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I started reading Walking Home, Simon Armitage’s book on the Pennine Way, just before Armitage was appointed Poet Laureate – and I considered giving up on the book right then. Benjamin Zephaniah has already explained why honours in the name of the British Empire are a bad thing:  Armitage has compounded the shame of his CBE with his recent appointment as a paid flunky.

Still, Walking Home is not a bad book. At the start, Armitage slightly oversells the toughness of the walk – I guess he’s trying to add some drama – but I’ve seen some fairly unfit people get by just through persevering. The book that follows is a gentle description of the people he meets, the scenery and his poetry gigs along the way.

The best thing about the book was reliving the trail. Armitage does it in the less popular direction (i.e. into the wind) and was unluckier with the weather than most people – his experience of Pen-y-ghent was as rough as mine. There are some great descriptions, particularly an early one of the Cheviots – “The view in every direction is delicious: a solar system of summits, majestic but benign hills overlaid with lush grass and the odd rectangle of planted conifer., And, somewhat incongruously, in the far distance to the east, the sea.”

While Armitage says he wouldn’t walk the trail again, the book made me want to go back, not least because of things I’d missed. For once, I didn’t realise that Jodrell Bank was visible from the Pennine Way. And I’d love to walk the Cheviots again.

There’s something interesting about how walkers can have such different experiences of the same path. It reminded me of the way we interpret texts differently, based on what we bring to it ourselves, and the conditions at the time. The route might be the same, but the walk is different – just like we have different readings of the same text.

And there are similarities too. Armitage had the same sensations of space as I did, the amazement that our ‘overcrowded island’ contains areas so wild, so barren. Armitage also wonders about the flagstones, a thing of controversy for some walkers, since they make difficult paths accessible in tough weathers. Armitage points out that these huge stones are sinking and will, in time, disappear into the moorland.

The most disappointing thing about the book is that Armitage does not actually complete the trail – he abandons the final day for the comforts of home. I’ve spoken before about how we pick our own rules for hiking. But when you’ve chosen the terms of your walk, you have to complete it on those terms. Armitage’s failure to complete the last stage is only mentioned at the end of the book, where he tries to frame it as something that doesn’t really matter. This seemed dishonest.

Not completing the route is something of a trope in successful books about hiking, as Robert Moor pointed out in a 2015 New Yorker article, Why the Most Popular Hiking Memoirs Don’t Go the Distance. Discussing Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and Paul Coehlio’s The Pilgrimage, Moor asks “why are the three most famous accounts of hiking three of the world’s most famous long-distance trails written by people who did not hike the whole distance?” It’s a good question, and Walking Home provides further evidence that this is indeed A Thing.

 

Back in August 2017, I blogged about a walk around the London Road stone circle. Last week, I repeated the journey with a friend who lives nearby. It looks like a few of the stones have been lost to development, and that it might be time to form a London Road Stone Circle Conservation Alliance.

The circle itself dates back to 2014/5, and was placed there by an artist’s group, The Brighton School, with the assistance of  the council. It was funded by European Regional Development Fund, along with local developers under section 106. The artwork consists of numbered stones embedded in the pavement, in a circle that passes through Preston Circus, the level and Brighton station. It claims to be the first urban stone circle, and is a great addition to the environment of London Road.

We started with the first stone, at the south-west corned of Preston Circus. Despite the superstition that it is unlucky to count standing stones, we followed our way from 1-50. A few times the numbers leapt up suddenly with no explanation. There was a section on Stanley road that went straight from 14-7 according to the map we had. My friend Laura suggested the stones might have moved, like in the film Labyrinth.

The ones in the Level have been marked with scratches – perhaps the local tribes are superstitious, and have scratched the surface of the stones to ward off bad luck?

I think some of the stones were hidden in gardens when the circle was made and are genuinely inaccessible. But others are being lost due to development. We found stone 40 on Blackman Street, but couldn’t find another until 43, up near Brighton station. According to shardcore, 42 “survived the station renovation and is now visible again”, but 41 appears to have been buried under the new Unity building.

For me, this artwork is a powerful and moving engagement with place. The circle passes through several places that I’ve lived and loved, connecting them. It adds a shared myth to a place that definitely needs one; and it is now facing the first signs of neglect. I know there are bigger problems in Brighton; but I also think this is something worth protecting and keeping.

 

 

 

In the run-up to the Cerne-to-CERN pilgrimage, a tarot deck was compiled: each pilgrim had to create an image for the deck to represent themselves. My card was The Walker, because of the importance walking has to me. But, as we were reminded by the Book of Synchronicity during the pilgrimage: “More deeds and fewer words”. Despite being The Walker, I’ve not done all that much walking recently.

So, I’ve started wearing my fitbit and feeding it 10,000 steps a day. While the benefits of fitness trackers are debated, they’re good for establishing a basic threshold.

And I decided to do a bit of proper hiking last week. I got up early on Thursday morning and took the train to Amberley to join the South Downs Way. I was on the trail by 7:20am, possibly earlier than I needed to be.

