The Next Pilgrimage

The long straight track.

Much of the time, we are willing to do almost anything rather than face the unknown, the wilderness. When we drive in our cars, we'll go on for endless miles, rather than admit we're lost. We drive our lives that same way until a crisis stops us. But that fear blunts our experience of the world, doesn't it?

. . . if you're lost enough, then the experience of now is your guide to what comes next. None of us knows what comes the next second.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

Oh, a storm is threatening / My very life today / If I don't get some shelter / Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away THE ROLLING STONES Gimme Shelter

The pilgrimage I'm undertaking soon may well be a challenging one: many days, if not weeks, of solitude — with cheap accommodation, or indeed any accommodation, thin on the ground. I'm taking a tent. And this time I'm making sure my pack weight is nearer a manageable 20lb than a punishing 30lb. I came up with the following 'ideal' guidelines, which I'm carrying with me in my head (zero weight!). Wish me luck.

     

Twelve Zen Guidelines for the Long Distance Pilgrim and Walker

1. To walk — and live — fully in the present.

2. To neither regret wrong turnings (the past) nor yearn for destinations (the future).

3. To walk — and live — mindfully, aware of and focused on what’s going on around, through the five senses, and what’s happening inside, through thoughts and feelings.

4. To try to get beyond desire, craving, negativity and division.

5. To let go.

6. To welcome intuition and the imagination, and to use them creatively.

7. To walk — and live — simply, thriftily and economically, consciously making each coin, each morsel of food and each mouthful of drink, count.

8. To be grateful for the luxurious, comparative freedom of a long-distance walk: going where I want, quickly or slowly, directly or obliquely.

9. To be grateful that, for a period of time, I am not subject to the usual routine dictates and compromises of family and society.

10. To consider walking a kind of art form.

11. To consider each step, breath, mile, thought, feeling, action, encounter, sight and insight a kind of prayer.

12. To try to love unconditionally.

Footpath through poppy fields.

For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know myself?

ROBERT MACFARLANE The Old Ways

The Old Ways

Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. EDWARD THOMAS The Icknield Way (1913)

My eyes were in my feet . . . NAN SHEPHERD The Living Mountain (1977)

All things are engaged in writing their history . . . Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal. RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1850)  

Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways is one of the finest books on walking I've ever read. Though it's about so much more than walking — it's about the whole world. Everything is contained in and fans out from the paths we take, whether our journey lies inwards or outwards. The tracks we make, our footprints in the snow, are our witness and record, our narrative and our history.

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.

ROBERT MACFARLANE The Old Ways, Author's Note

An Adventurous Life

Robert MacFarlane reviewing Artemis Cooper's new biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor in yesterday's Guardian...

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Patrick Leigh Fermor's legendary life is that it lasted as long as it did. He died in 2011 at the age of 96, having survived enough assaults on his existence to make Rasputin seem like a quitter. He was car-bombed by communists in Greece, knifed in Bulgaria, and pursued by thousands of Wehrmacht troops across Crete after kidnapping the commander of German forces on the island. Malaria, cancer and traffic accidents failed to claim him.

He was the target of a long-standing Cretan blood vendetta, which did not deter him from returning to the island, though assassins waited with rifles and binoculars outside the villages he visited. He was beaten into a bloody mess by a gang of pink-coated Irish huntsmen after he asked if they buggered their foxes. He smoked 80 cigarettes a day for 30 years, and often set his bed-clothes ablaze after falling asleep with a lit fag in hand. He drank epically, and would 'drown hangovers like kittens' in breakfast pints of beer and vodka. As a young SOE agent in Cairo in 1943, the centrepiece of his Christmas lunch was a turkey stuffed with Benzedrine pills; at the age of 69 he swam the Hellespont — and was nearly swept away by the current.

Yes, Leigh Fermor was an insurer's nightmare, an actuary's case-study, and his longevity was preposterous. He might best be imagined as a mixture of Peter Pan, Forrest Gump, James Bond and Thomas Browne. He was elegant as a cat, darkly handsome, unboreable, curious, fearless, fortunate, blessed with a near-eidetic memory, and surely one of the great English prose stylists of his generation.

Mosques in Istanbul (Constantinople). Image: Wikimedia Commons. Attribution: Christiaan Briggs.

Fermor wrote two of the last century's outstanding travel books — A Time Of Gifts (1977) and its sequel Between The Woods And The Water (1985) — about a walk he did as a young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. I've read and enjoyed immensely both these books. The final volume of the trilogy will appear posthumously from John Murray next year. I can hardly wait.

