Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It's hard to create a footpath on your own.
Robert Macfarlane
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
A couple of years ago, The Solitary Walker introduced me to two fine books by the excellent travel writer, Robert Macfarlane — Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (2003) and The Wild Places (2008). Macfarlane is one of those rare individuals who seems to have actually done what most of us only dream of doing. He is a tireless long-distance walker, a passionate mountain climber, a rock scrambler, an explorer with an insatiable appetite for adventure. And perhaps most important for many of us, he possesses a unique ability to extract profound wisdom from the terrain he has traversed, especially the ancient pathways that were created by the pilgrims and other wayfarers who preceded him.
Macfarlane's latest book is The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012). In the author's own words, it tells the story of Macfarlane's walks of "a thousand miles or more along old ways in search of a route to the past," only to find himself "delivered again and again to the contemporary." Whether you are an adventurer yourself, or simply one who enjoys reading about the improbable journeys of others, I think you will find both delight and insight in some of Macfarlane's observations about old pathways and their impact on the souls of the walkers.
Macfarlane's latest book is The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012). In the author's own words, it tells the story of Macfarlane's walks of "a thousand miles or more along old ways in search of a route to the past," only to find himself "delivered again and again to the contemporary." Whether you are an adventurer yourself, or simply one who enjoys reading about the improbable journeys of others, I think you will find both delight and insight in some of Macfarlane's observations about old pathways and their impact on the souls of the walkers.
Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind's eye also. The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land—onwards toward space, but also backwards in time to the histories or a route and its previous followers.
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Footpaths are mundane in the best sense of the word: 'worldly", open to all. All rights of way determined and sustained by use, they constitute a labyrinth of liberty, a slender network of common land that still threads through our aggressively privatized world of barbed wire and gates, CCTV cameras and 'No Trespassing' signs.
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Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.
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I've read them all, these old-way wanderers, and often I've encountered versions of the same beguiling idea: that walking such paths might lead you—in [ornithologist W.H.] Hudson's phrase—to 'slip back out of this modern world'. Repeatedly, these wanderers spoke of the tingle of connection, of walking as seance, of voices heard along the way.
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These are the consequences of the old ways with which I feel easiest: walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape; paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing.