Why oh why

Why walk?  It’s a question I often ask myself – especially when I’m tired and the weather is dreadful and there’s still a long way left to go.  I usually answer myself in terms along the lines of ‘bearing witness’, though I’m not exactly sure I know what I mean when I say that.  Am I just borrowing some significant-sounding, sonorous phrase or is there some truth behind it?

These thoughts were going round my head in the Lake District last year.  I was climbing the sharp edge of Fleetwith Pike with a couple of friends.  It’s a steep and rocky path, so I was taking it at a steady pace.  At times like that, I like to imagine I’m climbing a mountain rather than a small hill – the slow, deliberate steps over rock, the going up and up.  The slowness of the pace gives you time to study the hill and think about where you are and what you’re doing.

Later that night we were staying at the Black Sail Hut, a remote youth hostel that is far from any tarmac roads.  It provides fairly basic accommodation in an old shepherd’s bothy, though those basic provisions do include dinner and beer!  The hut sits at the head of Ennerdale, amongst the high peaks of Great Gable and Pillar, with the river Liza running just below it.  In the night I had to visit the outside toilet (blame the beer) but stopped while I was in the open air to stare up at the sky.  The coastal towns lit up the view at the bottom end of the valley, but where we were was a long way from any streetlights, so the heavens were crowded with an unimaginable mass of stars.  I gazed up in wonder, despite the cold of the night, to take it all in.  The next day, with the thoughts that have led to this post filling my sleep, one of my companions said to me, ‘You’re quiet today.’  I couldn’t think any response other than to nod.

When travelling away from home I feel I only get a real sense of the area I'm in by walking around it – whether that means cities, local villages or countryside.  Part of this is to do with the pace of walking – you’re going slowly enough to have time to look around you and to take everything in.  But also there’s something deeper, I feel, to do with the physical contact between you and the earth you’re walking on.  To step on those stones, those fields, pavement, kerbs, bogs and fells is to experience geography in a very personal, intimate way.  You feel each tiny gradient, the way the air blows past you down valleys, around walls.  The great naturalists and nature writers have all been great walkers because of that closeness walking gives you to your environment.  You bear witness to lives of others and to the life of other things, plants and animals, and to the seasons’ changes, the cycles of the earth.  It’s a connection that takes us beyond ourselves and shows us that we are a small part of a greater whole.

Wandering the Yorkshire Wolds

    When I think of this place, it’s the earth I think of, the ground beneath my feet.  It was cold the day I was there, and the ground was rather muddy, a thick clay that stuck to my boots as I walked across the farmland.  The tilled fields were chalky, though not as much as the ones up on top of the hills, below whose steep escarpment I was walking.  I had started on the tops, pressing into a sharp headwind that blew up from the vast acres of the Vale of York, but had extended my walk slightly to take in a little of the low country too.  On the tops, amongst the grazing ewes, there had been a variety of colourful wildlife: many pheasants, the bright red streak of a bullfinch, twittering coal tits, a pair of harsh-calling jays.  Down below it was grey and quiet.

    I was following a small but clear stream, Bishop Wilton Beck.  Its course was flanked by stunted alders, ash and oak, mixed in with brambles and teasels.  Water courses in chalkland are rare because of the porousness of the rock, so it pleased me to track this one’s journey between the fields.  The village of Great Givendale, sitting at the top of the scarp, also has a ‘water feature’, a couple of large carp ponds, apparently dug originally by the Romans – a Roman road passes close by.  It was up there that I saw a heron flying away at my approach and also where I called in at the pretty and peaceful church of St Ethelburga.  Much of the church is 19^th century but the chancel arch features some mediaeval carvings of Green Men: leering faces joined together with tendrils of plants that sprout from their mouths and noses.  Perhaps representing a, somewhat pagan, prayer for good returns from the earth but also a celebration of the region’s fecundity.

    The high ground beyond the village either rolls over gentle hills or dips sharply into steep-sided valleys, amidst woods, crops and sheep pasture.  In the Vale, the fields spread out wide as if pressed flat by the endless sky.  Ahead of me was the village of Yapham, raised, significantly, ever so slightly above the level of the fields.  When I was young I used to cycle the lanes around here often, and a frequent route was from Pocklington to Yapham, via Meltonby and up the hill to Givendale.  The names, the landscape, take me right back to that time and I always find the winter scenery is the most evocative, when the trees are bare and the vegetation has all died back.  The land then really stands out, silhouetted against the flat white sky, and reveals its bones.  In other flat places – Lincolnshire, the Fens – people seem mostly to talk about the grandness of the skies, but standing in that muddy field, tiny trees like cilia on the horizon, villages like islands linked by causeways, it’s the earth I think of and my solid, boot-shod connection with it.