The old ways, p.31
The Old Ways, page 31
22 ‘[a]s if I could look back … and their life’: Richard Jefferies, notebook entry for 1887, quoted by Jem Poster in ‘Ghosts: Edward Thomas and Richard Jefferies’, Archipelago 2 (Spring 2008), 118–25 (118).
23 ‘rich & joyful to the mind’: John Clare, ‘Footpaths’, in The Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837, p. 317.
23 ‘the recesses of the country’: William Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes (1810; London: Frances Lincoln, 2004), p. 72.
23 ‘lines of communication … liberty is kept alive’: William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance With Poets’ (1823), in Selected Writings, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vol. 9, p. 96.
25 ‘patient sublunary legs’: John Keats, letter to John Reynolds, 12 July 1819, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. Buxton Forman, 4th edn (1931; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 357.
25 ‘The earliest roads wandered … to keep in motion’: IW, p. 1.
25 ‘indelible old roads … long-dead generations’: RJ, p. 4.
25 ‘potent, magic things … over many centuries’: Edward Thomas, Beautiful Wales (London: A. & C. Black, 1905), p. 166.
25 ‘one of the great stories of the world’: CET, p. 57.
26 To Thomas, paths connected real places: Edna Longley, one of Thomas’s shrewdest critics and the editor of the excellent Annotated Collected Poems, agrees that ‘roads and walks condition[ed] his deepest imaginative structures’; ACP, p. 270.
26 ‘For untold thousands of years … who we were’: John Brinckerhoff Jackson, ‘Roads Belong in the Landscape’, in A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 192.
26 ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’: George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000), p. 47.
27 ‘I can only meditate … works with my legs’: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1782), trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), p. 382.
27 ‘so overwhelmed … scarcely walk’: Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), vol. 6, pp. 62–3.
27 ‘employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy’: Christopher Morley, Forty-Four Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), p. 38.
27 ‘feeling intellect’: William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul D. Sheats (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 219.
27 ‘Only those thoughts … have any value’: Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Maxims and Barbs’, in Twilight of the Idols (1888), trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 9.
27 ‘Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake’: Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes towards a Supreme Fiction’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1955; London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 386.
28 ‘the skull cinema’: John Hillaby, ‘The Skull Cinema’, New Scientist, 1 December 1977, 589.
28 These traces … ‘footprints’, ‘tracks’: Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1996), p. 31.
28 To the Thcho people … used interchangeably: Allice Legat, ‘Walking Stories; Leaving Footprints’, in WOW, pp. 35–49 (38).
28 ‘a mark that remains … has passed by’: Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Viking, 2005), pp. 50–51.
29 ‘Are you thinking about … Both!’: Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (1967–9; London: Routledge, 1998), p. 330.
29 ‘I can’t imagine … new thoughts within me’: Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Michael Nedo, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Wiener Ausgabe Einführung/Introduction (Vienna and New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), p. 19.
29 ‘carved out of rock … wild and cold’: Thomas A. Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), p. 81.
30 ‘clear gray icy water … utterly free’: Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’, in Elizabeth Bishop: Complete Poems 1927–79 (London: Hogarth Press, 1983), pp. 65–6.
30 ‘the depths of reason … steps of thought’: William Wordsworth, ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 3, pp. 82–3.
30 ‘each totemic ancestor … “ways” of communication’: Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (1987; London: Picador, 1988), p. 15.
30 ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys … terms of geology’: Chatwin, The Songlines, p. 16.
31 storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring: in his fascinatingly intricate book Lines, Tim Ingold distinguishes between ‘wayfaring’ and ‘navigation’: the navigator plots a course ‘before even setting out’, such that the journey is ‘no more than an explication of the plot’, but the wayfarer ‘follows a path that one has previously travelled in the company of others, or in their footsteps, reconstructing the itinerary as one goes along’. Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 15–16.
32 ‘I have long … graphically on a map’: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 2, p. 596.
