The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (41 page)

As I walk, scenes open in my memory from the paths I have followed, coming fast and clear as lantern slides: the green phosphorescent wake of
Broad Bay
as she trundles north to Sula Sgeir, the white paths of the English chalk country, Manus’s three-stoned cairn-tracks overflown by gannets, the mirror-line of the Broomway. Bodily recollections surface: the rasp of limestone in Palestine, the slim iron needles of the Spanish pine woods, the sandstone dust of the Black Mountains, so soft underfoot. The remembered senses of spaces small and wide: the beehive shieling set in the open moor of Lewis, the cool interior of the
qasr
near Ramallah, the dark glassy water under a stone arch on the Shiants. And so many people, so many path-followers.

Onwards, northwards, following the ancient footprints. Salt in the breeze, salt in the nose. The great cumulus cloud continues its slow-motion explosion: burly
bosses
growing out of themselves,
volute
s and
corbels
, gullies,
serac
s and great white
bolls
. A lateral shear-line at the cloud’s base, below which hang black sheets of rain. Northwards, the man and I reach a patch of small footprints: children playing in the mud. Two children are there now, today, jumping about barefoot. Suddenly I feel a tidal pull homewards, to my own children, wanting to keep them safe against harm and time.

The dating of the Formby footprints was achieved by means of a technique known as optically stimulated luminescence. OSL relies on the chronometric abilities of quartz granules. If kept in darkness – if buried in mud, for instance – quartz steadily attracts electrons to itself. Quartz samples are obtained from the site to be dated; they are kept unpolluted by the light and are taken to a laboratory, where they are irradiated by a neon beam. The neon causes the quartz to discharge its hoarded electrons, and the measured rate and quantity of electron discharge gives a reliable indication of the length of time the quartz has been in darkness. A final trail of white stones, marking time, showing the way back.

Images arise, gleaned from the miles on foot. White stones, white horses, flying islands, glowing eyes, mirages, drowned lands, dreams of flying, reversals and doublings, rights of way and rites of way, falcons and maps: the images move as brass spheres in an
orrery
, orbiting and converging in unlikely encounter. There is a flickering to order; gathered details are sealed by the stamp of the anterior. The land itself, filled with letters, words, texts, songs, signs and stories. And always, everywhere, the paths, spreading across counties and countries, recalled as pattern rather than as plot, bringing alignments and discrepancies, elective affinities, shifts from familiar dispositions. I imagine the Earth seen from an altitude so impossibly great that retrospect is possible as well as prospect, and that the prints of millennia of human walking are visible, the shimmering foil of our species.

Northwards, onwards. One of the prints, a right foot, is beginning to stand above the mud, as if the mark is the impress of another figure standing on the mirror-line, I on the
recto
and he on the
verso
.

The mountains of Snowdonia curve away to the south-west, drawing the eye. Anglesey is just visible as a shadow island through the haze. Three rooks strut on the beach ahead; a fourth lands and the group flaps off north. Inland, a sparrowhawk settles snug among alder branches, slyly hidden, orange-eyed. A plastic bag snagged on the marram shivers in the wind. Gulls fly over in Vs and Ws.

I stop by the last footprint, 5,000 years after setting out, my track ceasing where his does. I look back along the track-line to my south. The light tilts again and suddenly the water-filled footprints are mirrors reflecting the sky, the shuddering clouds and whoever looks into them.

Author’s Note

This book could not have been written by sitting still. The relationship between paths, walking and the imagination is its subject, and much of its thinking was therefore done – was only possible – while on foot. Although it is the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart, it need not be read after or in the company of its predecessors. It tells the story of walking a thousand miles or more along old ways in search of a route to the past, only to find myself delivered again and again to the contemporary. It is an exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt ancient paths, of the tales that tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and trespass, of songlines and their singers and of the strange continents that exist within countries. Above all, this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.

