Walking in Devon is, like life itself, much about weaving through the shadow and the light – bounding through sun scorched fields and ducking into the emerald dappled holloways. I arrived at dusk, and what struck me most is the intensity of the darkness. The absence of a moon made darker still by the high hedgerows, cradling you in your way, or hemming you in – whichever sentiment your perception gives way to. It is the antithesis of walking in Iceland, where the vistas are vast and trees are close to non-existent.
The hedgerows are so tall and present and full of life, that my first thought as I sat in the crackling black, was that non-human life in Devon took place more in the vertical than in the horizontal. There is a whole universe to be relearned in the leaves, the tendrils, the seed heads and the rosing hips. And in all the creatures that live on, under, through and between them. There are scurryings in the understorey, and flutterings in the upper levels. As I walked down a lane with my mother, I felt honoured to witness the moment when a leaf dried like an umbilical cord, then after weeks of photosynthesis, fell to its destiny.
The hedge is a many storeyed library of life, and it is impossible not to wish to read of its books. It feels an offence to the creativity and abundance of the hedge then, to begin to come across a majority which have been crudely subjected to a strimmer as the summer plods on. Apparently the farmers must keep their hedges in check to keep the car channels open, otherwise the council will do it for them and present them with a bill. The ancient, skilled and time consuming art of hedge laying seems to have largely been lost.
With my mother I passed old barns and derelict mills and followed a nide of pheasant hens up a hill into a wood where stood the ruined castle of Berry Pomeroy.
Down the hill again we passed an apple tree dripping with temptation. And, parked up beside a stream, a bow top wagon with a letter box – a suggestion of a rarity: that this traveller has been allowed to stay awhile, before wending its way again between the bright fields and the dark hedges.
One morning I woke early, ecstatically happy. I whispered to my friend Eleanor as she slept, “I’m going for a walk”. I did not know where I was going, or when I would be back.
27th July 2013. Awake early, bright eyed with excitement that we’ve made it here, to THIS place. The bottom of a valley filled with red deer! And thanks to the kindness of strangers, a belly filled with cheese & wine and a perfect wild camp on an inlet in the beck, under a large alder – trifurcate (or three trees?) like three sisters joined at birth. She will cast shade when the sun gets up but that’s not what woke me. Perhaps it was the light, but it felt more like the startling awareness of the kindness I’ve received, and an irrepressible urge to walk up the hill – made light by it.
Up the track still in morning shadow, the heads of red deer grazing in the long rushes. On the track straight in front of me is a large creature – solid and squat. Its long ears rotate towards my footsteps. I get quite close, at which point it bounds off – so large that for a moment I wonder if it is a fawn. No, the ears again. It’s a hare.
Onto the last stretch of tarmac, I pass some ancient barns flanked by foxglove spears and watched over by a half moon wishing to linger here. It is still cool enough to keep my jumper on, but to my right the mountain is bright and sun-lit and the sky is a pure blue. Down in the valley the deer bark their herd calls – the hundredfold sound of a heavy oak door creaking shut – and the sun shows signs of peeking above the opposite ridge.
A hay barn at Dale End is open sided and the first rays cascade through the portal as a swift skits out. And it’s up. Immediately I peel off my jumper. Up now; up a grassy track which hugs the dew glittered, sun bathed slope. The rhythm of my breath is foregrounded until the sudden swarming of flies from a glistening sheep’s carcass. The stench follows me for a while.
I pass a haphazard cairn and add a stone. The path proceeds higher in front of me but I cannot resist going up and over the brow to my right to see the valley on the other side: A breathtaking and breath giving view. The perfections of form carved and sanded by the glacier’s tool kit. Silvery ribbons of water finding the path of least resistance to the lake.
A spot of admin…
Taking a photo on the Penguin sponsored iPad, I realise I have network for the first time in two days. There have been thunderstorms recently (thankfully I was in a house at the time) and it seems to have created a communications black spot. Now I can publish yesterday’s blog post – a weight off my shoulders. A few emails to answer and minutes later I realise that I am frozen in my stance to review the photo – boots on, standing up, bent over a screen – totally inappropriate and awkward for being on top of a mountain. I feel self conscious about being one of those people with an iPad, staring at the screen rather than the wonder in front of me, when another early rising walker passes unexpectedly. I consider giving him a Wayfarer business card, as if to justify my sins, but that feels more inappropriate still.