Chapter 3: Chalk
Pages
37 ‘it is about a road which begins … had to stop’: IW, pp. vi–vii.
39 ‘go ranges of chalk hills … against the sky’: SC, p. 2.
40 ‘the first … plough or wheel’: Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Sequel’, in The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 422.
41 It is possible that the entire route is post-Roman: see Sarah Harrison, ‘The Icknield Way: Some Questions’, Archaeological Journal 160 (2003), 1–22.
43 ‘more miles … except myself’: IW, p. v.
44 ‘travelled along this road till … from sea to sea’: Emslie’s notes are published in C. S. Burne, ‘Scraps of Folklore Collected by John Philipps Emslie’, Folklore 26: 2 (June 1915), 153–70.
44 ‘dreams … under men’s feet’: SC, p. 60
47 ‘Even when deserted … by many signs’: IW, p. 27.
47 ‘ghostly … roads’, ‘blind roads’: IW, p. 4.
47 ‘It is one of the adventurous pleasures … glimmerings’: IW, p. 27.
48 ‘the clink, the hum … the random singing’: ACP, p. 97.
48 ‘shadow-sites’: for an illuminating discussion of shadow-sites and aerial views, see Kitty Hauser, Shadow-Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
49 ‘ “innumerable queer resurrections … lost to knowledge” ’: Kitty Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London: Granta, 2008), p. 90.
49 ‘What is astonishing to the point of uncanniness … about their business’: Hauser, Bloody Old Britain, pp. 85–6.
49 ‘A white snake on a green hillside’: IW, p. 1.
50 ‘The eye that sees the things of today … and philosopher’: SC, pp. 151–2.
52 ‘several chains … mists of morning’: IW, p. 9.
53 ‘Thiepval 1915, In Memory of Your Wilhelm … To Fritz With Compliments’: see Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 121–4.
53 ‘the continual cracking … come up into you’: Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (1967; London, Dublin: Dalkey Archive, 1990), p. 90.
54 ‘dark beech alley[s] … crumbling chalk’: SC, p. 199.
54 ‘buried under nettle and burdock … bryony bines’: SC, p. 50.
55 ‘I could not find a beginning … of the Icknield Way’: IW, p. vi.
Chapter 4: Silt
Pages
70 Doggerland: The archaeology of Doggerland is well described (briefly) in Laura Spinney, ‘The Lost World’, Nature 454 (9 July 2008), 151–3; and (at length) in Vincent Gaffney et al., Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2009). I draw on both sources.
73 ‘ogee … line of beauty’: William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London: J. Reeves, 1753), p. 38.
77 ‘could be on the far side of the moon’: John Burroughs’s comment was reported to me by Jules Pretty, and appears in his This Luminous Coast (Suffolk: Full Circle, 2011), p. 161.
77 ‘soft bluish silvery haze … changed to a supernatural’: AIE, pp. 40–41.
77 ‘No matter how deliberately … live another life’: Wendell Berry, ‘The Rise’, in The Long-Legged House (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 96.
78 ‘It is a piece of weakness … own natural climate’: Martin Martin, A Voyage to St Kilda (1698; London: Dan Browne, 1753), p. 3.
79 ‘Why would anyone want … by being in England?’: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008), p. 190.
79 ‘An absolutely new prospect … King of Dahomey’: Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in The Works of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Lily Owens (New York: Avenel, 1981), p. 277. I am grateful to Jos Smith for drawing my attention to the convergence of opinion in these three quotations (Martin, Deakin, Thoreau).
79 ‘cognitive dissonance … to fail catastrophically’: see William Fox, ‘Walking in Circles: Cognition and Science in High Places’, in High Places, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 19–29 (20).
Chapter 5: Water – South
Pages
88 ‘as by Line upon the Ocean [we] go … as the Land’: John Dryden, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1666), in The Poems of John Dryden 1649–1681, ed. Paul Hammond (London and New York: Longman, 1995).
