Walkers as visionaries

I'm very grateful to a reader of this blog for drawing my attention to Fieldwork, a collection of essays by Ronald Blythe, and in particular to ‘John Clare and footpath walking’ written for the John Clare Society Journal in 1995. It infects me with excitement, as reading sometimes does. It articulates, with wonderful clarity and economy, my own half-developed observations and ideas; and each time I read it, I learn something new.

The essay explores the role of paths (as opposed to roads and newly-forged ways) and our fairly recent but diminishing legacy of walking as a way to get somewhere which also becomes an incidental route towards learning. It draws attention to a peopled countryside, the fields as one-time places of social intercourse, where routes of work met and crossed. This was what I wanted to capture when I walked village paths in Kenya, meeting and chatting with people going about their ordinary business on foot; walking old ways such as drove roads with their legacy of footfall; and is one of the aspects of Thomas Hardy’s novels that I relish. The sense of travel along shared paths and social routes is very precious, when so much of our recreational walking now seems to suffer from both its deliberateness and its anticipation of relative solitude.

During the recent months of snow, I was intrigued to hear of a change in ‘normal’ patterns. A woman living a mile or so from the shop in Strathtay (where most people get to and from home entirely by car) told me how she and her neighbours, unable to get their cars out, established a new ritual. Each would walk the mile along the river to the shop, returning together, and finding that they enjoyed the unaccustomed pace and company. This would have been the natural way not long ago for rural dwellers, but I suspect now spring is here, and the roads are clear, it will be a rarity again.

Clare walked both for his travel to work – lime-burning or ploughing – and for his poetry, in order to look, to solve problems and to scribble furiously as he stopped in dips and hollows in the land. The effect of walking on a creative mind is profound, as Blythe says in this essay, ‘a great amount of our best poetry, novels and essays smell, not of the lamp, but of dust, mud, grit, pollen, and, I expect, sweat.’

But more interestingly for me, Blythe highlights how the experience of walking touches everyone: ‘.. it touches us because we are all descended from the walking men, the walking women, the walking children: and not so very long ago either. Sometimes we forget that it wasn't only the poets, novelists like Hardy, who had these wonderful ideas as they walked….. Certainly, these long walks to work, these long walks to school, these long walks with a friend, these long walks just to get out of the house, etc, were part of a pattern of life of people right up until the modern age. Whilst it happened, their minds ticked over in an extraordinary way. Because men and women haven't all been able to write, or paint, or make music about certain things, it doesn't mean they haven't experienced them...’

I particularly love Blythe's idea that countless people, not just writers, whilst on the way to work, or at work itself, were unwittingly visionary. And I love this line: 'It was the landscape being articulated in their heads, via their normal work practices. ' Walking is a great leveller – it democratises the visionary and gives everyone the opportunity to learn. But with the loss of these simple ways of getting around, I can’t help wondering what else we’re losing.

Now I’m off to try and find a copy of the out of print Fieldwork so I can read the rest of the essays, and while I’m at it, Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze, a novel featuring John Clare's time at High Beach Asylum in Essex.

The persistence of feet and water

The train from Nairobi to Mombasa travels to its own timetable, its hours unpredictable. When children in the nearby villages and homesteads hear it, they come running across the fields towards it, specks at first, full pelt with shoulders leading, until they stop with wide grins for the daily spectacle. Whistles, shrieks, waves greet us. The embankments are trailed with paths. The beat of feet have found the most direct way down, identifying the line and then reinforcing it over and over, up and down, wearing it smooth, stone free, curving. The feet have worked with natural features - soft or hard rock, contours, just as a stream would.

In Hell's Gate National Park, close to Lake Naivasha, I was told a story which combines feet and water in the formation of a deep gorge . The Maasai used to herd their cattle between the high plateau and Lake Naivasha. The route they wore attracted running water in the rainy season, which worked with the pathway over the years to gouge a deep indentation in the land. The herders continued to use the route, fairly dry except during the rains, and the gorge deepened to its dramatic formation today. Whether or not this geography is accurate, I like the story of cooperation between human and animal movement and the aggressive momentum of water.

