Walking back through time: a landscape history of pathways

For a while now I have been contemplating researching a comprehensive landscape history of paths, or at least the pathways of Britain. Paths, such an intrinsic topographical element, both a symbolic and practical medium for accessing and moving through much of the landscape, really should have their own history told. Somewhat surprisingly, no-one seems to have done this yet in a holistic way (though there is, of course, a vast array of books, pamphlets and web pages devoted to walking and related experiences, to describing routes through the landscape, and to recording often locally specific paths, tracks and byways). What lies below our feet - the actual path - often seems to be curiously incidental to these narratives, perhaps taken for granted (even, dare I say it, by academic specialists, psycho-geographers and new nature writers).

These musings have been honed into a research proposal so that I can hawk this around for funding (so far unsuccessfully!) or undertake the project independently. I'm beginning to think that the latter pathway is more likely and has many advantages, less constraints, and allows a wider ranging, should I be able to find the time to carry it out (and walk the miles). Anyway, here is what I have in mind. If anyone has any comments or suggestions then please do get in touch. It is written as an academic research proposal so please bear that in mind if you slightly loose the will to live before reaching the end.

Footpaths are not simply conduits for moving through the landscape: from prehistory to the present day, they have played a fundamental role in shaping both the land and the people who have walked them. Each pathway has a topography and social history of its own which tells the story of its original purpose and subsequent use. And yet, paths and their infrastructure – and the meanings which have become associated with them – have seldom featured in the historiography of the British landscape. This research will fill that gap.

Defining a path as a route used for non-vehicular passage away from the main arteries of commerce and travel, this project will examine a variety of different types of British pathway. These include routes used for everyday local movement and connection alongside long-distance routes such as pilgrim ways, drovers’ roads, and recreational trails. Pathways with special functions, for instance industrial tracks, will be studied together with both formal and informal circuits of protest and celebration. In terms of geographical and chronological scale, investigation will concentrate on a British context from the early medieval to the present day, drawing on comparisons and evidence from further afield and prehistory where necessary. While recognising that every path is the unique product of its own history, this research will explore a number of themes relevant to all. Temporal and spatial consideration will be given to the permanence or ephemerality of paths, and their stability or instability as landscape features. 

The research will also address such issues as the extent to which pathway origins can be traced, and how their courses, material fabric, names, and purposes might have changed over time. It will examine pathways as networks of movement and connection, and how patterns of footpaths have formed in different regions and landscape settings, and at different times. It will look to explain why pathways take different physical forms. It will examine how people have understood paths whether as public spaces or common rights of way, or as symbols of social memory and community custom, markers of boundaries, and channels for dissent. 

Complementing these historical perspectives, the project will also address the part paths play in the contemporary landscape: how are they now managed, to what extent are they at risk or under-appreciated as a public good, and what role might they play in a more sustainable society?

The history, physical form, and utility of routeways has been addressed to some extent in scholarly discourse (Allen and Evans, 2016; Hindle, 1991; Morriss, 2005; Taylor, 1979). The substantial corpus of research accumulated for other elements of the historic landscape, such as fortifications, religious and ritual sites, settlements and field systems, is, however, lacking for the pathways that connect these spaces. What has been published has tended to focus less on paths and walking, more on roads and highways as networks for elite movement, trade, and communication: for instance, the outputs of the recently concluded Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England project (Brookes et al, 2019). Moreover, though W.G. Hoskins’ ‘mud on your boots’ ethos has permeated the empirical landscape archaeology and history tradition in Britain, the paths used to explore and record the historic environment (and walking as a fieldwork technique, beyond the structured practice of ‘field walking’ to identify artefact scatters) are generally overlooked, for instance, in the fieldwork guides of Brown, 1987 and Muir, 2000.

Prehistorians, anthropologists and cultural geographers have been more interested in paths and walking than those examining trackways and footpaths in the historic period (Bell, 2020; Leary, 2014; Wylie, 2005). Mobility through the landscape has appeared as a key theme, though phenomenological approaches based on inhabiting the landscape, and considerations of flows of people and objects have left surprisingly little space for examining the materiality of paths and tracks (Gibson et al, 2019; Ingold, 2011; Sen and Johung, 2016; Tilley and Cameron-Daum, 2017).

A slew of popular yet highly literate narratives around path-making and -taking (Macfarlane, 2012; Solnit, 2002), together with psycho-geographical tracts constructed around novel walking practice, often in urban, contested or prohibited settings (Papadimitriou, 2003; Sinclair, 2002), provide further contemporary context. Wider public and policy interest in landscape responses to environmental and climate change such as future farming practices, rewilding, and flood control are also of relevance here, not least because walking footpaths remains one of Britain’s most popular outdoor pursuits, valued for cementing a sense of place as well as its health and well-being benefits (de Moor, 2013; Ramblers, 2010).

This research will draw judiciously from the various methodological and theoretical approaches taken in these previous studies of pathways, extending them further and applying them in new contexts.