To read MacFarlane's whole piece, please click here.

The Quiet Pilgrimage

The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience. HILAIRE BELLOC

Place works on the pilgrim . . . that's what pilgrimage is for. ROWAN WILLIAMS

Not long before I went to Spain, I read an essay in the journal Artesian by a Czech writer called Vaclav Cilek, cryptically entitled Bees of the Invisible. Cilek — himself a long-distance wanderer — proposed a series of what he called 'pilgrim rules', of which the two most memorable were the 'Rule of Resonance' ('A smaller place with which we resonate is more important than a place of great pilgrimage') and the 'Rule of Correspondence' ('A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.') 'The number of quiet pilgrims is rising,' he observed. 'Places are starting to move. On stones and in forests one comes across small offerings — a posy made from wheat, a feather in a bunch of heather, a circle from snail shells.' I had come across such DIY land-art often myself: the signs of unnumbered 'quiet pilgrimages', of uncounted people improvising odd journeys in the hope that their voyages out might become voyages in.

Perhaps, though, each era imagines itself to be increasingly on pilgrimage. As Merlin Coverley notes in The Art of Wandering, the pilgrim is among the most venerable figures of literature. The true boom-years of religious pilgrimage were, of course, medieval — but the Victorian decades saw a strong surge of interest in pilgrimage both as practice and metaphor. Hilaire Belloc's bestsellers The Path to Rome (1902) and The Old Road (1904) — the former an account of what he called his 'mirific and horripilant adventure' of walking to the Holy Sepulchre — carried that interest over into the 20th century. 'Pilgrimage,' wrote Belloc permissively and encouragingly, 'ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs.'

ROBERT MACFARLANE From his recent Guardian essay Rites Of Way: Behind The Pilgrimage Revival. (You can read this excellent essay in its entirety here.)

Walking, Art And Nature (10)



Camino, Spain


I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. THOREAU Walking

The political philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) believed that human beings were inherently good, and that they were only corrupted by the evils of society. He gradually lived an ever simpler life, becoming closer and closer to nature, studying botany, and enjoying the solitary walks he recounted in his ten, classic meditations Reveries Of The Solitary Walker.

Walking, art and nature - these three things are so bound up in Rousseau, and, since his time, have been inextricably linked.  



Camino, Spain

Walking, art and nature. We think of Thoreau's ecstasies in Walden and in his Journals; the mystical outpourings of Richard Jefferies in The Story Of My Heart; William Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'; the labourer-poet John Clare's walks among the dispossessed pastures of English agricultural history; Gary Syder's Beat and Buddhist mountain treks; Richard Mabey's gentle, literary eco-strolls through the Chilterns and Norfolk; Robert Macfarlane's explorations on foot of Britain's wild places; John Constable walking and painting in Dedham Vale; JMW Turner walking and painting in Europe.    



Camino, Spain

As well as walking in nature being an inspiration for art and literature, walking itself can be an art form in its own right. Richard Long, whom I've written about before, gives walking a totemic resonance through natural artworks created on the walk, or even through the signature of the actual walk itself: its mark, footprint and track across the landscape.

 

Camino, Spain

Sadly (for me at least!) I've reached the end of my ten-part journey through walking country. I hope some of it has been inspirational, or at least informative. Most of all I hope that's it's motivated you to go walking, or, if you're walkers already (which I know many of you are), to go walking even more. It's a land without class, without prejudice, without materialism, without competition, without complication, without compromise, without celebrity culture, without bonds. Rousseau famously wrote at the beginning of The Social Contract: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Why don't you throw off those chains, and start walking?



Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain



Here's the Roman arch at Caparra in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I walked under it nearly a year ago on my pilgrimage along the Via de la Plata. Why don't you join me as I step beneath it again, right now? Let's walk together towards those distant hills, that blue horizon. You never know what we might find... 

Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain

Wild Creatures

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery. Quoted of an American wilderness expert by REBECCA SOLNIT in her book Wanderlust: A History Of Walking

So few wild creatures, relatively, remain in Britain and Ireland: so few, relatively, in the world. Pursuing our project of civilisation, we have pushed thousands of species towards the brink of disappearance, and many thousands more over that edge. The loss, after it is theirs, is ours. Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare's run, the hawk's high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise, that live by voices inaudible to you. ROBERT MACFARLANE The Wild Places

Wildness

There is wildness everywhere, if we only stop in our tracks and look around us. ROGER DEAKIN

He [Roger Deakin] was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby. ROBERT MACFARLANE

Throughout the course of his book, The Wild Places, and throughout the course of his ramblings in the British wild, Macfarlane comes to appreciate more and more that 'wildness' exists not only in the grand, majestic, panoramic places, such as Sutherland or the Cairngorms, but also in the close-at-hand, often-ignored topographies of small canvas, such as the plant-rich cracks and crevices in the Burren's limestone pavement, or the ancient, sunken holloways of the Dorset chalkhills. If you look carefully, these unseen landscapes can be found in the bend of a stream valley, in the undercut of a river bank, in copses and peat hags, hedgerows and quicksand pools ... in the margins, interzones and rough cusps of the country: quarry rim, derelict factory and motorway verge.

He also realises that you don't necessarily have to travel big distances from human habitation - to the Arctic tundra or the Siberian taiga for example - to encounter 'wildness'. It exists right there alongside human activity, bound up with human presence - such as in the 'cleared' valleys of the Scottish Highlands, which are haunted by the ghosts of former shielings and settlements; and in the earthworks and burial mounds, and tree rings and stone circles you find all over the British Isles, which speak eloquently of past human ritual and ceremonial.

He concludes that the uneasy opposition between culture and nature, between garden and wilderness, need not be the hard-to-reconcile division we may at first imagine. We can recognise and fulfil ourselves in both apparent polarities. But we do need them both. This is essential both for us and the planet. This is what it is to be properly human: to know what to cultivate and what to leave alone. I fear we have a lot to learn (or relearn) - before it is too late.

(My posts on Edward Abbey, and his book Desert Solitaire, also touch on this subject - if you are interested, click on 'Edward Abbey' under the LABELS widget on the right hand side of my blog.)

The photo was taken on Mount Etna in Sicily.

A Felt Relationship With The Natural World

In this modern age, very little remains that is real. GASTON REBUFFAT

Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? THOREAU

I've finally got round to reading Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places and I'm entranced. I share so many of the same sentiments of this author that it's uncanny. I loved his first book, Mountains Of The Mind, and I can't think why I haven't read this, his second book, until now. Macfarlane is one of our finest writers on landscape. He blends the scientific, the poetic and the philosophical so beautifully, and his use of language is compelling and original.

That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemd to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.

The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has done before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - it spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit amd ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird's sharp foot on one's outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one's upturned palm.

(Read my other posts on Robert Macfarlane by clicking on 'Robert Macfarlane' under the LABELS widget on the right hand side of my blog.)

Peregrine

Seeing Loren Webster's photo of a peregrine falcon yesterday reminded me of a book I bought the year before last by J. A. Baker called simply The Peregrine. It was originally published in 1967, but a new edition came out in 2005 with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, one of my favourite writers on wilderness. Very little is known about John Alec Baker, the author, except that he lived in Essex. Even the date of his death seems to be a mystery. Perhaps he is still alive?

The Latin name for the peregrine falcon is falco peregrinus. Falco means hook or sickle-shaped - a reference to its curved beak and claws. Peregrinus means foreigner, traveller, wanderer, pilgrim - undoubtedly an acknowledgement of its long migratory flights in spring and autumn, and also its lonely sky-gliding journeys in search of food. Peregrines are one of the fastest birds on earth, sometimes diving or 'stooping' at 100 miles per hour to kill their prey.

In Baker's book, a classic of natural history writing, nothing happens very much. But we become utterly absorbed in the peregrine's world. Baker is obsessed with the bird. He eats, sleeps and drinks nothing else. We, too, share almost as intensely in the bird's life as readers. The book's written in a style which is a mix of close observation and poetic imagination. From any page I could choose a quotation showing Baker's fine writing and demonstrating his close identification with the falcon. Just at random how about this:

Beyond the line of poplars, he circled and began to soar again. This time he pulled across the wind, rising swiftly to the north-west, moving far out and very high above the river valley. Gliding, spiralling, hovering, sculling, he seemed to be freed at last from his orchard obsession. Free! You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light. Along the escarpments of the river air he rose with martial motion. Like a dolphin in green seas, like an otter in the startled water, he poured through deep lagoons of sky up to the high white reefs of cirrus. When my arms were aching, and I could watch him no longer, he blurred into a tiny speck and vanished from the bright circle of my vision. Soon I found him again, and saw him grow larger. Gradually, steadily, he grew larger. From thousands of feet above the valley he was diving back to the orchard, which he was not yet ready to leave completely. He grew from a speck to a blur, to a bird, to a hawk, to a peregrine; a winged head shouldering down through the wind. With a rush, with a flash, with a whirr of wings, he came down to the hedge ten yards away from me. He perched, he preened, he looked around; not tired, not tested even, by his half-hour of festive flight. With the whole valley to choose from, he had chosen to came back to the orchard where I was standing. There is a bond: impalpable, indefinable, but it exists.