I am hot now, and it is not yet eight o’clock. I am very ready to find Angle Tarn. Around the next bend there she is, a dawn reflection. A mica like flake cradled in the halfway-up-a-mountain. Their are islands trimmed with wildflower banks and dotted with rowan trees. I descend to its edge and strip off, my insect-acres of bare flesh immediately detected by a hungry mosquito. It is shallow and warm. Flat slabs of rock border the shoreline underfoot, then further out, the rich squidge of decomposition presses between my toes. I push off onto my back and wash off my yesterdays, looking at the ever bluing sky. Turning on my front I see the sky still – the surface a perfect mirror. Piercing the perfection are stubs of a water weed, doubled and hovering in the mirrored sky. A damselfly lands on one of them. I am totally enrapt by the twofold beauty.
I swim silently towards the island, not wanting to disturb the glassy surface. The edges of it are a festival of colour – deep pinks, yellows, whites. It is a hanging garden. I am naked and spy some wild campers on the far shore. I crouch down low, suddenly aware that I am not alone. A self conscious Eve in her Eden. I wonder about coming back here with a sleeping bag to camp on the island, and returning to the shore I walk on the boggy bed to measure how deep it is.
I’m aware now that Eleanor might be getting concerned and decide to take the more ‘direct’ route back to my alder camp via The Nab. I have been gone for four hours but know she will have been asleep for most if them, thankfully. Like many ‘direct’ routes crossing the landscape without a pathway to follow it turns out to be less than straightforward. Parts of it steep, parts tufty and uneven. I am fine until I have passed the peat hags – dark blemishes in the smooth green curve of the Nab from a distance; deep, springy wadis that I descend into and clamber out of once upon them. The course of my boots through the air as my heels peel off the cushiony moss – left, right, left, right – flicks splashes of bog water on the backs of my ankles; an unexpected pleasure.
The only semblance of a path I spy heads upwards, and I want to go down. So I start down the flank of the Nab. It is steep but my knees are still fresh. I follow the miniature terraces made by the sheep and the deer. Some deer raise their heads above the long grass. I cannot resist taking their photograph, and the light in that moment is beyond the sublime. The river wiggles down the bowl of the river valley – a mercury snake that will lead, at some point downstream, to my camp.
I am aware of ticks in the bracken having acquired one last week, burrowing just above my navel, so I make out a route that seems to avoid it. But the rushes are even taller, and whip at my bare legs. I resist covering them. It is too warm and at least this way I shall spot a tick straight away.
The descent seems endless and my knees are starting to tire. Sometimes there are small streams just below the meshwork of vegetation. Once, my foot plunges blindly into it, the grass hiding it like a boobie trap. I must not twist my ankle; that would be bad. Nobody knows where I am and I am not on a path, in a valley where apparently not many people come. Stupid on two counts, though only if something goes wrong. It’s also known as ‘just going for a wander’.
Finally I make it to a friendly grove of alders and lean on the topmost for some shade. Oh, another carcass. Strong stench. Continue descending. I find another alder. This one has a rowan growing from within its gnarly hollowed trunk. I take off my boots and enjoy the grass for a while. There is nowhere approaching horizontal to sit, so I stand propped against the tree.
At last I reach the dry stone wall at the valley bottom where, apparently just for me, a section has collapsed to ease my passage to the river. I consider wading to the camp in the river but I feel I should not linger. Parts of the way I can walk by the bank. Parts sheep have grazed low leaving only thistles to navigate. Again I find myself wading through spiky rushes.
I cross the river twice, eventually getting close to a place where it feels close to home. The trees bend over the stream making a hollow of green and small pools are churned by a miniature cascade. Up ahead I see a flash of Toby on his way to his lunch date. I want to shout “I’m OK!” but he was never aware that I might not have been. There is a sudden lift from my right. An eagle! I follow and he plays catch-me-up all the way downstream: landing, waiting, I catch up, he takes flight. That’s how it goes, until on the home stretch of the track nearing my camp, he lets me get within ten metres then disappears under a tree, not to be seen again.
I see El and get ready to apologise. I have been gone for seven hours. She is suitably unconcerned, as she has been awake for three. Her day is still new, and mine is already filled to brimming with adventure.
What a magical feeling when some people who were, just a moment ago, simply ‘people’ in a photograph I took (the group in the background below), make me stop and have an encounter with them – on this occasion initiated by a request to take a family portrait. ”You do know what you’re sitting on?” I said. “Yes. The place they rested the coffins”. We engaged in chat as one does. It emerged they were three generations of an adult family – mother, children and one grandchild, who had come back to the place they used to holiday as children to commemorate the recent death of their father. “A walk down memory lane”, as they put it.