Six case studies will anchor the research, chosen to represent a diversity of topography, geography, and history: a deep survey of specific localised footpath networks at the scale of the historic parish or group of parishes (as long-established territorial units). Close study of medieval tracks associated with monasteries in south-east Wales has already tested the feasibility of this approach (Procter, 2019). A matrix of criteria will be used to identify the case study parishes, taking account of the existing path network, and richness of historic mapping and primary sources. Representation from across England, Scotland and Wales and a range of landscape settings, such as heavily wooded, upland, low-lying, industrial and urban will also be ensured. Case study selection will precede the main research study. The Cotswold scarp of Gloucestershire has been provisionally identified as the location for an example of ‘ancient’ countryside and a parish characterised by planned enclosure will be selected in the Feldon area of south Warwickshire. In addition, a study of Offa’s Dyke Long Distance Trail will focus on contemporary trail-making and recreational utility.

Building on my own doctoral research practice, an interdisciplinary methodology will integrate topographical, archaeological, cartographic, etymological and historical evidence. Applied experience and knowledge of working as a Public Rights of Way Officer and leading volunteer parties maintaining National Park footpaths will supplement academic research skills. The archaeology and physical characteristics of the paths in each case study area will be examined in the field to establish geographical patterns and networks, their fabric and form, function and evolution, and classify related landscape features, such as boundaries, stiles, and bridges. Public rights of way, permissive routes, and unofficial and disused tracks will be extensively walked, photographed and recorded, harnessing the assistance of local history and walking groups. Key exemplars will be subjected to more intensive investigation through measured survey. This field evidence will be combined with an analysis of references to case study footpaths in existing data sets (HERs, archaeological reports, etc.), and primary and secondary sources held within local and national archives (including estate, enclosure and tithe maps, legal cases relating to rights of way, highway commissioners reports, and manor court records and surveys). Corroboration will also be provided from aerial photography, satellite imagery, LiDAR, and other geo-spatial resources. These data will be combined, analysed and where appropriate modelled in GIS; and the research outcomes illuminated by a set of GIS-based maps of the case study path networks, written and photographic commentaries of selected walks, and detailed plans of example path types. 

Archival sources, such as early medieval charters and later medieval court rolls, references to perambulations and ‘Beating the Bounds’ of parish boundaries, will be interrogated alongside local legend and folk tales, early modern chorographies, and literary and artistic representations to chronicle how the case study pathways have been experienced and perceived through time. An indication of contemporary attitudes to the footpath network will be highlighted through small-scale qualitative on-line, social media, and in-person survey of users and other stakeholders within the case study areas, complemented by analysis of quantitative data-sets available from bodies such as National Parks, The Ramblers and National Trust.

The primary output from the project will be a monograph or book. Detailed, place-specific spatial and temporal descriptions of the origins, and material and cultural evolution of the case study pathways will inform an overarching landscape history of British footpaths. There are currently no titles that cover this territory. Additionally, two articles on elements of the project (for example, the walking fieldwork practice and a case study) will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals such as Landscapes, Landscape Research, and others across related fields including archaeology, cultural geography, history, and literary studies. The emerging research will also be disseminated through conference papers (particularly targeted at conferences with an inter-disciplinary landscape focus).

Wider public engagement will be threefold. First, a dedicated blog and social media profile, highlighting interactive maps of the case study path networks, walk commentaries and suggested routes, and enabling interaction with local interest groups within the case study areas. Secondly, such groups as well as cultural festivals and events with a landscape, walking, nature, or travel writing component will be approached as platforms for talks (where possible combined with themed guided walks). Finally, several short-form articles will be submitted to relevant magazines, websites, and blogs with both niche and wider audiences outside of academia, ranging from ‘new nature writing’ and psycho-geography to walking and outdoor titles.

Bibliography

Allen, V and Evans, R (eds.) (2016) Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Bell, M (2020) Making One's Way in the World: The Footprints and Trackways of Prehistoric People (Oxford: Oxbow).

Brookes, S, Rye, E and Oksanen, E (2019) Bridges of Medieval England to c.1250, Archaeological Data Service database <https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/medbridges_lt_2019/>, accessed 12/02/20.

Brown, A (1987) Fieldwork for Archaeologists and Local Historians (London: Batsford).

De Moor, D (2013) Walking Works, Walking for Health review report (The Ramblers).

Edwards, J and Hindle, P (1991) ‘The Transportation System of Medieval England and Wales’, Journal of Historical Geography, 17(2), 123-134.

Gibson, C, Cleary, L and Frieman, C (eds.) (2019) Making Journeys: Archaeologies of Mobility (Oxford: Oxbow). 

Ingold, T (2011) Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description (Abingdon: Routledge).

Leary, J (ed.) (2014) Archaeological Perspectives to Movement and Mobility (Farnham: Ashgate).

Macfarlane, R (2012) The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (London: Hamish Hamilton).

Morriss, R (2005) Roads: Archaeology and Architecture (Stroud: Tempus).

Muir, R (2000) The New Reading the Landscape (Exeter: University of Exeter Press).

Papadimitriou, N (2013) Scarp: In Search of London’s Outer Limits (London: Sceptre).

Procter, E (2019) ‘The Path to the Monastery: Monastic Communication Networks in the Southern Welsh Marches’, Landscape History, 40(1), 59-70.

Ramblers, The (2010) Walking Facts and Figures 2: Participation in Walking <https://www.ramblers.org.uk/advice/facts-and-stats-about-walking/participation-in-walking.aspx>, accessed 14/02/20.

Sen, A and Johung, J (eds.) (2016) Landscapes of Mobility. Culture, Politics, and Placemaking (Abingdon: Routledge).

Sinclair, I (2002) London Orbital (London: Granta).

Solnit, R (2002) Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Granta).

Taylor, C (1979) Roads and Tracks of Britain (London: Dent).

Tilley, C and Cameron-Daum, K (2017) An Anthropology of Landscape: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary (London: UCL Press).

Wylie, J (2005) 'A Single Days Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path', Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 234-47

Take the long road and walk it

Mapped above is the route of a week long walk I will be undertaking in June, linking up the estate landscapes and medieval route-ways of the three case studies of my PhD research: Llanthony Priory, Llantarnam Abbey and Tintern Abbey in the southern Welsh Marches.

The aim is to contribute to the 'walking as deep topography and PhD fieldwork practice' that I outlined in a recent blog post, adding a linking and overarching narrative to the more localised walks I am undertaking within the three case study areas individually.

Deep topography practice – landscape walks as PhD fieldwork

Composite map of the landscape walk routes in the Llanthony Priory case study (Source: map drawn in ArcGIS using ArcGIS World Imagery basemap).

A note here on the experiential landscape walks that I am undertaking across the three case study areas on which my PhD research is focussed, a core element in an interdisciplinary approach: blending the solid of landscape history with the drift of landscape perception. 

One key purpose is to bridge the traditional fieldwork focus on macro-level reconnaissance across relatively large areas on the one hand and smaller-scale targeting of specific sites and features through survey, field walking, test pitting and so on on the other. The walks aim to fulfil a complementary and linking middle ground that also provides additional evidence and value. More fundamentally, actually walking and moving through the landscape on foot, experiencing and investigating on the ground, helps to provide a more nuanced, fleshed-out and three-dimensional feeling to supplement important but formulaic desk-based study focused on academic reading and ‘birds eye’ views from aerial photographs, satellite imagery and maps and so forth. This is deep topography in practice: a deepening understanding of landscape history allied to a deeper perceptual viewpoint. Getting to know a landscape, its biography through walking.

The old roadway to Llanthony Priory from Longtown and its Herefordshire estates, now disused; investigated on the Llanthony to Longtown landscape walk.

I have appropriated 'deep topography' here from Nick Papadimitriou's description of his 'conscious walking' through the fringes and suburbs of North London, most expansively articulated in his book Scarp: In Search of London's Outer Limits (2013). This terminology could also be used to describe the work of outlier geographers, largely operating outside of the academic arena, such as Patrick Keiller (The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes, 2013), Tim Robinson (Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 1990) and Will Self (Psychogeography, 2007). All exponents of a more nuanced counterpart to the now perhaps over-cooked concept of 'psycho-geography', less shackled to its conceptual and urban prescriptions. Self has described deep topography as ‘minutely detailed, multi-level examinations of select locales that impact upon the writer’s own microscopic inner-eye’, combining ecology, history, poetry and sociology; or in Nick Papadimitrou’s own terms ‘an acknowledgement of the magnitude of response to landscape.’ A mention here of another related concept, phenomenology, which this research also aims to integrate. A phenomenological approach views the environment as more than just a passive backdrop or external object of the spectator’s gaze; providing a challenge to more traditional ideas of landscape as simply a way of seeing the world or a repository of empirical material data. Ideas taken forward most notably in relation to landscape by archaeologist Christopher Tilley (A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, 1994) and anthropologist and cultural geographer Tim Ingold (Imagining Landscapes, Past, Present and Future, with Monica Janowski, 2012).

Although psycho-geographical texts and practice have attracted academic interest in recent years, this has tended to be within the confines of cultural geography and literary studies and focused on the urban experience, whilst the extensive archaeological practice of phenomenology has largely been limited to the study of prehistoric landscapes. As Papadimitriou’s ventures into deep topography throughout the Middlesex-Hertfordshire boundary lands and W.G. Sebald’s long existential walk along the East Anglian coast (The Rings of Saturn, 1995) demonstrate, any landscape can in principle be opened up to what Iain Sinclair has described as: ‘psycho-geography lite. It was a long way from the Situationists but it suited the English sentiment about walking, deep-topography, historical scavenging.’ This is the context for my tramps through the countryside of the southern Welsh Marches, looking for the liminal topographical ghosts of monasticism.

An old wall in the woods above the Angidy Brook, possibly a boundary of the 'lost' Tintern abbey grange of Secular Firmary; investigated on the Porthcasseg landscape walk.

A series of walks is being undertaken in each case study area focussed on particular themes, features and objectives identified through initial desk-based analysis, but with scope to venture ‘off-piste’ when in the field (composite maps of the walks taken so far in the Llanthony and Tintern case studies are provided here). Through a mix of observation, photography and note-taking places that can be easily overlooked, neglected or invisible to the casual eye are investigated and recorded. The footpaths, lanes and off-the-beaten-track routes followed form a sort of outdoor laboratory for the crystallizing of thoughts, ideas and connections, found evidence of the medieval and historic landscape and a wider appreciation of the geography of, and feeling for, the landscape as it is passed through. A mental map taken back to enrich work at lap-top and desk. 

