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.