Given I was on my local trail, and one I’d walked before, I was very casual about setting out – no hat, no suncream, only a little water. I didn’t remember the first bit of the trail, and I was nervous about finding my way – I had no map or guidebook for the day’s first section. But every trail has a grammar to their signposts. Some, like the Limestone Way are poorly marked, but the SDW has  regular signs, and it’s easy to tell if you’re straying – particularly with a quick check on google maps (yup, all the art’s going out of hiking).

It was good to be in the countryside. From the field beside me a flock of songbirds noisily took to the air, and I wish I’d installed that Shazam-for-birds app. It was almost an hour before I encountered anyone, a woman walking seven dogs. She was grateful for the weather being better than the day before, so that  she wouldn’t have to dry all the animals. I said I thought the job would be better than being in an office, even on a rainy day. She’d had such a job for twenty years, she told me, and became a dog-walker after being made redundant. It didn’t look like a bad life.

I stopped for a first break (and coffee) after almost exactly an hour, having eased the Fitbit past 10,000 steps. There aren’t many great places to sit on the South Downs Way, but I found a wooden fence bar and sat there – it looked sturdy enough. About to start eating, I shifted and found myself on my back, looking at the sky. The fence was less robust than I’d thought. I fixed it up, then found somewhere better to sit.

I took the second section slower, but a mere 8,000 more steps took me to Chanctonbury Ring, and it would have been a shame not to stop there. Immediately after that, I could see the i360, meaning that just a couple of hours into the walk, it felt like I was almost home.

The third section was the longest, from Chanctonbury Ring to the Truleigh Hill Youth Hostel. To get there I had to cross the Adur Valley and the A283. It’s a somewhat depressing section, as the west side of the valley goes through a large pig farm. The sight of so many doomed animals makes the atrocity of the meat industry feel very present, in a way that the cows and sheep I saw earlier hadn’t. I’d been reading about another environmental obscenity the day before, the Apple Airpod, and dark thoughts gathered with the rainclouds.

I listened to some music as I walked across the Adur valley, just ahead of the incoming rain showers – Nick  Cave’s Skeleton Tree, since the first song mentions the River Adur. I remembered once being told about a concept in Basque mythology, Adur, described to me as how everything that has a name exists.

Whenever I pass people and I’m listening to headphones, I take one of the ears out so I can say hello. It seems unfriendly to be walking past people and not being present in their environment. Maybe it’s silly, but I always felt annoyed when mountain bikers would roar past me on the South Downs Way, listening to music and ignoring other people.

Beeding Hill is a slog. I rushed up on my first time walking the Way, desperate to get it over with. A mile from the top is the Truleigh Hill Youth Hostel; I arrived there at noon and stopped for lunch in the cafe. Another forty minutes after lunch took me to Devil’s Dyke. It was only early, but I couldn’t be bothered with the trudge down to Hove, so called an Uber just before half one. The 18 miles had taken just over six hours, much faster than I should have walked.

But it was good to get out on the Downs again, to remind myself how much I enjoy walking. More, soon.

There are many examples of walking as a spiritual practise, but relatively few of walking as a magical act. One example comes from the film director Werner Herzog, whose text, Of Walking in Ice, is a remarkable little book. I first heard of it from Warren Ellis.

“it’s the story of Werner Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris to visit a dying friend — on the magical belief that if he walked there, the friend would not die. That’s six hundred miles. It’s kind of heartbreaking, in its way. And it’s the dead of winter, so Herzog is walking face-first into horizontal snowstorms for a lot of it. But it’s also very beautiful”

Herzog travelled through the bitterness of winter, in November and December 1974, because he felt German cinema could not manage without the critic Lotte Eisner.  Ellis describes it as “weirdly life-affirming, even as he treads through the dead world towards a deathbed”. Herzog is ill-prepared, and forced to break into holiday homes for shelter. Strange little narratives intrude upon the text, sometimes dreams, sometimes flights of fancy. The trudge of hiking is summoned almost as well as it is in the walking classic, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

There are issues with the book. Some people will consider Herzog as cheating when he accepts lifts – but then the rules of walking are very much set by oneself. There’s also a slightly strange manner in which Eisner’s sickness becomes a reason for Herzog’s quest, while not informing it very much. Her illness turns into his story, something that he has power over.

My edition of the book was missing what I consider the ending of the story. Herzog reached Eisner, and she survived her illness, going on to live until 1983. I can’t find a reference for it, but the story I was heard was that Eisner grew tired of life and asked to be released from the magic. Apparently, some editions include the valedictory speech where Herzog performed this mercy: “Lotte Eisner, we want you with us even when you are a hundred years old, but I herewith release you from this terrible incantation. You are now allowed to die. I say that without any frivolity, with deep respect for death, which is the only thing we can be sure of.”

As Geoff Nicholson points out in The Lost Art of Walking, “Walking in order to keep somebody alive, may be eccentric in the extreme, but if it works, then maybe there’s nothing eccentric about it whatsoever”