Composite map of the landscape walk routes in the Tintern Abbey case study (Source: map drawn in ArcGIS using ArcGIS World Imagery basemap).

The output from the walks is a set of commentaries and photographs of the landscapes encountered both from a physical and perceptual perspective, with an accompanying map of the route. As well as informing the main narrative these notes, which will be presented in a standard format as an online resource alongside the main Thesis (see example screenshot extract below), are intended as a more in-depth supplement to the main text. The discussion section of the Thesis will also critically evaluate what worked well and less well in integrating this approach with more conventional landscape archaeology and history research tools. 

Extract from Cwmyoy South landscape walk notes.

Finally, back to Nick Papadimitriou. In an interview on the subject of his deep topography practice at the London Short Film Festival, he outlined six tips for deep topography walking. The approach adopted for my research does not necessarily stick to all of these principles and aims to demonstrate a more expansive fusion of such metaphysical exploration with other approaches, but they provide a useful starting point and stimulus: 

• Go walking. Stay away from bright lights. 
• Explore second hand bookshops. Buy books on topography – on areas, regions, counties. Study them. Then walk around and see whether you can make sense of the present landscape in relation to the past. This way you’ll get more tension and depth in your engagement with the landscape. 
• Go out on your own without any maps and without a digital camera. Digital cameras are the death of the imagination. 
• Go in any direction that suits you. Go in unfamiliar directions. Go in familiar directions and try and see things in a new way. 
• Develop a sense of contours. They tell you a lot about the tensions and releases of the landscape and the way the ancillary aspects if the landscape (such as sewage and drainage systems) are organised. It will build up your sense of place. 
• Develop a poetry out of the commonplace. The two aren’t opposites. The inexplicable and the obvious reside alongside each other. 

Nick expands on his approach in John Roger's documentary The London Perambulator: Afoot in London's Edgelands (2009): 

There's joy in a simple place

Not that I need an excuse for a walk, but inspired by my current read - Rob Cowan's superb nature/landscape/memoir, Common Ground - and buoyed by the small victory of producing a first basic map in a new (to me) GIS package, I headed around my own patch of edge-land. Oldbury Court and Frenchay Moor might not exactly be terra neglectus, but away from the perpetual dog walkers there are many quiet nooks and acres here, part of Bristol's characteristically laid-back green drift into the surrounding countryside. 

This is a simple place, a minor place, but there's joy here in the cold January sun.

I've been to a minor place
and I can say I like its face,
If I am gone and with no trace

I will be in a minor place 

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - A Minor Place

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark

Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar

Cwm, corrie, cirque. Geography lesson rote learning that has stuck. The same etymology from different terrains - Wales, Scotland and France; combe is a south-west England variant - defines the amphitheatre-like landform that can be found at the head of a valley. Classically, U-shaped with a steepling mountain forming the headwall and arduous scree slopes topped by climbing ridges aside. But also equally arresting in more modest surroundings: the spring-line bowl of a chalk down, Iron Age hill-fort ramparts casting slanting shadows from above; or constructed in miniature in a dozen stream-fluted tributary gullies and hanging valleys indenting an upland river dale. These are the nooks, slacks, hollows and cloughs that form a sort of "invisible estate", to use Henry Vaughan's phrase, in hill and mountain country.   

Such places are often looked down upon, both literally, from a higher ridge or summit, and metaphorically because they are liminal backdrops to the landscape, away from the toiling tracks to the heights. Not most peoples idea of a destination, part of the scenic wash that accompanies an ascent to bag a peak or complete a horse-shoe circuit: integral but largely uncharted topography. And yet, as Nan Shepherd so compellingly shows in The Living Mountain, her antidote to shallow thrill-seeking, there is "wild enchantment" to be had in following a mountain stream to its airy source, in picking a route across a stony slope; in gladly going nowhere in such catchments. In Shepherd's words: "often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone our merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him".

And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk

The unfinished business of the Right to Roam Act, 2004 - an addendum to the progressive public access legislation that saw the introduction of National Parks in England and Wales in 1949 - has provided the opportunity to freely wander across vast tracts of previously off-limits open, uncultivated mountain, moor, heath, and downland. Ordnance Survey maps clearly demarcate land where this freedom can be exercised, and many lonely valley heads are now legally open to anyone to explore. And yet, and quite rationally, most people stick to the known paths when in this opened up country. Veer off to find your own personal wildness and you will soon be quite alone.

Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots and rabbit holes for steps

The attraction here is the feeling not just of in-the-moment aloneness but of new frontiers. In The Wild Places Robert Macfarlane rightly, and cheerfully, points out that "the human and the wild cannot be partitioned"; that even seemingly remote places have been dwelt in, worked in and visited at some point. But walking or scrambling a steep slope at a valley fountainhead, well away from any path or right of way, and you may be the first human breath, touch, sight within that micro trajectory for what: a year? a decade? a century? The particular ground you are covering may have seen few, if any, people traverse the exactitude of its quiet terrain over several millennia. In a sense you may very well have entered a version of the "chaste land" that many would agree with Macfarlane is a mythical concept.