In the gorge, the Maasai found boiling water spouting and falling, they thought of it as someone below them, cooking. They were then convinced this ravine led to Hell.

The Maasai and their animals are now settled there, no longer nomadic. But the tracks of wilder animals persist, overlaying each other on the same routes, ways that converge into the only water hole, to lay out a massive spider of paths.

Yesterday I walked across the valley near my home. The valley bottom is now a golf course but it had previously been common-land and people walk their dogs or themselves there as if it still is. By and large walkers and golfers cooperate. Over the years the greenkeepers have made efforts to re-direct feet by closing gaps in walls where short cuts emerge onto roads or other pathways. Yesterday I noticed that one of the former ways has re-asserted itself over the non-golfing winter - a thin line has been worn in the grass leading to a small but determined tumbling of the wall.

Baring our soles

Our feet are unique. Making moulds of them in wool certainly showed that (see post below), but so do footprints on a beach. Look at these two. One gouges a great hole with its long toes and heavy front pad, drawing a great archless slab. The other seems almost impossibly pointed at its toes, the body it bears balancing precariously above an arch hovering high over the ground.

This beach in Kenya carried a transient record of the collision of different peoples, trajectories and times. Kenyans and Europeans; fishermen and strolling tourists. Sometime between two high tides the two feet above kissed, mingling forms into one, when their owners might not have ever knowingly passed each other, locked eyes, nodded a greeting. Promiscuous feet. Then the tide washed in, removed the evidence.

How often do we walk barefoot? Perhaps the only time for many of us is on a beach, enjoying the granular massage of sand on soles. But what do we deny ourselves by not baring our soles more often? My friend Philo Ikonya, whose village walks I shared, talks about removing shoes as removing barriers, 'like talking between feet and the earth'. She talks about the enlivening effect on the senses as if contact of the foot on the land makes her alive right up to her forehead. Barefoot rambling enthusiasts are also keen to point out the health benefits of escaping the strains footwear puts on the biomechanics of our gait.

Three of us tried it, a walk of a few kilometers between Philo's mother's home, the river where she used to fetch water, the church which she attended every Sunday, the school where she taught for thirty years, where a pair of shoes were kept in a cupboard to be put on when she arrived. I bared my winter-soft feet, and the other two bared their city-shod ones, and we walked, careful of sharp rocks, occasional glass, our feet warming to the journey, spreading onto the soft red sand of slopes worn above the river by repeated climbs and descents. Young girls strained uphill with barrels on their backs, their toes active, rising and splaying slightly from the pad, the foot solid and supportive.

Women walking barefoot around these village paths and roads is nothing unusual. We met an old lady who told us she would gladly walk the 30km from Nairobi barefoot. She could afford to buy shoes, but why would she want to wear them, when she had the freedom to walk like this? I agreed with her, but at the time I was hopping from foot to foot, as the sun-glossed earth scoured my soles. A white woman walking barefoot was a little unusual and did attract comment. What power did my companions have over me that they could make me do it? Was I being punished for something?

It was a sensual experience, made me measure each footfall, appreciate the texture of soil, sand, pebbles, tarmac, the cool damp crumble of a valley-bottom path, the crazed maps of baked earth. And when we reached the church, and washed the red soil from our feet under a tap, replaced our shoes for the return journey, I felt a new aliveness in my feet, a tingle, as if they had been more properly exercised. I enjoyed, in the days that followed, a slight callousing on the soles. The natural weathering of well-walked feet.

I came home to a deep fall of snow and then a fast thaw, bundled my feet in damp wool socks and boots to walk across the re-emerging grass of the golf course. The soft snow had melted, but it left behind it islands of impacted ice, foot-shaped, stamping their lines across the grass like floating reminders of journeys made in an ice age. With the incoming tide of warm rain, rising temperatures, they too will soon be gone.