The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (49 page)

Matthew Hollis and I discovered that for three years we had been following similar paths back into Edward Thomas’s life, without ever quite meeting or realizing the other was around. Such footstepping and way-crossing came to seem wholly in keeping with our shared subject, and I remain grateful for Matthew’s generosity of spirit. The categorized index, brilliantly composed by Dave Cradduck, was inspired by the work of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, whose Sustain-Release and Corbel Stone presses produce some of the most beautiful books and pamphlets I know.

I am indebted to various institutions: chiefly Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where I have been fortunate to hold a teaching fellowship throughout the writing of this book; also to the Faculty of English in Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland, the Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and differently to
Archipelago
, the
Financial Times
,
Granta
, the
Guardian
and
Lonely Planet
Magazine
.

For the granting of permissions I am grateful to: Ian Stephen, Periplum, Pocketbooks and Survivors Press for use of the poetry of Ian Stephen; to John Freeman and
Granta
magazine (where an early version of ‘Limestone’ appeared); to Andrew McNeillie and
Archipelago
(where an early version of the Ravilious material appeared); to Thomas A. Clark for allowing me to quote from his poetry; to Henry Holt and Co., LLC, and Random House UK, for allowing me to quote from ‘The Road Not Taken’ (in
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Latham, © 1969 Henry Holt and Co., LLC); to David Higham Associates and the estate of Louis MacNeice for allowing me to quote from ‘Autumn Sequel’; and to the Imperial War Museum for permission to reproduce the photograph prefacing
Chapter 15
, ‘Ghost’.

Profound thanks to Richard Emeny, Rosemary Vellender and the Edward Thomas Estate for their support and goodwill, and for their permission to use published and unpublished material concerning Thomas. When quoting from Thomas’s poetry I have followed the versions in Edna Longley’s
Edward Thomas: The Annotated Collected Poems
(Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008). I am grateful to Professor Longley and to earlier editors of Thomas for their work in making available the poems.

All images within the book are mine, save for those which preface
Chapter 3
, ‘Chalk’ (© Bram Arnold);
Chapter 4
, ‘Silt’ (© David Quentin);
Chapter 5
, ‘Water – South’ (© Ian Stephen);
Chapter 6
, ‘Water – North’ (© Michael Skelly);
Chapter 8
, ‘Gneiss’ (© Steve Dilworth);
Chapter 15
, ‘Ghost’ (© Imperial War Museum, image Q 45786, showing opposing trench systems on the Western Front in 1917); and
Chapter 16
, ‘Print’ (© Alison Burns). I am grateful to those photographers for allowing me to use their images here. David Quentin’s back-cover photograph of me walking the Broomway could not be truer to the book’s interest in how we are complicatedly doubled and riddled by the places through which we move.

In 1909 Henry James’s novel
The Golden Bowl
was reissued in what is known as the ‘New York Edition’. James revised the novel, originally published in 1904, for its new edition and he also contributed a foreword in which he considered the act of self-revision, and the uncanny encounter with the double of your earlier writing self that it involved. In that foreword, he strikingly figures the original writer as a walker who has left tracks in the snow of the page, and the revising writer as a tracker or hunter, following the original print-trail:

It was, all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes indeed more or less agree with the original tracks, but might most often, or very nearly, break the surface in other places. What was thus predominantly interesting to note, at all events, was the high spontaneity of these deviations and differences, which became thus things not of choice, but of immediate and perfect necessity.

The snowfield as the blank page, and the tracks as words: here, as so often, walking shimmers into writing and vice versa. One of the talents of the passage is that James holds both sides of his metaphor (snow-plain and page; prints and print) in ‘immediate and perfect’ balance, so that neither steps forward to dominate the other: rather, they equalize. Visually speaking, it is impossible to pull one aspect of the metaphor into focus and relegate the other to blur. They exist on two planes (plains), but simultaneously. As such, I am reminded of those rare occasions when a white object achieves perfect tuning against snow, defeating the eye’s ability to grade and differentiate, so that the object loses its perceptible outline and is absorbed into the snow – or, audaciously, absorbs the snow into it. Which has been tuned to which, or have both been tuned to a new and shared frequency? That rare effect is a conspiracy between observer and two observeds – a coincidental miracle of triangulation.

It is significant that James is interested not in how we might perfectly repeat an earlier print-trail, but in how re-walking (re-writing) is an act whose creativity is founded in its discrepancies: by seeking to follow the traces of an earlier walker or writer, one inevitably ‘break[s] the surface in other places’. One does not leave, in the language of
tracking
, a ‘clean register’ (placing one’s feet without disparity in the footprints of another, matching without excess or deficiency, as an image in cut paper is applied as a sharp shadow upon a wall). James sees our
misprints
– the false steps and ‘disparities’ that we make as we track – to be creative acts.

I have, inevitably, followed in the footsteps of many predecessors in terms of writing as well as of walking, and to that end wish to acknowledge the earlier print-trails that have both shown me the way and provoked ‘deviations and differences’. The atmospheres, moods and textures of this book arise out of the places through which I have been fortunate to move, but also out of the prose of J. A. Baker, Robert Byron, M. R. James, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman MacLean, Cormac McCarthy, John McPhee, Vladimir Nabokov, Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Raban, Tim Robinson, W. G. Sebald, Nan Shepherd, Rebecca Solnit, Gary Snyder and Colin Thubron; the poetry of Peter Larkin and Colin Simms; the photography of John Beatty, Fay Godwin and Gus Wylie; the art of Chris Drury, Hamish Fulton, Nick Hayes, Kurt Jackson, Peter Lanyon, Richard Long and David Nash; the films of Werner Herzog, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; the music and songlines of Olöf Arnalds, Brahms, the Busch Quartet, Eliza Carthy, Ivor Cutler, The Duke Spirit, Brian Eno, Johnny Flynn, P. J. Harvey, The Kevin Flanagan Quartet, Laura Marling, The Pixies, Schubert, Elliott Smith, The Smiths and Ralph Vaughan Williams; and the thoughts of BLDGBLOG, Fretmarks and Some Landscapes.

*
The Sweet Track is the wooden road laid across the spongy Somerset levels during the early Neolithic, to permit passage between areas of higher drier ground: the hills of the Mendips and the hummocks of Glastonbury. Astonishingly precise pollen-dating allows us to know that at Shapwick, near Westhay (place names which sound as if they should come from Shetland, not Somerset) in the spring of 3806
BC
, rods of alder, hazel, holly, oak, ash and lime were bound and laid in a walkway across the levels.

*
Sometimes these ‘roads’ are sheltered expanses of water (the Carrick Roads at Falmouth, for instance, or those leading into the Mersey estuary).

*
When in 704
AD
the Abbot Adomnán wrote the
Vita Columbae
, the first biography of St Columba – who in 563
AD
had sailed from Ireland to Scotland to establish the monastery at Iona – the only journey he considers to be worthy of mention as in any way exceptional is a land journey, across Scotland from west coast to east.

*
An
immram
is a ‘rowing-about’, from the Gaelic
ramh
, meaning ‘oar’, and can designate – like the Aboriginal Australian walkabout – either a pragmatic journey or a mystical spirit-voyage; an
iorram
is a rowing song that laments the dead.

*
Cunliffe tells the charming story of the visions of T. J. Westropp, an antiquarian who in 1912 claimed to have seen Hy-Brazil three times in his life: ‘it had two hills, one wooded; between them, from a low plain, rose towers and curls of smoke’. Mention of ‘Brazil Rock’ was not finally removed from all Atlantic charts until 1865.

*
‘Albert Ross’ the albatross first appeared on Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth in 1967, then relocated in 1972 to the vast gannetry at Hermaness on Unst in the Shetlands, to which island he returned annually for more than twenty years, before disappearing for a decade, and then visiting Sula Sgeir between 2005 and 2007. He seems to have been wandering the Scottish gannetries in search of a gannet partner, gannets bearing a passing resemblance to albatrosses as they do, and the 700,000 female members of Albert Ross’s own species all residing, inconveniently, south of the equator.

*
The cross/gannet is likely to have been a band of gneiss enriched by pink alkali feldspar, formed at some point in the
Pre-Cambrian
, and crumpled into its current shape by subsequent compression.

*
David, who was with me on that walk, tried tramping through patches of nettles and declared them to be ‘like chilli for the foot’, leaving it bracingly buzzing. I was insufficiently convinced by his recommendation to try this for myself.

*
I’ve failed to do so.

*
As described in the fifth chapter of
Mountains of the Mind
. My grandparents and their world began that first book; it is appropriate that they recur in this one.

*
I later discovered that it had come from an azure-winged magpie.

*
‘Landscape’ is a late-sixteenth-century (1598) anglicization of the Dutch word
landschap
, which had originally meant a ‘unit or tract of land’, but which in the course of the 1500s had become so strongly associated with the Dutch school of landscape painting that at the point of its anglicization its primary meaning was ‘a painterly depiction of scenery’: it was not used to mean physical landscape until 1725.

*
On another expedition, Schaller and Miceler travelled to Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India, to make a survey line through a previously unsurveyed region. Up in the far north-west of the region, they met the first ever recorded snow leopard in Arunachal Pradesh, coming down a mountain path towards them. It was swinging by its bound feet from a pole, carried by four men, having been clubbed to death that afternoon. Schaller and Miceler accompanied the party down to a nearby village, and watched in silence as the leopard was skinned.

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