89 Surface currents, tidal streams … between certain places: see E. G. Bowen, Saints, Settlements and Seaways in the Celtic Lands (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969), p. 17.
90 It was the emergence of prehistoric archaeology: the historiography of the sea roads is valuably discussed in Bowen, Saints, Settlements and Seaways, pp. 1–10.
90 An early breakthrough was made … a different vessel: see O. G. S. Crawford, ‘The Distribution of Early Bronze Age Settlements in Britain’, Geographical Journal 40 (August 1912), 184–97.
91 In 1932, Cyril Fox published … reached Shetland: see Cyril Fox, The Personality of Britain (Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 1932).
91 In his superb work on Atlantic cultures … sea travel: see Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC–AD 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Cunliffe’s book allows me to speak about the history of the seaways with an authority that is not firstly mine; I draw also on, among other sources, Bowen’s Saints, Settlements and Seaways, and Peter Davidson’s brilliant and compressive essay ‘Seven Short Sails’, contributed as the epilogue to Pat Law’s ‘7 Short Sails’ project. See http://studiolog.heriot-toun.co.uk/7sails/7sails.php
91 The first sea-road mariners … story and drawing: Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, p. 79.
92 ‘poetic logbooks … inland kin’: Kenneth White, On the Atlantic Edge (Dingwall: Sandstone, 2006), p. 90; Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, pp. 85–6.
94 ‘lost wavelengths … of the spirit blow’: White, On the Atlantic Edge, p. 47. See also Hayden Lorimer’s fine proposition that at the shore of the sea ‘a different order of persons and powers in the world … become[s] palpable, taking place through fields of variations, relations, sensations and affects, life felt on the pulse, in the turning of seasons, in mass movements of water and air, in depths and surfaces, inhalations and exhalations, in the quickening and slackening of energies, in the pacing and duration of encounters, in the texture of moods and casts of light, in washes that are biochemical and tidal, and in currents that twine the personal and impersonal, substantial and immaterial’. Hayden Lorimer, ‘Forces of Nature, Forms of Life: Calibrating Ethology and Phenomenology’, in Taking Place: Non-Representational Geographies, ed. Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison (London: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 55–78.
94 one of Robert Burns’s most perfect songs … tune: I am grateful to Peter Davidson for this detail.
95 Peregrini… reached such places: I have written at greater length about the peregrini in the second chapter of The Wild Places (London: Granta, 2007), pp. 21–42.
95 ‘suddenly began to move … quick thinking and poetry’: White, On the Atlantic Edge, p. 38. See also Bowen’s mapping of the ancient churches dedicated to the peregrini across north-western Europe and Atlantic Britain, in Saints, Settlements and Seaways, pp. 51–80.
96 ‘metaphor and reality merged … over time’: Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean, p. 15.
98 ‘affected by isobars … hands on helms’: Ian Stephen, in Offshore/Onshore (Edinburgh: Morning Star, 1998), p. 4.
100 ‘If it’s about anything … touch of your people’: Ian Stephen, ‘Southeasterly, Stromness’, in it’s about this (Glasgow: Survivor’s Press, 2004), p. 6.
103 ‘the grace of accuracy’: Robert Lowell, ‘Epilogue’, in Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 838. I take Lowell’s line from Gerry Cambridge’s fine short appreciation of Ian Stephen, ‘All About Shine’, which stands as the foreword to Ian’s Mackerel & Creamola: Stories and Recipes (Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2001), pp. 11–15 (13).
105 In Siberia, the Khanty word … ‘way’: I take the detail from Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 90. Ingold attributes the research to Natalia Novikova, in ‘Self-Government of the Indigenous Minority Peoples of West Siberia: Analysis of Law and Practice’, in People and the Land: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 2002), pp. 83–97. I am grateful also to Tatiana Argounova-Low for our conversation about hodology, and her sharing of research-in-progress on the relationship between roads and narratives in the Republic of Sakha, north-western Siberia.