I have pondered finding wildness in out-of-the-way nooks at length in a previous post and won't dwell on this further. It is though interesting to reflect upon who might have been here before you? A fellow Gore-Tex clad roamer, a field archaeologist or botanist, a gaggle of bereft Duke of Edinburgh teenagers, an OS surveyor, a shepherd, a downed German pilot, a sorrowful Romantic poet, another shepherd - maybe benighted, a poacher, a gamekeeper, a deserting soldier, a determined tinker, a pair of clandestine lovers, a party beating the bounds, gambolling children from a summer sheiling, an army scout, a searcher of new territory, a hunter, a gatherer. Some of these perhaps, but probably no-one has ever stroked that rock, slaked from that point in the stream, gripped that tree root, slipped on that patch of scree. You are a momentary pioneer.  

The Sun of Winter, the Moon of Summer and all the singing birds

Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out

Writing now my mind is drawn to an array of valley heads, fell sides and steep gullies: some monumental, others with a gentler force of wildness. Ponden Kirk, the rain-lashed millstone grit venue for my first childhood hillside adventuring, the springs and hanging woods of the western Cotswold scarp combes, and the ice-scraped bowls of the upper valleys of western Lakeland: Ennerdale, Eskdale, Mosedale. Student hangovers blown away dropping off the monk trods of the North York Moors into the beginnings of Great and Little Fry-up Dales (in search of breakfast?). Regular haunts amongst the darren, pant and ffridd of the less-frequented valleys of the Black Mountains: Cwm lau, Olchon, Nant Bwlch and Grwyne Fechan; places unburdened by topographical complexity or any hint of being a final destination. Further afield and a memorable day scrambling around a corrie in the bowels of the southern-most Andes of Tierra del Fuego, falling asleep with tired feet in the cool mountain water freed from the glacier above. And I can picture many more, often with a clarity that escapes memories of the summits and ridges with which they share topological space. 

As often with landscape, it is the poet who best captures the words for this terrain. In The Cataract of Lodore Robert Southey vigorously brings to life the darting, roaring, guggling, brawling, sheeting passage of mountain becks and burns as they proceed downward from their springs, tarns and bogs "under the mountain's head of rush and stone" as Edward Thomas would have it. These watery starting lines disguised as cul-de-sacs are a gift to the rural flâneur; sheep tracks, streams, crags, ruined sheep folds - all encourage the curious visitor to roam hither and thither rather than plod a linear course. To seek a path in this domain of the mountain hare, red kite and curlew, petrified hawthorn and blackthorn, lichen-taken crag and scree: "scanning the close at hand for interest, or at least a place to crouch in out of the wind while the others scramble up" (Hilles Edge, Glyn Maxwell).

The title and extracts here are from Edward Thomas poetic paean to these unsought commons, The Combe, published in 1917:

The Combe was ever dark, ancient and dark.
Its mouth is stopped with bramble, thorn, and briar;
And no one scrambles over the sliding chalk
By beech and yew and perishing juniper
Down the half precipices of its sides, with roots
and rabbit holes for steps. The Sun of Winter,
the Moon of Summer and all the singing birds
Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper,
Are quite shut out. But far more ancient and dark
The Combe looks since they killed the badger there,
Dug him out and gave him to the hounds,
That most ancient Briton of English beasts.

References

Macfarlane, Robert (2007) The Wild Places (Granta).

Maxwell, Glyn (2000) 'Hilles Edge' in Baker, Kenneth (ed.), The Faber Book of Landscape Poetry (Faber and Faber).

Shepherd, Nan (2011) The Living Mountain (Canongate).

Southey, Robert (1988) 'The Cataract of Lodore' in Cotter, Gerry (ed.), Natural History Verse: An Anthology (Christopher Helm).

Thomas, Edward (2004) 'The Combe' and 'Over the Hills' in Edward Thomas: Collected Poems (Faber and Faber).

Vaughan, Henry (1988) 'The Waterfall' in Cotter, Gerry (ed.), Natural History Verse: An Anthology (Christopher Helm).

Richard Long: 'Time passes. A place remains.'

"A good work is the right thing in the right place at the right time. A crossing place."
Richard Long, 1980

The Arnolfini gallery in Bristol is currently hosting an exhibition of the work of Richard Long, entitled Time and Space. As a native Bristolian, works from the city and the South West are well-represented as are those from further afield, from all seven continents in fact.

His, often ephemeral, sculptures, photographs, textworks and other creations could be classified as land art or art made by walking or even (God forbid) psychogeographical art. As with other artists who use landscape as a touchstone and a material, such as Andy Goldsworthy, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Jeremy Deller and Richard Skelton, his output seems refreshingly straight-forward and free of dogma, unnecessary theorising and cant. It has a felt and intelligent simplicity. However, I will leave it to the words and work of Richard Long himself to convey how he uses materials in the landscape, walking and place itself to create his art.

