walking home from the office

‘Nothing educates the eye for the features of a landscape so well as the practice of measuring it by your own legs’. Leslie Stephen said this in an essay, ‘In Praise of Walking’, and it perhaps sums up best the impulse that pushed me out of my office and through the back gate of Stirling University to start my walk home on a sunny March evening recently.

I emerged into the leafy streets of Bridge of Allan, passing through sandstone mansions, the scent of cherry blossom, the thwack of tennis balls across nets. It was all pleasingly familiar, with the Ochil Hills just behind the town hinting at remoteness, and the A9 humming in contradiction. And yet I had never walked home before. I’ve taken an hour to drive this route countless times over the last 17 years, travelled it by trains and buses more recently, since not having a car. But I’d never had the experience of measuring it with my own legs, perhaps not surprisingly as the journey is about 50 miles long.

I’ve worked part-time as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Stirling over the last three academic years, and with my time there now coming to a close, it seemed appropriate to ‘walk home from the office’ as a sort of ritual of transition. Long journeys on foot make wonderful rites of passage – to draw a line under a job, mark a significant birthday, or any kind of change in our lives. There’s time to think and there’s the rhythm, the fresh air, the observations and so on, and there’s a pause in normal life while the transformation settles within and starts to flourish. It is meditation and refreshment.

On my first full day of walking, high up with curlews burbling around me on the Sherrifmuir road in the Ochils, the spread of Strath Earn still to cross below, and the rise beyond of hills marking the start of the Highlands where I would climb in two days time towards home in Aberfeldy, I took a phone call. A new position was offered to me, a departure and a challenge. It seemed an intrinsic part of the walk that I was leaving one position and could begin looking forward to another.

The timing of this walk was significant in another way. Queues were snaking from petrol stations as the fuel ‘crisis’ took grip. I’ve often enjoyed reading accounts of people walking significant distances to jobs, or to fetch a cow or go to university prior to our seemingly universal expectation of car-use, and I enjoyed a sense that I was doing the same – walking to get
somewhere because that’s what you do. I was appreciating the real distance. And perhaps within my lifetime, the real distance will become more of a consideration in the planning of our journeys.

Although the round hills and green valleys of Perthshire are unremarkable in some ways, at the pace of foot travel and with the dullness of familiar vision removed by a slightly different route, giving a fresh angle, they became less so. (Not to mention the delirious thrill of early Spring sunshine). There are so many natural features here to enjoy – the river Earn snaking me through rich farmland to lead into Crieff; the canyon-esque entrance to the Highlands represented by the Sma’ Glen. And the human features here whisper of layers of history and sometimes conflict – Roman forts; graveyards; abandoned farmhouses; a disused railway to follow as part of the route; golf courses and wind farms. But the final day of my walk was the most exciting in terms of undiscovered history on my doorstep.

I’ve always wanted to follow Wade’s Military Road between Crieff and Aberfeldy. In the winter light especially, I’ve caught sight of it marching straight across the moor when the road veers, but never fully realised that it’s possible to walk its 25 mile length with recourse to only tiny stretches on the A822. Built as part of the attempt to quell the Jacobite uprisings in the early 18th century, the road is not only still easy to follow, but also makes a really enjoyable route, passing over the delightful bridges which characterised Wade’s roads, and often still visibly bordered by two lines of boulders. It kept me marching all day, enthralled to discover each new section after 17 ‘blind’ years of living and passing so close by.

Finally it tumbled me down, sore-footed but exhilarated to be in my home valley. I crossed the field that I often walk, its path bordered with twin lines that I now realised were distinctive to something greater. With dusk falling and hunger rumbling, Wade deposited me in the Town Square, just outside the Co-op, where I prepared for a feast.

Map as narrative as journey as map

I suppose it’s inevitable that a walker will develop an obsession with maps. I spend hours looking at maps of places I know, or places I plan to go. The imaginative gap between what I read from the configurations of line, shade, and word, and what I meet and feel once in the actual landscape, is always intriguing. Google Earth has never worked the same magic on me, although it can be a useful way of anticipating what to expect, and I was fascinated by Kamila Shamsie’s account of using it to research places for her novel ‘Burnt Shadows’.

I discovered the Roy military maps of the mid 18th century some time ago - gorgeously figurative depictions of Scotland incorporating volcanic bursts of bold shade for hills with the fine detail of settlements. They can be viewed online at the National Library of Scotland, who can also provide copies from the incredibly helpful, and good value map library.

But I’ve only quite recently discovered Timothy Pont’s sketch maps of Scotland made in the late 16th century. He seems to be something of an unsung hero, a young scholar from St Andrew’s University who walked vast tracts of Scotland in what must have been quite hostile conditions to sketch topographies and human settlements as far apart as Dumfries and Durness, including many lands between. He was the earliest known Scottish map-maker, and his sketches were the basis for the first printed maps that appeared in Joan Blaeu’s world atlas of 1654. But his originals remained unprinted until Jeffrey C Stone’s collection appeared in 1989.

To walk a river valley today, or climb onto a hilltop on the dividing ridge of a watershed, and sketch what we can see without the aid of mapping or surveying tools, would put us on an equal footing with him. (I must try this as an experiment.) His combination of aerial representation and elevation often mean that buildings and hill shapes are recognisable when seen from a particular angle. Some slightly odd representations have fuelled speculation that he sometimes used verbal sources and descriptions to fill gaps in his own observations. He shows us chapels, mines, bridges, islands, antiquities, and placenames, and annotates with field notes. For the far north west corner of the country he wrote: ‘extream wilderness’, and ‘verie great plenty of wolfes doo haunt in this desert places’. He also commented on the lack of trees in Caithness, where he later became Minister of Dunnet Church (pictured below) between 1600 and 1610, where he is now celebrated by a plaque. I am fascinated by what motivated Pont. Is this a general human urge? Are we all driven to map our environment to some extent? I think back to Hamish’s wonderful map, the eight year old son of a friend who continues to pore over maps and make his own with extraordinary skill. And I think of the rock art pictured below that forms part of an amphitheatre of engravings just to the north of the river and west of Weem Castle on Pont’s sketch of the Tay valley above. Could these mysterious engravings have been maps showing the relationship of key places to each other as people conceptualised them in their own minds and tried to show others? The diversity of this act of conceptualisation is demonstrated on a brilliant blog, ‘Strange Maps’.

And now I’ve begun to wander into the relationship between texts, stories and maps. In trying to help students structure essays as part of my Royal Literary Fund (RLF) fellowship at Stirling University, I was struck by this advice which appears on the RLF website: ‘Another way of thinking about the introduction is that it should draw a map for the reader. Imagine you are taking the reader on a journey. Your introduction tells the reader not only the intended final destination but the route you are going to take, the method of transport, the places you are going to visit on the way, the people you are going to meet and even some of the things they are going to say.’ Leslie Stephen described a walk as ‘a little drama itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes’. In ‘Wanderlust’, Rebecca Solnit says: ‘the long distance walk is an easy way to find narrative continuity. If a path is like a story …then a continuous walk must make a coherent story, and a very long walk makes a full-length book.’

There’s something here I want to pursue. Map as narrative as journey as map. And those ‘haunting wolfes’ must surely be part of the story…