Saint Fillan got me walking again

It wasn't quite a Lazarus moment, but curiosity about this early Celtic Saint gave my leg the longest stretch it's had since injury back in April. The curiosity was inspired by a tiny writing commission of 62 words as part of the '26 Treasures' project which has matched writers to 26 objects at the National Museum of Scotland, with equivalent schemes in Belfast and Aberystwyth.

The 62 words are now submitted and will be revealed in the '26 Treasures' trail later this year. For such a miniature piece of writing, it's surprising how much 'digging', reading, and walking went into discovering the meaning of the 'Coigrich', this showy reliquary of Saint Fillan's crozier.

It took me walking along a stretch of the West Highland Way nearest to where I live, and had never walked before. I went to find Saint Fillan's mysterious 'healing pool' and the ruins of the chapel priory named for him. The durability of these sacred places, objects, beliefs is striking, surviving the Reformation, the damping down of superstition. Magic is alive and well along those birch-tunnelled burns and amongst the lichen-aged stones.There's a fuller account of this intriguing project on the '26 Treasures' blog (including my piece on St Fillan's Magic here) where each writer discusses their approach to the task, including James Robertson on 'The Maiden' guillotine, and Lee Randell on the Darien Chest. Meanwhile here's some photos of Strath Fillan on a lovely July day.

On not walking, but writing

It's two months now since I was heaved off the tarmac of a tennis court to take up a supine position with a bag of frozen peas. Even now my right leg doesn't quite keep up with the breezy swing of my left, and protests if it goes too far or has to tackle inclines.

Although quite seriously disabled by my torn hamstring, I never completely stopped walking. At first it was only the 200 yards or so from my front door to the Co-op, taken at a literal snail's pace. Normally at this time of year I would expect to be quite active, so perhaps it was fortunate the summer has mostly been fairly similar to winter, except with light evenings (and just about without the snow). Perhaps I have been a little less frustrated than otherwise. I have also learnt a few things from the experience:

If you walk at toddler pace, the world is revealed differently. My eyes have been glued to the ground, alert to impending jolts and slips, and so my observations have been at foot level and in miniature. The discarded shoe lace or shopping list; lost buttons; the postie's trail of red rubber bands; flowers forging up between cracks in the pavement; a beetle poised on the end of a blade of grass. These tiny miracles, these embryonic stories, I would normally overlook.

I've developed a sense of affinity with people who walk with sticks (not the sort who bound along with hiking poles). There are many of them, I've discovered. I want to ask the younger ones about the nature of their injuries; the older ones I've admired for their bravery in taking to their feet at all and joining the unbalancing flow along pavements. That sense of vulnerability is not something I'm used to.

In the initial weeks, my work involved more teaching than writing, and unfortunately this included a day's walking and writing workshop for Edinburgh University Geosciences students, and a week roaming about in the woods at Abriachan with about 100 schoolchildren. (I hope they didn't take my pained expression and mental lapses personally.) After this came the period allotted to writing. You might think this would be a really good time to sit down and get it done. But my pattern of heads-down thought and word-pulling (as in teeth) is usually followed by a walk. It loosens everything up, allows for obvious solutions of word, character or plot to float into my slightly removed mind. How incomplete my writing days have felt without the daily walk.

One early morning in late May, I took myself, my fast leg and my slow one for the much missed 'turn' about the Birks of Aberfeldy. I'd forgotten the sense of elevation when I leave the trees for meadows at the top, the sense of getting away from the hum of roads. There I found a look of surprise in a lamb's eyes, the sway of calf-high bluebells, the cuckoo's insistent alarm call, the soft smirr of dew on grass. I felt ridiculously thankful for the return of my mobility; the intensity of it made the exile of injury seem almost worthwhile.

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...

Trails and Translation

In Oman, I indulged my usual preoccupations in a new landscape. I was drawn to lines representing journeys; built structures that penetrate wilderness. How could I resist, with so much space, with textures of sand and rock and sea.

A single set of footprints left in Wahabi Desert dunes – an archive of a journey that was almost eradicated overnight by the reorganising wind.

Animal prints sunk into wet wadi mud, then fired by the sun into a textured ceramic tile.

