Why Walk?
By
KENAN CHRISTIANSEN -
Published: January 2, 2014
“The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot”
by Robert Macfarlane caps off a trilogy of books that examine the
subtle links between landscape, history and the imagination. Having
already ventured into wilds, high and low, this third book focuses on
the ancient routes and countless communal pathways that mark the world,
connecting people to places, one another and the landscapes they
inhabit.
Below are edited excerpts from a correspondence with Mr. Macfarlane, 37, on traveling the old ways.
Q. What are the “old ways”?
All footpaths are “old ways” in that they’ve taken time to come into
being, and have been formed by the passage of many feet. They’re
communal landmarks in that sense. It’s tough, tending to impossible, to
make a path on your own, save by walking it hundreds of times (as the
land artist Richard Long has done). I chose to use the old ways partly
because I was fascinated by this network of paths that joined with one
another and covered much of the globe (a very different kind of
worldwide web), and partly because they seemed to promise a way of
walking deeply into, rather than just shallowly across, the landscape.
That promise came good.
You’ve said you were “interested in wonder as a response to landscape.” What have the old ways taught you about wonder?
Over the years I walked, I was wonder-struck countless times by the
sight of storm-light, sundown, high peaks or wild water, as well as by
the behavior of creatures and people. But I was also brought to reflect
on the darker relationship between walking and despair. Several of the
long-distance walkers I write about — the Victorian George Borrow, who
suffered from what he memorably called “the Horrors”; or the poet Edward
Thomas — walked to outstride their depressions, and leave their black
dogs behind on the path. It didn’t always work for them.
Are there particular routes renowned for producing mental or emotional states?
Among the most powerful old ways I know are the ancient routes of
pilgrimage: the roads leading to Santiago de Compostela, say, or the
paths that circle the sacred peaks of the Himalayas (Kailash, Minya
Konka) and along which Buddhist pilgrims perform their arduous koras.
How else do travelers respond to landscape?
Everywhere I walked — in the Hebrides, the West Bank, Sichuan, Spain,
the chalk downs of southern England — I met people for whom walking was a
means of making sense of themselves and of the world. Scottish
islanders who instead of feeling culturally marginal walked their way
into intimacy with their remarkable home landscapes; Palestinians who
used path-following to discover direction and worth in a political
context of disorientation and disturbance. Conservationists for whom the
“foot-transect” was an indispensable means of data collection.
Why not just drive?
Ha! Well, many of Chaucer’s pilgrims traveled on horseback; while the
hajj to Mecca now involves air travel for the majority of pilgrims. But
there are two obvious differences between walking and vehicular travel.
The first is that walking is a full-body experience; mind and body
function inseparably, such that thought becomes both site-specific and
motion-sensitive. The second is that on foot you are unshielded from the
world. There is no sheltering glass or steel between you and the
weather, and whoever or whatever you might encounter. Walking a path,
you greet or chat with the people you meet: I can’t remember ever having
flagged down a stranger’s car on the other side of the highway to talk
things over.
Which paths would you like to walk?
There are hundreds of them, and more suggestions come each week. Right
now, however, I’m pretty much happily homebound by my son, who turned 1
year late last month. The day before I write this, though, he took his
first two steps.
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