105 The Old English writan … harrowing a track: I draw here on Ingold’s discussion of the relations between text, track and texture in Lines, p. 43.
105 As the pen rises … same seam or stream: inspired by Ingold, Lines, pp. 92–3.
110 ‘The Shiants … the heartlands of Europe’: Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 12–13.
111 ‘The place has entered me … like a stain’: Nicolson, Sea Room, p. 3.
111 the delusion of a comprehensive totality: I am grateful for this phrase to Tim and Mairéad Robinson.
111 ‘The mind cannot carry away … has carried away’: LM, p. 3.
Chapter 6: Water – North
Pages
119 ‘In antiquity, Irish scholars … intellectual’: Richard Kearney, Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976–2006 (Dublin: Lilliput, 2006), p. x.
121 the first record of the guga hunt dates to 1549: see James McGeoch, Catriona McGeoch, Finlay MacLeod and John Love, Súlasgeir (Stornoway: Acair, 2010); and John Beatty, Sula: Seabird Hunters of Lewis (London: Michael Joseph, 1992). I am grateful to Finlay MacLeod, the McGeoch family and Acair Press for their generosity in making materials available to me concerning Sula Sgeir and the guga hunt.
129 ‘the bounce of light … elaborate counter-physics’: Ian Stephen, ‘Anstruther to St Andrew’s Bay, aboard The Reaper’, in it’s about this (Glasgow: Survivor Press, 2004), p. 10.
129 ‘long slanting line … to tell every day’: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; London: Penguin, 1986), p. 96.
132 ‘roomy’: William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; New York: Holt, 1905), pp. 136–7. James draws on the phrasing of the German physiologist and colour theorist Ewald Hering.
133 ‘tin road … amber road’: Kenneth White, On the Atlantic Edge (Dingwall: Sandstone, 2006), pp. 29–30.
135 ‘Wheeling flights … to suck the deck’: Ian Stephen, ‘Groundswell’, in Adrift/Napospas vlnám (Olomouc: Periplum, 2007), p. 72.
Chapter 7: Peat
Pages
146 He has devoted himself to the exploration … sixteenth century onwards: see, for instance, Finlay MacLeod (ed.), Togail Tìr/Marking Time: The Map of the Western Isles (Stornoway: Acair, 1998); Finlay MacLeod, The Healing Wells of the Western Isles (Stornoway: Acair, 2000); Finlay MacLeod, The Chapels in the Western Isles (Stornoway: Acair, 2007); Finlay MacLeod, The Norse Mills of Lewis (Stornoway: Acair, 2009).
146 ‘Sandwalk … the thinking path’: see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 10; and Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 69.
153 ‘drifts of sparkling bog-cotton … commemorate stories and people’: Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod, A-mach an Gleann (Stornoway: privately published, 2007).
154 ‘a promontory or point … narrow neck’: see the ‘Onomasticon’ in Richard V. Cox’s magnificent The Gaelic Place-Names of Carloway, Isle of Lewis: Their Structure and Significance (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2002).
157 ‘Èig’: the term is taken from ‘Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary’, a document running to four pages and 126 Gaelic terms, detailing the language used in three Lewisian townships (Shawbost, Bragar and Shader) to describe and designate features of the local moorland and peat-banks. Many of the terms are remarkable for their compressive precision; the whole is a deeply moving document. It was compiled between 2005 and 2007 by Finlay MacLeod, Anne Campbell and two others. For a much longer discussion of this document, and the relationship between toponyms and place-intimacy, see Robert Macfarlane, ‘A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’, in Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, ed. Gareth Evans and Di Robson (London Art Events, 2010), pp. 106–30.
158 ‘Walking barefoot … flavour in the mouth’: LM, pp. 103–4.
160 ‘During the summer of 1935 … became much easier’: Frank Fraser Darling, A Herd of Red Deer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 27.