The Romance Of The Open Air

Recently there's been a flurry of people doing the Robert Louis Stevenson thing and sleeping out under the stars. (Though without the donkey.) First there was Robert Macfarlane, nightwalking and open-air sleeping in his wonderful new book, The Wild Places. Now we have John Hee and Weird Darren making the most of those last few warm summer nights with their bivouac on a Dorset beach.

I love sleeping outdoors too - all that fresh air, the rush of the wind and the rain, the shriek of owls, the bark of foxes, gosh it can be noisy out there - but so far it's always been in a tent or some kind of shelter. Except on three occasions long ago. When I was very young.

The first was on the beach at Nice on the French Riviera. Lovely to drift off to sleep with the peaceful, hypnotic sound of waves slapping shingle. Not so good when a gang of opportunistic thieves descend on all the hippy overnighters and steal their valuables.

The second was on a riverside seat by the banks of the Seine in Paris - with a friend, two tramps and several bottles of cheap red wine for company. (No doubt I was pretending to be down and out like George Orwell. All very bohemian.) I woke with a start in the early hours of the morning - and found a rat actually sitting on top of my sleeping bag!

The third was on a street bench next to a tram stop in Frankfurt, Germany. No sleeping bag or bivvy sack involved at all this time - just the clothes I'd been wearing the night before in the Sinkkasten jazz club in Mainzstrasse. I woke to the hostile glares of Frankfurter businessmen on their way to work. I think an excessive amount of lager and wine had something to do with it.

Snowy Woods And Pilgrim Islands

The reviews are now appearing for Robert Macfarlane's new and eagerly awaited book The Wild Places and they are universally ecstatic. Look at the notices from The Sunday Times or from The Scotsman for example. I mentioned how much I was looking forward to reading this book in a post a few weeks ago. I don't think I'll be disappointed when I get my hands on a copy. In yesterday's Guardian he describes how he went about researching the book: I travelled widely, and I tried to travel wildly. I walked, swam and climbed through landscape and seascape. Wherever possible, I slept out. I travelled in all four seasons, in sunlight, rain and blizzard, and by night as well as day. I also sought out the company of native guides: people who had lived in those landscapes for many years, or came to know them intimately as scientists, artists, shepherds or foresters - people who had acquired the wisdom of sustained contact with a place... I had a great deal of fun. I spent nights out on cliff edges and distant bays, in snowy woods and on pilgrim islands. I walked up frozen rivers by night, swam into sea caves, and one midnight I wallowed in a phosphorescent Irish Sea. I slept near a shearwater colony (noisy), and under the sky route of thousands of migrating geese (deafening); in a winter wood (cold) and on the summit of Ben Hope (bone-chilling). I became lonely, tired, wet, midge-bitten, irritated with nature and, most often, very happy. If this account of getting out into the wilderness - living in it for a while, sleeping in it, experiencing it first-hand - doesn't inspire us, I don't know what will...

The Wild Places

Talking of all things wild and wonderful, I'm eagerly anticipating what will be the publishing event of the year - the new book by Robert Macfarlane: The Wild Places: A Wonder-Voyage, due out in September from Granta. (His first book, the uncategorizable and quite brilliant Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination was published to great acclaim in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award.) In this, his second book, Macfarlane seeks out the last remaining wilderness places of the British Isles, including the Lleyn Peninsula, the Isle of Skye, Connemara, Rannoch Moor, the Cumbrian fells, and, surprisingly, even the Essex salt marshes and the ancient hollow ways of Dorset. He wanted to see with new eyes his local landscapes or, as he puts it, the undiscovered country of the nearby, and found that Britain was an archipelago in its own right. His prose, as always, will be poetic, lyrical, exquisite, dense and rich. The type of book is a hybrid one - a blend of history, natural history, topography, biography, autobiography; the personal, the literary, the factual, the mythological: a genre-busting mix of experience and imagination. I expect it will annoy all hardcore mountain men and serious power-trekkers. I just can't wait to read it.