Category: The Book of the Walker

It’s a year today since I started working on my project about the South Downs Way. What started as a theme for some linked short stories has sprawled in the most amazing manner, and become something much more ambitious. This is by far the largest writing project I’ve worked on.

The full project will emerge as around 150 short stories all based upon the hiking trail. One of my favourite things about hiking is how the stories of the landscape and the walkers intertwine. There are the stories of the places you pass through, and the stories you swap with your companions. And then there are people you encounter, the little things they tell you. This is something you only experience when travelling at two miles an hour and I wanted the collection to capture this.

I’ve spent most of my life in Sussex, so my own stories are spread out along a section of this trail. But I want this to be more than just an anthology of Sussex stories (with a few in Hampshire on the west end of the trail); I want this to be a novel. During my MA, Nicholas Royle made a passing comment that “you can’t make a novel out of vignettes”. Producing the satisfaction of a novel from tiny independent stories is going to be tricky, but I’m sure I can pull it off.

I’ve produced three books so far. While the nights are drawn in, and I’m walking on the Downs less, I’ve been re-organising things a little, and preparing lots of new stories to add to the 44 published this year.

It’s the last day of September, and I’ve just got hold of copies of my latest collection of stories about the South Downs Way. I’m really pleased with how this has turned out. There’s a mix of stories here, but I’m starting to see how the whole collection will fit together.

If you’d like a copy, let me know in the comments and I will put one in the post to you.

Now to start work on part 4. I’m considering not finishing the stories on physics just yet. Instead I’m thinking about writing a collection of stories about shepherds, churches, the devil, and the shepherd god Hastur. Let’s see.

I feel like I’ve been suffocating this summer: sitting indoors, every day the same, becoming so bored that I pretty much stopped walking. At the start of August, I decided to waste no more days sitting inside. Last Saturday (the 15th), I headed to Pyecombe with a couple of friends and set off east towards Ditchling Beacon.

The day was overcast and cloudy, with visibility heavily restricted. Coming up from Pyecombe it felt as if we were heading in the wrong direction until we reached the ridge on the Downs.

It was another day of excellent foraging. The brambles were thick with fruit, all freshly-washed by the rain.

We stopped for lunch under a thorny tree where the ground was dry, just near an empty dew pond, and shared our picnic lunch. It was a place I’ve stopped before.

The coffee wagon was at Ditchling Beacon, same as it had been the last time I’d been here, just before lockdown. We bought drinks for the next stage of the journey, cutting back through the hills to the woods near Stanmer Park. Here, someone had written ominous messages in chalk on the trees:

The Stanmer estate was as lovely as ever. And it was good to see the sculpture near the house, which we used to refer to inaccurately as ‘the bear tree’.

It was a good short walk, and I’d avoided the promised storms once again. I was starting get complacent, telling my friend on the Sunday walk that the weather would be OK, whatever the forecast said. (Besides which, as they say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only a poor choice of outfit).

We took the train to Southease where we joined the South Downs way, intending to walk west until we reached the A27 crossing, when we would head back into Brighton.

It’s a familiar stretch of path, but one I love. There is the Norman church at Southease, with its round tower, currently closed:

Between Southease and Rodmell is a lovely valley, which heads towards Telscombe if followed all the way.

As we headed onto the yellow brick road, we could hear thunder behind us, and Seaford was blotted out by the clouds. We were going to be caught in the rain. It wasn’t the epic storm we’d been promised, with a disappointing lack of lightning, but it was wet. The choices were to head straight to Lewes (2 miles away), head to the coastal fringe to get an Uber (3 miles), or carry on the the current walk. My friend was getting soaked so we decided to head down the hill to Kingston and, from there, aim for Lewes Station, guided in by the This Way markers. The route led us along the meadows to the edge of Lewes.

The highlight of the walk was the wild sunflowers growing near the yellow-brick road. Two short walks across a weekend, but good opportunities to explore small slices of the South Downs Way. And both walks, despite the weather, were better than staying cooped up indoors.

I booked a Thursday off to do some hiking, waking up ridiculously early to travel to Amberley before rush hour. I’m not actually sure whether rush hour is a thing that still happens, but decided not to find out. My colleagues had warned me that there would be thunderstorms all day, and when I left home at 5am it was raining after days of hot weather. The weather turned out to be pretty mild, with some cooling winds.