"They are a sort of simple celebration of place, like its stones, or the horizon, or the mist, and of me being there, at that particular time, possibly never to pass that way again. I sometimes think of these works as songs."    
Richard Long, 2014

I like simple, practical, emotional,
quiet, vigorous art.

I like the simplicity of walking,
the simplicity of stones.

I like common materials, whatever is to hand,
but especially stones, I like the idea that stones
are what the world is made of.

I like common means given
the simple twist of art...

...I choose lines and circles because they do the job.

My art is about working in the wide world,
wherever, on the surface of the earth...

...I use the world as I find it...

...My outdoor sculptures and walking locations
are not subject to possession and ownership, I like the fact
that roads and mountains are common, public land.

My outdoor sculptures are places.
The materials and the idea are of the place...

...A walk expresses space and freedom
and the knowledge of it can live
in the imagination of anyone, and that
is another space too.

Extracts from:
'Five, six, pick up sticks
Seven, eight, lay them straight' (1980)

A footpath is a place.

It also goes from place to place, from here to there, and back again.

Any place along it is a stopping place...

...There is an infinite and cosmic variety of journeys, at all scales...

Notes on Paths, 1999

Art is a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials.

Royal West of England Academy, 2000

A text is a description, or story, of a work in the landscape. It is the simplest and most elegant way to present a particular idea, which could be a walk, or a sculpture, or both.

Extract from Notes on Works, 2000

References

Lailach, Michael, 2007. Land Art. Cologne: Taschen.

Long, Richard, 1997. A Walk Across England. London: Thames & Hudson.

Roelstrate, Dieter, 2010. Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking. London: Afterall.

Tufnell, Ben (Ed.), 2007. Richard Long: Selected Statements & Interviews. London: Haunch of Venison.

Richard Long: Time and Space. Exhibition guide, 2015.

The mountains of Arran: a landscape of wonder within reach

"My place above every other place

to be on your high shoulder-blades

striving with your rocky great grey throat"

The Cuillin, Sorley MacLean

The beginnings play out the familiar rhythms of the start to a day in the mountains. Shaking off car park lethargy with a steep - initially conifer-shrouded - ascent, cresting to a suddenly wide-screen terrain, taking in the always wonder-capturing first vista with heavy breath then a washing-over of the stoic reserves required for the upward progression to the initial peak. 

The rising rock-scape in question is Goat Fell, at 874 metres the highest point of the mountain range that bosses the northern half of the Island of Arran, a hypereal mirage of jagged horizons seen across the Firth of Clyde from the drab mainland reality of the port of Ardrossan and post-industrial North Ayrshire (post-industrial being, of course, a bogus alias for places - and people - that have been used, spat out and apparently no longer matter).

For once the opportunity had arisen to pass over the usual horse-shoe circular movement in favour of a less predictable linear upland journey: ten miles or so of high level tramp from the Victorian Laird-land of Brodick Castle to the sheltered bay of Lochranza on the northern coast (famous as the landing point of Robert the Bruce on his return to Scotland in 1306 and as a site of the geologically important Hutton's Unconformity)  A clear forecast after several dreich days means that the climb to Goat Fell is well populated in both directions. Up and over and the descent to the exposed ridge of Stacach sees the masses dwindle to the occasional fellow wayfarers, then a morphing into a facsimile (for it is nothing more) of wilderness, with no sightings of a human being in the final three hours of the walk.

Picking a route down to the dispiritingly low pass of The Saddle and Geography lesson perfect glaciated valleys fan in all directions. Looming ahead and then above is the seemingly unbreachable massif of Cir Mhor ('big comb' due to its resemblance to a cockscomb, the crest of a domestic cock). The thin line of a path up the mountain-side traced from afar is now out of sight. The unlikely smallness of the gravel track commencement of the climb requires faith and experience to envisage it as a way to scale the looming heights. After the so-so summit of Goat Fell (the highest point of a range is rarely the most memorable), Cir Mhor is a revelation of a mountain; the apex of an X-shaped quartet of ridges. A high terrain that seems more Pyrenees or Dolomite than Scottish Highland, with light grey granite tors resembling massive Inca walls (or perhaps a pneumatic Dartmoor): the Andean ambiance bringing to mind the opening scene of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, a caravan of conquistadors and their Queshua slaves descending a mist-shrouded Huayna Picchu on their doomed search for El Dorado. 

Looking back from the curva-like ridge approaching the final peak of the day, Caisteal Abhail, and the dragon's back route from Goat Fell appears in sharp relief. Atop and gazing in the opposite direction and the day's destination, Lochranza, appears for the first time; a balm for heavy legs but a hazy blue horizon still four miles distant. 

High-rolling days like these need to be cherished. Not because they represent a tired macho peak-bagging mentality or some nebulous concept of wilderness; its more simple than that: they are a reminder that landscapes of wonder are within reach.

The Sad Road to the Sea: Walking a forgotten branchline by Jack Cooke

A guest post from Jack Cooke on the storied melancholia of walking a forgotten East Anglian branchline. 

No one departs, no one arrives

From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.

They've all passed out of our lives

On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.

