Following our Fathers

Meredith Robinson, who is currently undertaking an MLitt in Publishing Studies at Stirling University displays the illustrated book she has created for her course project: Following our Fathers: Two Journeys among Mountains. The book comprises two essays, photos and hand-drawn maps extracted from my longer essay collection, Doubling Back, which was shortlisted in 2009 for the Robin Jenkins Literary Prize for environmental writing, and currently remains unpublished in its full form.

Following our Fathers will be in print from 'best foot books' later this year, and you can already 'like' it on a Facebook fanpage!

Robert Macfarlane has said of it: "A wonderfully subtle pair of stories about walking, wayfaring and memory. Cracknell explores the strange durability of the paths that we make in our lives, in our dreams and after our deaths."

And here's the blurb:

Two men make significant journeys on foot, one in Nazi-occupied Norway, 1944, and one in the Swiss Alps, 1952. More than half a century later, the writer finds their routes still ‘way-marked’ by memory. By sharing their footprints, she makes memorials to the men as fathers – one of them her own. Despite the shadow of death and danger, the book celebrates life, family, friendship and walking through mountain landscapes richly textured with stories.

This has been a very worthwhile collaboration with Meredith whose course and its professional approach will, I hope, see her midwifing many further books and writing projects, before long.

Maps in the sands

I've been spellbound by a chance reading of 'Arabian Sands' by explorer Wilfred Thesiger, of whom I knew little until I read this obituary (he died in 2003). My copy of the book published in 1959, has a linen map folded into a pocket at the back, immediately endearing it to me. It charts in red lines Thesiger's extraordinary traverses across Rub al Khali (The Empty Quarter), the vast area of dunes that seems to defy national boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula. The journeys of previous European explorers are marked on the map as dotted black lines: Philby 1932, and Thomas 1931.

Just one night spent in the Wahiba Sands of Oman in January, made me appreciate the profound effect of that landscape. When I returned home, I dreamt every night for about a fortnight of being in the desert - exposed, but thrillingly energised by it.

What comes across from Thesiger's stunning prose, is the incredible hold that the desert had on him, his hardships while travelling with Bedu tribes becoming their own reward. He was clearly compelled to go back and back, to feel the desert's 'mystery of space'. 'Here, to be alone was to feel at once the weight of fear, for the nakedness of this land was more terrifying than the darkest forest at dead of night.'

Thesiger also felt the levelling effect of the desert on his relationships with the men he lived closely alongside. He was devastated by the changes that occurred to traditional lives here not long after his journeys, and the irony of his own part in this did not escape him:

'While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming. Regretfully, however, I realise that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.'

It's made me think about the word 'explorer' and what it means. In an article in last Saturday's Travel Guardian Has technology robbed travel of its riches? 'Explorer' Benedict Allen talks about how much of the more extreme contemporary travel doesn't count as exploration because it doesn't communicate a new picture of a place or advance knowledge.

It's also made me think about maps, which I tend to value almost intrinsically. I caught sight of a headline today which said the British populace are now so dependent on satnav that map reading skills are being lost. These skills feel ancient, and traditional, but it was pointed out to me last summer that by the time maps were being drawn, a level of geographical and language skill had already been lost. Routes would have been learnt through our own landscapes by an intricate remembered sequence of place names passed down through generations, and then these were replaced by marks on paper...

Britain from above

This is quite a fascinating website if you are currently marvelling at (or infuriated by) the relinquishing of our skies to birds, air currents, volcanic ash. A short film visualises flight paths across Britain, the central 'motorways' these routes conform to, the fabric their lines weave, and the gaps above sensitive military sites etc. There's some similar animations showing taxi routes in London, the tentacles of telephone networks, pipelines of electronic data delivery, and Britain's population by light intensity.

It's all very interesting for any mapping fanatics, making invisible routes visible, and brought to my mind both Richard Long's fascination with the marks we leave, and Anthony Doerr's piece in Granta 102 (The New Nature Writing), in which he writes of animal migration:

‘Salmon, wildebeest, locusts. Stalks, swifts, snow geese. What if the torrents of animals migrating past us every year left behind traces of their routes? What if arctic terns sketched lines should the sky as they poured out of Antarctica and back; what if steelhead trout left thin, colourful filaments behind as they muscled up rivers? The skies above our fields would become a loom; the continents would be bundled in thread.’

Wouldn't it be fascinating to do this for walking journeys in various parts of the world?

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…

Hamish's map

I love maps. There's something about the combination of line, image and sparse text that appeals endlessly to my imagination in conjuring landscape and places. As part of my walking and writing workshops, I've often asked participants to sketch a 'map' of the walk we've just undertaken.I keep instructions to a minimum so that each person can approach it in their own style. Mine tends to be a mixture of image and word generated by landscape features or by incidents that happened in specific places, my own names for places, and a sense of the shape of the walk. But other people see the walk as a continuous straight line, or ripples of words expressing sensation experienced and observation almost as if they are contours. Rarely have people come up with a very literal or schematic expression of the place.

Hamish Ashcroft, a friend's son aged six, has made this extraordinary map of Aberfeldy, transferring his observations from one dimension to another. It amazes me that a six year old can make this conceptual leap. It is a highly accurate representation including key landmarks, the river Tay, the curve of streets and crescents in relation to each other, and is also a very beautiful object.

It can be seen on proud display in the Aberfeldy Watermill. I'm sure any cartography commissions can reach him c/o their address!