bones than I had in two decades of mountaineering, drank too much gin with a sort-of shaman in the Outer Hebrides, walked stride for stride with a 5,000-year-old man near Liverpool, followed wadi paths through occupied Palestine, and found myself – like many English walkers before me – tramping an arid branch-line of the Camino in Spain, under a vulture-filled sky. I traced a tidal path nicknamed ‘The Doomway’, which is allegedly the deadliest path in Britain but which turned out to be a cakewalk, I admired the celestial bling of meteor showers over the North Atlantic, I traversed an arc of the winter Ridgeway on skis and saw, I’m fairly sure, a black panther in Wiltshire. I spent nights out in copses, fields and beehive shielings, and on the haunted summit of a chalk down in Sussex where I underwent heebie-jeebies at the hands of ghosts that I now suspect were probably only owls. And everywhere I met people – usual and unusual, quiet and voluble, everyday and eccentric – for whom landscape and walking were vital means of making sense of themselves and of the world. I met dawdlers, dreamers, striders, guides, pilgrims, wanderers, stravaigers, trespassers, cartographers – and a man who believed he was a tree and that trees were people.
Of the dozens of people who feature in this book, Edward Thomas is the most important. He ghosted my journeys and urged me on. I set out to walk my way back into intimacy with Thomas, using the paths as a route to his past, but ended up discovering much more about the living than about the dead. In his memoir A Berlin Childhood around 1900 Walter Benjamin floats the idea of representing his own life cartographically: ‘I have long, indeed for years,’ writes Benjamin, ‘played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life – bios – graphically on a map.’ I have come to imagine Thomas’s ‘sphere of life’ as a kind of way-map, and so I have retold it in this manner in the book’s penultimate chapter: not an act of biography, exactly, but perhaps one of biogeography. That chapter is the convergence point of the book’s various paths: the meeting of its ways.