I’d walked this route recently, and I remembered the way pretty well, knowing the paths before I saw the signposts – including the first devious turn where the signpost is hidden by a fresh growth of bushes. It took a little time to get my muscles moving. After my last trip, I’d actually packed enough water, so my rucksack was heavier than usual.

I ate breakfast on a hill barrow. The path around Amberley is a good one, bouncing over hilltops where you can’t see too far ahead, and there are always new views unrolling. All along the way were bushes thick with blackberries and I plucked a couple of them, loving the sweet taste and crunching the pips.

The walk is a familiar one – along the hilltops towards the Adur valley, passing through a pig farm on one side, then Truleigh Hill on the other, before following the edge of the Downs to the Dyke. I think the bullet-riddled roadsign on the A24 has been replaced, but still has the ‘bullet holes’. I also passed three signs within a short distance of the road which gave different distances to the Adur.

I reached Chanctonbury Ring about 10am, where I stopped and read for a while. I am writing about that stretch of the walk for someone else, so I won’t not talk about it here. It was a good, calm walk, relaxed and enjoyable, more so than the frantic ones in the first days after lockdown was lifted.

A while back, I went to a talk by writer Tristan Gooley. He’s an excellent public speaker, and in an hour gave the audience the feeling that, just by paying more attention, we could understand the landscape. And, a few days ago, I read a piece in the Guardian about Nick Hayes’ Book of Trespass. Walking along, I thought about how, in the English landscape, there is more that needs to be understood about fences than birds.

The South Downs Way ran between two fences much of the way. Most of the time, the ownership is hidden. I can’t read the landscape in terms of ownership, and how I’m not supposed to. And then I found a little sign on a fencepost, showing the local farmer. It told me that the land I walked through was owned by ‘The Norfolk Estate’. This is actually owned by a hereditary line dates back to the 13th Century and King Edward I.

Another thing I’d been reading recently was James Meek’s How to Grow a Weetabix an excellent article about farming, which looked at the economics – how much the subsidies paid to some of the richest landowners are. There has been so much in the press about the difficult financial problems farmers have. The solutions always involve subsidies of one sort or another – rather than, say, removing the rent on the land they pay for. And why are the richest people in the country receiving subsidies in the first place?

After encountering a reference in a review, I ended up reading a lot about Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie. To my shame, I’d not read her books before, although I’ve since picked up Findings on the Kindle. What attracted to me about Jamie was her aggressive critique of nature writing, particularly how it relates to class and gender.

Considering such things is not just virtue signalling on my part; and any responses need to go beyond writers just acknowledging their privilege. I think there is a deeper question about how people from comfortable backgrounds justify their writing (in the same way that many writers from minorities might feel forced to as a matter of course).

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to my writing about the South Downs Way. It’s not simply about being ‘better’, which reinforces the idea of writing as a competition for scarce audiences. For me, it is about being aware of what makes my writing worth showing to anyone else. If I simply write from a position of privilege, I am merely a ventriloquist for society. Instead, I need to ask what I can say that nobody else can, and make sure I am doing that.

Jamie wrote in her 2008 LRB essay:

What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-​class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! … Here to boldly go, “discovering”, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.

Jamie is not fond of nature writing, saying in one interview “ I can’t even say the words ‘nature writers’, I can’t get it out of my gob … “. In an New Statesman piece, Death of the naturalist: why is the “new nature writing” so tame?, Mark Cocker linked Jamie to another writer, Jim Perrin, who

argues that new nature writing is quintessentially an urban literature with a primarily metropolitan audience. [Perrin] suggests that for both author and reader, engagement with nature is an act of remembrance rather than a daily, lived experience. Given that most Britons now dwell in cities, one could argue that it is therefore a perfect literature for our times.

As Cocker continues, this literature often involves:

clothing a landscape in fine writing, both the writer’s own and that of other historical figures… John Crace’s mischievous “Digested Read” for the Guardian of Macfarlane’s latest book, Landmarks, defines “Macfarlish” as “the process of praising other authors to make your own book better by association”

In a 2019 Guardian interview, Jamie talked about how nature writing “has been colonised – by middle-class white men“, suggesting that “if you understand how that’s happened, you understand the whole godforsaken political state of this country.” The same type of people as usual have emerged at the top of a field that Jamie says was “barely there” 15 years ago. The same calm competence ends up running things again.