This deep, corrugated trail, testament of a 90 million year impulse, left overnight on beach sand by a green turtle. She heaves herself ashore to lay her eggs, returning to the surf and her elegant sea-creature self as the sun rises.

Two months later all 100 young turtles hatch, take three days or so to swim up to the light through sand, and make these confused, energetic trails as they search for the horizon, water, light.

But the trails I followed in Oman were also less visible: faded imprints of history, geography and culture that have paced to and fro along the coast of North Africa to medieval Spain leaving the legacy of Al Andalus; the curving sails of dhows that caught trade winds seasonally north and south along the coast of East Africa, trailing the scent of cloves, and laden with dark cargoes, empire and slavery. As I expected, my first experience in the Arab world brought echoes and chimes from my previous travels, and raised the rounded heads of question marks.

The historical links between Zanzibar and Oman reverberate on in the Swahili language spoken widely in Muscat; cardamom-flavoured coffee served in the streets of both places in small white porcelain cups, with dates; the charm and courtesy offered to strangers; men in floor-length white dishdashas and women in black; the portioning out of the day by calls to prayer in mournful echoes between walls and mountains; the slow shuffle of sandals along darkened lanes.

Southern Spain echoed there too, in arches and architecture, in open throated singing, in the parchment dry ravines and jagged fins of mountain that must have seemed familiar to the first Umayyad settlers in Spain. And in the systems of falaj and aquecia, when the mysterious skills of surveying and a democracy of sharing, brought arteries, veins and capillaries of running water to the last date palm, the centre of the most remote village to redeem the dust.

falaj in Wadi Shab, Oman

I re-trod my previous thought-steps, taken when I was in Spain walking Mozarabic trails in 2007. I thought again of Al Andalus and the value placed on the word, on translation, on books and libraries as a way of sharing intellectual curiosity across cultures of the world. And I thought on the religious tolerance that existed, however briefly, in that same period.

As the Arab world rocks, and our cultures and religions seem in danger of further polarising, might it not be time to turn to the values of this period, and in particular to put more value on translation?

It's well accepted that reading builds empathy. But so little Arab literature finds its way into English, it almost seems that we in the west are being wilfully ignorant. In the view of Farouk Mustafa, translator and professor at Chicago University, Arabic literature can transform impressions of people who might otherwise remain misunderstood. "Whether you think it's going to be a 'clash' or a 'dialogue' of civilisations," he says, "we have to know what the rest of the world is doing and thinking, and nothing expresses that better than literature."

When the longlist for the Best Translated Book award was announced this week, it included very few works from non-European languages, and only one from Arabic. Orhan Pamuk also complained this week about this marginalisation: "When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity."

By being monolithic, are we reinforcing cultural barriers rather than allowing free-flowing fraternisation, an awareness of our common humanity? It seems now more urgent than ever to reinvigorate translation. Arabia Books and other projects stimulating developments in this area, are to be applauded, but so much more is needed.

Some of the books on my current reading list (both specific to Oman and more general to my understanding of the Arab world) are:

The Dark Side of Love, by Rafik Schami – a Syrian epic novel, already underway with this one – splendid!

Touch, by Adania Shibli

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, by Jim al Khalili

The Tenth Parallel, by Eliza Griswold

From the Holy Mountain, William Dalrymple

Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger

'Waller and Dyker' review of The Beat of Heart Stones

Delighted to have 'The Beat of Heart Stones' reviewed in the official magazine of the Dry Stone Walling Association, Winter 2010.

This book brings to life the building process of an old dyke, the history it has witnessed and the life it supported in a brilliantly evocative way. I challenge you not to become involved with these living stones by the end of the journey.

Richard Love

winter trees

I can't claim to have been doing much walking over the last week or so, but I have been shuffling around on my skis with my eyes frost-struck and a camera in hand. This particular weather event has dressed the trees - ghosting their arterial shapes with white echoes; baubling them with ice-lights ; laying low mists to worship at their feet; and scouring the skies with purple dusks to backlight the symmetry of their reach. And perhaps the effect is most striking because it was only just before this, they were still dressed dark gold for autumn.