Notes

List of abbreviations used in the notes

ACP
: Edward Thomas,
The Annotated Collected Poems
, ed. Edna Longley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008)

AIE
: W. H. Hudson,
Afoot in England
(1909; Oxford: Beaufoy Books, 2010)

CET
: Edward Thomas,
The Childhood of Edward Thomas: A Fragment of Autobiography and the War Diary
(1938; London: Faber and Faber, 1983)

ETGB
: Edward Thomas,
Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley
, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)

GB
: Edward Thomas,
George Borrow: The Man and His Books
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1912)

IW
: Edward Thomas,
The Icknield Way
(1913; London: Constable, 1916)

LFY
: Eleanor Farjeon,
Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years
(1958; Stroud: Sutton, 1997)

LM
: Nan Shepherd,
The Living Mountain
(1977; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011)

RJ
: Edward Thomas,
Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work
(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909)

SC
: Edward Thomas,
The South Country
(London: J. M. Dent, 1909)

SLET
: Edward Thomas,
Selected Letters of Edward Thomas
, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

USW
: Helen Thomas,
Under Storm’s Wing
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1988)

WOW
: Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (eds.),
Ways of Walking
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)

Epigraphs

Pages

vii
‘Much has been written … of the road’: IW
, p. 13.

vii
‘My eyes were in my feet’ LM
, p. 46.

Chapter 1: Track

Pages

5
‘All things are engaged … print of the seal’
: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Complete Works
, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4), vol. 4, pp. 261–2.

Chapter 2: Path

Pages

13
‘Always, everywhere … symmetrical or meandering’
: Thomas A. Clark, ‘In Praise of Walking’, in
Distance & Proximity
(Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2000), p. 15.

15
Utsi’s Stone
: I am grateful for this detail to Hayden Lorimer, ‘Herding Memories of Humans and Animals’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
24:4 (2006), 497–518 (514).

16
‘pointedly condemned … female connoisseurs’
: Thomas De Quincey,
Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
, ed. David Wright (1862; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 53–4.

16
‘They give me joy as I proceed’
: John Clare, ‘Rural Scenes’, in
The Poems of the Middle Period 1822–1837
, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 585.

16
‘My left hand hooks … a plain public road’
: Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
(1855), in
Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose
(New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 82.

16
It is one of the significant differences … labyrinth should exist
: It is perhaps the chief paradox of the English footpath network that it came into being chiefly as a result of the Parliamentary Enclosures Acts of c.1750–1850. Prior to the Acts, large areas of land were ‘common’; as the Acts were passed it became necessary to define the rights and duties of landowners, and the extent of their landownings, by means of hedges and fences (preventing access) and footpaths (designating and permitting, but also implicitly limiting access). Various paths (previously permissive) vanished; new ones appeared (and were protected by bye-laws), but the openness of the landscape, and the freedom to move wilfully within it, was compromised. Thus the legal birth of the footpath system shows it to be on the one hand a function of freedom, on the other of trammelment. See for a brilliant and impassioned account of this history of access, Marion Shoard,
This Land Is Our Land
(1987; London: Gaia, 1997).

19
‘several books in the Manchu-Tartar dialect … no great difficulty’
: this story has had various tellings. I draw here on that given in Herbert Jenkins,
The Life of George Borrow
(London: John Murray, 1912), pp. 94–104. Edward Thomas repeats a version of it briefly but with pleasure in GB, pp. 125–6.

19
‘the Horrors’
: Jenkins,
Life of George Borrow, passim
; and
GB
, p. 131.

19
‘There’s night and day, brother … wish to die’
: George Borrow,
Lavengro
(London: John Murray, 1851), p. 156.

20
‘charm of the unknown’
:
AIE
, p. 7.

20
‘the longest walk … on record’
: Charles F. Lummis,
A Tramp Across the Continent
(1892; Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), p. 3.

20
‘going out … was really going in’
: Linnie Marsh Wolfe (ed.),
John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 439.

21
‘wildlings’
: Henry Williamson,
Tarka the Otter
(1927; London: Book Club Associates, 1985), p. 142.

21
‘chipped from the breastbone’
: Henry Williamson, unpublished letter to Dennis McWilliam, 11 June 1968. Later in his life Williamson’s folk notion of the ‘land’ soured into a troubling sympathy with fascism.

21
‘thronged by souls unseen … man dead’
: John Masefield,
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
(London: Macmillan, 1918), vol. 2, p. 62.

21
‘slip back out of this modern world
’:
AIE
, p. 14.

21
‘ghost and a ghost-to-be’
: the translation is that given by the American novelist Howard Norman in ‘On the Poet’s Trail’,
National Geographic
(November 2008), 36.

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.