(Flanders & Swann)

Ducking in behind the pawnbrokers on Saxmundham High Street the footpath leads north, following a sheltering embankment of cow parsley and crisp packets. After a few hundred feet and glimpses of neat allotments, I emerge alongside rails, picking up speed like a train pulling free of the town. Ahead of me, the track splits, the Lowestoft service passing on up the coast. How many of its passengers ever spot a sister track, half-hidden behind gravel sacks and wire? This forgotten line curves gently away to the east, disappearing into the hedgerows. I cross the rails, a necessary trespass to follow the old route to the sea.

Board a train anywhere in mainland Britain tomorrow and you have roughly eleven thousand miles of track ahead of you. You can coast along steels to every city, a thousand towns and even the odd village. Yet if you yearn to travel by rail into the small corners of the British countryside, you have missed your train by a margin of fifty years or more.

From the moment the first steam engine berthed in the 19^th century, British railways spread fast across the length and breadth of the islands. At its peak the system extended over twenty-three thousand miles of rail, hundreds of branch lines diverting from the main trunks and journeying into lonely valleys and onto isolated headlands. As the network expanded it became increasingly eccentric, with different operating systems and burgeoning costs. With the rise of the roads after the First World War, traffic from many of the smaller tracks found other means and some branch lines ground to a halt. Following nationalisation in 1948 this programme of closure accelerated but, by the 1960s, the warp and weft of the network was still haemorrhaging over three hundred thousand pounds a day.

In the midst of this deepening crisis, two opposing forces came head-to-head on the spider-web of British rail. The infamous Dr Beeching, rationalist and man of science, newly appointed Chairman of the British Transport Commission, and John Betjeman, romantic and man of letters, soon to be appointed Poet Laureate. These men were emblematic of polarised attitudes, on one side the desire to modernise Britain’s sprawling rail network and cut its crippling deficits, and on the other a passion for preservation, for conserving a rural and industrial past and the communities served by the branchlines. The ‘Beeching Axe’ was victorious. Link-by-link most of the remaining tracks were torn up or cut off; they became fading constellations in a universe of shrinking steel.  

Trains that end in the sea have always had a peculiar romance. As the ground falls away to the coast, the traveller seems to pick up speed, accelerating to meet land’s edge. For one hundred years and six, a small railway branch on the East Suffolk coast serviced fish, coal and passengers. Leaving the Lowestoft line it looped away from a junction, breaking for the sea on a long descent through small towns; Leiston, Thorpeness and finally to the shore at Aldeburgh.

Today, it is a half-track, four miles of rail and four more of farmland. The dawning of the nuclear age has saved the first section as far as Leiston. The A, B, and coming C of Britain’s nuclear power complex at Sizewell beach provides enough traffic, construction and radioactive waste, to keep the steels in place. Beyond, the old track is marked only by its absence. There is little evidence left of the thousands of tonnes of fish sacks or coal stacks, or the people who used the line.

I wanted to recapture the views of fifty years long gone, to come to the sea as a tourist might have done half-a-century ago, not funnelled up a tarmac corridor but flying over the flatland. By following the line from beginning to end, along the repossessed nuclear railway and then on, to the traces etched in crag path and clearing, I hoped to rediscover a lost perspective on familiar country. I wanted to conjure, just for one day, the steaming splendour of ‘The Eastern Belle’, ‘The East Anglian’, and other trains that once took this track, loaded with ice-cream anticipation, sea visions and thoughts of escape.

Turning off down the branch line, the track is well ordered. New Magnox rivets secure the sleepers and steel and, once a year, a ‘weed-killer’ engine comes shunting up these rails, lacing the embankment in a chemical cocoon, keeping the passage clear for nuclear flasks passing in the night. In photographs these toxic containers look just like the classic cash boxes of great Hollywood heist movies; treasure chest-shaped and lying in state on single carriages. Their innocent form cloaks a dead weight of fifty tonnes, steel casing and lead linings housing radioactive waste in transit. I try to imagine the flasks passing me on the track, mistaken for holy relics washed up by the sea; a funeral procession on its way up the line to some inland place of rest.

The track is sloping toward the seaward horizon now. Elated calls of mating birds blend with the distant curses of lone farmers, spring bringing sex for one and toil for the other. I am walking in the long shadow of Good Friday, though the parish churches I glimpse from the embankment will be observing it in small, solemn congregations barely filling single pews, much like the last passengers on this branch line nearly fifty years ago.

My legs were not manufactured for this gauge of railway. Just too short to bridge sleepers with a single stride, I fall between the cracks, boots scudding on the aggregate and clipping alternate ties. After a mile of this halting pace, I catch a rotten sleeper and fall headlong with hands outstretched. I make to rise, looking back between my legs and ahead, embarrassed by my mistake. Then I remember where I am, exposed but alone, and settle back onto the railroad, balancing my head on the warming noon steel.

There is a strange magnetism attached to walking a railway. Just as a train is bound to the limits of the line, after an hour walking between the rails I feel locked in and unable to deviate. A pedestrian on rails is melded in my mind with ideas of the American West; frontier towns, steel-driving men, endless horizons. As I press on down the old branch line the comparisons with springtime Suffolk do not seem so remote. The sporadic shotgun cases of farmers and poachers lie alongside the bones of predated rabbits in the track bed. On either side spreads flat desert with patchy trees and silent tractors, loose metal sounding in the wind. The pancake of coastal East Anglia becomes twinned with territories in Wyoming or Utah, all ‘big sky country’. On old ordnance maps, used when this line still carried passengers, some of these fields bear the same colouring as Saharan sand.