One of the assumptions this leads to is the idea of ‘the wild’. This means different things to different people, depending on how secure they feel, their sense of safety, and, yes, their financial background:

There’s nothing wild in this country: every square inch of it is ‘owned’, much has seen centuries of bitter dispute; the whole landscape is man-made, deforested, drained, burned for grouse moor, long cleared of its peasants or abandoned by them…

James also points out that our relationship to the wild has changed because

with our (almost) guaranteed food supplies, motor engines, vaccines and antibiotics, [we] have begun to make our peace with these wild places, and to seek recreation in land which was once out to kill us, where we can be reassured, in some way

These points raised by Jamie link in with the issues raised by Angus Carlyle when he was interviewed on Justin Hopper’s Uncanny Landscapes Podcast. Where does the authority and competence of these writers come from. Kathleen Jamie describes our interaction with this figure:

The danger of this writing style is that there will be an awful lot of ‘I’. If there is a lot of ‘I’ … then it won’t be the wild places we behold, but the author. We see him swimming, climbing, looking, feeling, hearing, responding, being sensitive, and because almost no one else speaks, this begins to feel like an appropriation, as if the land has been taken from us and offered back, in a different language and tone and attitude. Because it’s land we’re talking about, this leads to an unfortunate sense that we’re in the company, however engaging, of another ‘owner’, or if not an owner, certainly a single mediator.

There is an important question here about how I write about the world around me. How can I move beyond an assumption of universality? How do I move beyond simply explaining, particularly when that act of explaining often masks an act of appropriation? How do I introduce a space for doubt, for appreciating the beautiful spectrum of approaches other people will bring to a natural space? I think there is a space to talk about my experience of landscapes, but I guess the question is how to do that without assuming that my subjective experience is everything.

Justin Hopper, author of The Old Weird Albion, recently launched a podcast called Uncanny Landscapes. The first episode contained an interview with Angus Carlyle, a writer I’d not heard of before, but whose books I immediately hunted out.

The interview with Carlyle described something that has troubled me for a while. Carlyle was discussing the compilation of two of his books, Nightblooms and A Downland Index. Nightblooms contains poetry and photographs taken with a smartphone and torchlight while running on the downs. A Downland Index consists of a hundred pieces, each 100 words long.

Both books were initially written as entries on social media platforms – A Downland Index as “an obscure Tumblr”, and Nightblooms on Twitter and Instagram. While the use of these services in the book’s production is not foregrounded, Carlyle says that he was fascinated by the relationship between the timestamps used in these services, which put the uploaded item into an almost-legal framework, and the ambiguity of the thing being timestamped.

Carlyle used this to explore his feelings about nature writing. For Carlyle, such books depend on a “mantle of truth-telling“, but it is hard to know how authentic this is: “Did they really know at this time they described themselves knowing it?” There seems to be a “projection of a certain expertise… the nature writer is a virtuosic inhabitant of the familiar or unfamiliar. Even in the unfamiliar they rely on beautiful writing [or] a transparent reflection of their own emotions, reporting back their experience“. How do you seperate the lived experience from the writer’s later research?

The digital services used acted as witnesses to Carlyle’s immediate presence, exploring “how to use something as clean and digital and unnatural as the internet architecture around these clocks that are constantly logging activities like me uploading things… as a way of inserting some kind of doubt into the process of nature writing”.

It was an exciting discussion, and arrived while I was wrestling with a question around my own writing. I’d been asked to provide documentation of a favourite walk, but there seemed to be various traps around this. I did not want to fall into the role of a man wandering about noticing things then explaining them. Carlyle’s assertion of presense feels like an useful thing to consider.

I’m going to write more about Carlyle’s book soon, particularly A Downland Index. Indexes do not appear often enough in creative writing (one notable exception being JG Ballard’s story The Index.) Carylye begins his book with the index and it’s an interesting way to present a book. Why are there more entries for cars than chalk? How does this format affect my feelings about the coming book?

Justin’s podcast is beautifully produced, and his voice is perfect. The third volume arrived in my RSS reader, and I’m looking forward to listening to it this afternoon.