The Coffin Route: Ambleside – Rydal – Grasmere
I felt that was as apt a description as it ever would be as I walked along the Coffin Route between Ambleside and Grasmere – one of several in this area. These routes were used from the 13th century (or possibly earlier) on Sundays in all weathers for churchgoers to descend from their farms in the valleys to their nearest parish church. This Coffin Route led to St. Oswald’s church in Grasmere – the only parish church in the area, until a small chapel was built in what is now Ambleside in the 16th century. Even then, the trek still had to be taken to St. Oswald’s to mark births, deaths, and marriages, and it remained the only church with a graveyard. It is not until the construction of the Turnpike Road in the 19th century that piety became less of an arduous task. Along the routes are large flat stones upon which the coffin bearers rested their load, on what would have been a difficult trek on uneven terrain.
Unless the weather be particularly fierce these will not have been silent and lifeless lines [of people], but small clusters full of laughter, chatter, movement, as the week’s events are related, gossip exchanged, even some business done. For most, it is the only opportunity to socialise, and, resenting the imposed trek, they make the most of it.
I appreciated the route for its mundanity, and I thought of all the people who would have walked it across the centuries – young and old, happy and grieving, reflecting on the week past or remembering the life of another.
Every encounter I have along the way is an opportunity for passers by to become the characters they are in my story – their lives opening out into mine and mine into theirs. We became a part of each other’s summer on that St. Swithin’s Day, as the tales were picked up and carried onwards.
Something that is very new to me on this adventure is the concept (and reality) of being deeply entangled with technologies, or at least thinking about what the next blog post might look like. It is an interesting process, but sometimes I crave to walk unfettered by kit, or ideas, and to just be present in the landscape, experiencing it directly. Yesterday, it was extremely hot. I took a notebook and a pencil, and wrote directly – as I walked, or paused to enjoy the cool shade of a tree. This is what came out.
Every tree has a great significance on days like these. You walk into their micro-climates as you would dive into the cool of a lake. My feet are boiling. New boots. Woollen socks. Trying to break them in. There’s a river not far away. The signs point to a bridge – Sprint Bridge. I look forward to meeting it like a child meeting ice cream.
The sheep took shade in an entanglement of hawthorns, poked through with spears of purple foxglove.Sheep create many of the land-marks that are useful to me: paths, hollows ideal for a campfire, clear flattened patches of earth under a tree for a camp or a nap. And I enjoy watching the tufts of wool, flapping like bunting, caught on a barbed wire fence or a post where an urgent itch was satisfied.
These trees are big and have been here so much longer than I have. And I have the audacity not to know all of their names. What kind of education do we give our children that they know the names of gadgets but not the beings that allow them to breathe?
Ahead of me is a snaking green path through tall yellow grasses, out in the brash sunlight. I am drawn to this spot by the magnetism of the cool, the sounds of the breeze in the canopy (high note) and grasses (low note). Occasional improvisation from raven and ewe.
Shade. It’s like a pool, and an orbit for creatures attracted to it. Shade. What happens in it? I stop. Sometimes to stop, sometimes to write.
Crinkles in blades of grass. Like brail under the thumb. Soothing stimulation.
I hear the river as an all encompassing, constant breeze (high note) then on closer listening the low melodious plop-pouring of the cascading pools. A wood pigeon. A cockerel. A cockerel? Must be a house nearby. Chink of something on stone. A woman’s voice.
Step back into the shade. River’s edge. Can’t see anything for a moment. When I shut my eyes the ghost of the last bright moment burns a bright yellow green. Readjusting now. Shade by water – more humid, more penetrating.
Today I am headed northwards, having spent a couple of days treading the paved ways of Lancaster and Manchester, getting kit sorted and letting word of my journey get around. I shall be doing an event at Waterstone’s bookshop in Lancaster at the end, and hopefully will be in the local paper soon.
Being in town has been quite pleasant in the sun, and had its unexpected discoveries. I walked the chalk in a different way. It made me think about our impulses to leave traces of our passing, on any journey, great or small.
Tonight I am headed to a place just outside Kendal, from where I shall depart on my meanderings through the Lake District. I hope to get some pointers from friends who know the area well. For now, I imagine myself as a bird, hovering at the edge of it all.
Journeys In Between 