The Disappearing Line

The Solitary Walker on Hadrian's Wall. (Photo taken by George at Transit Notes.)

Walking was not always considered the normal, pleasurable, everyday activity that it is now. In eighteenth-century England the foot traveller could be viewed with suspicion and disdain:   

A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man or an out-of-the-way being who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by every body that meets him . . . 

In England any person undertaking so long a journey on foot is sure to be looked upon and considered as either a beggar, or a vagabond, or some necessitous wretch, which is a character not much more popular than that of a rogue . . . 

To what various, singular, and unaccountable fatalities and adventures are not foot-travellers exposed, in this land of carriages and horses?

CARL PHILIPP MORITZ

This all changed with the Romantic writers and poets. Wordsworth (and his sister Dorothy), Coleridge, Hazlitt and De Quincey were all prodigious walkers. This extract is from Wordsworth's The Prelude — for me one of the finest poems ever written. Whenever I read the words 'its disappearing line' and 'a guide into eternity, / At least to things unknown and without bound' I get an excited thrill:

I love a public road: few sights there are

That please me more: such object hath had power

O'er my imagination since the dawn

Of childhood, when its disappearing line,

Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep

Beyond the limits that my feet had trod,

Was like a guide into eternity,

At least to things unknown and without bound.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Hazlitt's essay On Going a Journey is a key piece of writing for the solo, independent walker:

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, Nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone . . .

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticising hedgerows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I like more elbow-room and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude . . .

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters . . . that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself . . .

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours march to dinner — and then to thinking! I laugh I run, I leap, I sing for joy.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

One of my New Year's resolutions is to do more walking in 2014 than I did in 2013.

A Happy New Year to everyone, and happy walking!

(All the above passages are taken from that excellent book by Morris Marples, Shanks's Pony: a Study of Walking, first published in 1959.)  

Walking As A Cultural And Aesthetic Act (8)

Camino, Spain

Nowadays we take it for granted that walking is a laudable pastime and recreational activity. We tend to give a positive nod to the walkers we see: they are taking exercise, they are getting out in the fresh air, they are enjoying being part of nature. All Good Things. It was not always thus.

Up until the late eighteenth century no one walked unless they could help it, unless they were poor and could not afford horse, carriage or coach. And, for the ubiquitous poor, walking was not always a pleasurable pursuit. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself - the practical, indeed the only way to drive cattle and pigs to market, to reach crops grown on feudal agricultural strips, to visit friends and family. Beyond the village, routes were uncertain, if not dangerous. Highwaymen and footpads roamed the highways and byways, and folk in other settlements could be suspicious of, or downright hostile to, strangers. Even as late as 1782 the German minister Carl Moritz, walking across England, found himself abused by innkeepers, and ejected from hostelries where he wished to spend the night. His crime? He was on foot! He wrote: A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.

But, by the early nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Influenced by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who originated the idea of the 'noble savage' living free and uncorrupted in the wild, poets and writers like William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau wholeheartedly embraced the cultural, aesthetic and moral value of nature. And, to get close to nature, you had to walk through it. Thoreau's two-year sojourn in a hut by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is well known. He wrote: When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

And Wordsworth - often accompanied by his sister, Dorothy, or fellow Romantics like Coleridge or De Quincey - must have walked tens of thousands of miles during his lifetime. He would regularly cover fifteen or twenty miles a day, and, even when at home in his Lakeland cottage, would stride endlessly up and down the garden in a creative reverie. Walking in nature gave him solace and inspiration, and he would commonly compose his poems while walking, rather than at his desk. To return to Thoreau, Thoreau also wrote: When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' Wordsworth's masterpiece of a poem, The Prelude, is really just a long walk in words. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, this walking lark really caught on. Tourism was invented - helped by the boom of the railways - and people travelled further, and walked further, to admire and be awestruck at picturesque views, raging cataracts and terrifying mountain scenery. Hikers and climbers started to explore the European Alps and other mountain chains. Souvenirs were manufactured, and cameras began to record it all. The activity of walking also began to appear in the literature of the day. If you read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you'll find they are full of people walking.