I come off the line on the outskirts of Leiston, next to the town cemetery. I have avoided the thousand pound trespass fine with no more than a hostile look from an old woman at one of the crossing cottages. I wonder if she has made a phone call and the British Transport Police block the next crossing, lazy blue sirens spinning on the verge. In my experience, there’s never been such a good way to meet people as trespassing on their property. You’ve immediately given them the high ground, which makes them a lot more sociable. You can then proceed to roll over like a dog. Everyone loves dogs.

Eating the remainder of my lunch, pulverised pork pie and sweet tea, I look back at the blank hedge behind me with no sign of the railway hiding under its blackthorn ridge. Like the Suez Canal, it takes a moving object to make you aware of what lies concealed in this landscape. The blackthorns form a ha-ha, hiding the margin into the next field and history in their shadow.

In 1872 an iron safe was installed in the Leiston ticket office. The volume of trade and passengers on the line had reached such levels that the Station Master regularly found fifty pounds worth of fares burning through his pocket at nightfall. In contemporary cash, that’s nigh on a grand. As I enter Leiston’s suburbs, walking in the shade of post-war housing estates, I try to conjure a cantering 19th century villain, shotgun under arm, cresting the rise ahead of me and bent on the day’s takings.

Beyond Leiston, I come to Crown Farm siding, where radioactive waste leaves the coast for its long journey North for reprocessing. In a gap at the end of the street, the titanic globe of Sizewell B sits, half-buried in its seaside bunker of sand and shingle. An elderly man, shuffling out of the adjacent Sizewell Social Club, looks at me suspiciously. “Yer awright boi?” he says, fag in mouth. Here men come to play pool and poker in the lee of the reactors, successive phases of British power sculpted by father and son. I give a thumbs up and scuttle off into the undergrowth behind the loading bays. There are no nuclear flasks lying upended in the scrub.

Past the bays and winches and the rails end abruptly, a sharp transition from steel to sand. Only rabbits use this railroad now, the old grooves providing perfect speedways for bunnies going about business. The ghost of the track remains in the landscape; rows of gorse bushes clinging to an unseen ridge; gate posts facing each other across fenceless margins.

Clouds gather and a light rain falls on a group of cabbage pickers, working under pylons in the field beside the track. Watching their progress I am surprised to turn forward again and find myself on a long, narrow lawn, running straight for two hundred feet toward a small bungalow. I pause outside, wanting to go in and compliment the owners on their well-mown piece of railway history.  Beyond the bungalow, abandoned in a small grove is Thorpeness Halt, the penultimate stop on my journey. I find the platform buried in brambles. Ambitious trees have rooted themselves in its spilt lip and tall thistles are the only travellers, swaying as they wait for a train that will never come again. Somewhere beyond the weeds is the Meare at Thorpeness, the resort vision of John Barrie, and behind that the town and the sea washing its back. I kneel on the ruined platform, bewitched by the mummified air surrounding a station that no longer exists as a mark on the map. If you take express trains across Britain there is a degree of comfort as you speed past tantalising, half-glimpsed stations, that you might one day alight there. The only way to return to Thorpeness Halt is on foot.

Continuing on down the last seaside miles to Aldeburgh, something drifts across the path behind me, dry leaves and dust. All the absent elements of the old railway, the steels, the broken ties, the shifting rock of the embankment, reassemble in my head. The wind through the firs that line the path starts to gather strength and then subsides, like the memory of an engine that won’t start anymore. Is this the first whispers of a ghost train soon to come steaming around the weeds and deadwood? I conjure a gleaming Pullman bearing down on the dog-walkers, bird-watchers and cyclists, all trespassing on its route.

I arrive at the end of the line at nineteen minutes past four in the afternoon – a late-running service. A journey that once would have taken twenty-two windswept minutes has lasted five hours on foot and the sun is already low in the west. What it must have been like, to come rolling in at dusk with ducks skimming off the marsh and the lightships slowly flickering to life out at sea. On the promenade a wind whisks salt rain over the houses and clouds bunch overhead. The advent of a storm is imminent, but even under dark skies The Railway Inn at the ruined end of the line is full; beer and chips spilling out onto the street once home to the terminus. That business should be so good makes me wonder, did Dr Beeching destroy a sleeping fortune?

The scratched plastic of the shelter spots with rain as I wait for a bus back to the working rails and the city. My thoughts turn to the future on this stretch of coast. When East Anglia sinks into the mud of the North Sea, what will become of this small embankment; a barely-visible lip, breaking the incoming tides that flood the land around it? Perhaps in another hundred years people will swim across these fields, long since underwater. Looking down through clouded masks they may glimpse a strange line of aggregate, fading slowly into the silt. Who amongst them will recognise the golden age of rail, lost beneath the sea?

You can find out about more of Jack's writing projects on his website.