A SPLENDID SUNDAY WALK: RAVEN ROCK TRAIL

As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

                                Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping 


After several bruising weeks of winter weather, the temperature has risen in recent days, the ice in higher elevations has melted, and the trails of the Blue Ridge mountains are once again beckoning the winter walker.  For those of us who have suffered from a bit of "cabin fever" lately, the prospect of spending more time outdoors is a welcome relief.

Early yesterday morning, I drove up to the piedmont area of the mountains and set out on the Raven Rock Trail, an interesting circuit hike that offers moderately challenging ascents and descents, as well as magnificent views of Lake Keowee. From the moment I entered the trailhead, I became a different person — no judgments, no analysis, no anxiety, no resentment — just pure, unadulterated peace and joy.  How liberating it is to be in the woods, far from the material world and the maddening crowds!

A few photos of my walk are set forth below, along with some observations about the importance of our connections with the natural world.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Thoreau 

Keep close to Nature's heart . . . and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods.  Wash your spirit clean.

John Muir

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

George Washington Carver 

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch.  And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest — the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways — and re-enter the woods.  For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence.  Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it.  Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in — to learn from it what it is.

Wendell Berry 

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things.  In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

John Fowles

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

John Muir 

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Keats 

                                           What would the world be, once bereft
                                           Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,
                                           O let them be left, wildness and wet;
                                           Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

                                                         Gerard Manley Hopkins

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Walt Whitman

And this our life, exempt from the public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running books, sermons in stone, and good in everything.

Shakespeare

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Thoreau 

HABITS OF A LANDSCAPE

Paths are the habits of a landscape.  They are acts of consensual making. It's hard to create a footpath on your own.

Robert Macfarlane

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot 

A couple of years ago, The Solitary Walker introduced me to two fine books by the excellent travel writer, Robert Macfarlane — Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (2003) and The Wild Places (2008).  Macfarlane is one of those rare individuals who seems to have actually done what most of us only dream of doing.  He is a tireless long-distance walker, a passionate mountain climber, a rock scrambler, an explorer with an insatiable appetite for adventure.  And perhaps most important for many of us, he possesses a unique ability to extract profound wisdom from the terrain he has traversed, especially the ancient pathways that were created by the pilgrims and other wayfarers who preceded him.

Macfarlane's latest book is The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012).  In the author's own words, it tells the story of Macfarlane's walks of "a thousand miles or more along old ways in search of a route to the past," only to find himself "delivered again and again to the contemporary."  Whether you are an adventurer yourself, or simply one who enjoys reading about the improbable journeys of others, I think you will find both delight and insight in some of Macfarlane's observations about old pathways and their impact on the souls of the walkers.

Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over.  The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind's eye also.  The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land—onwards toward space, but also backwards in time to the histories or a route and its previous followers.

* * * * * 

Footpaths are mundane in the best sense of the word: 'worldly", open to all.  All rights of way determined and sustained by use, they constitute a labyrinth of liberty, a slender network of common land that still threads through our aggressively privatized world of barbed wire and gates, CCTV cameras and 'No Trespassing' signs.

* * * * *

Paths connect.  This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.

* * * * *

I've read them all, these old-way wanderers, and often I've encountered versions of the same beguiling idea: that walking such paths might lead you—in [ornithologist W.H.] Hudson's phrase—to 'slip back out of this modern world'. Repeatedly, these wanderers spoke of the tingle of connection, of walking as seance, of voices heard along the way.

* * * * *

These are the consequences of the old ways with which I feel easiest: walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape; paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing.

DIRECTIONS FOR A WALK

In the Yorkshire Dales

As one who has a passion for walking in the English countryside, I find much that I relate to in this thought-provoking poem by the American poet, Joseph Stroud.  I like the way the poem moves through mundane travel arrangements until the walker finds a place that feels like "a beginning," a place from which he will begin to "walk the freshness" back into his life.  And then there is a beautiful description of another walker seen in the distance, a solitary figure who is "walking, making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace."  

Directions

By Joseph Stroud

                                      How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

                                      Seem to me all the uses of this world

                                      Take a plane to London.

                               From King's Cross take the direct train to York.

                               Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,

                               then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,

                               a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,

                               and soon you'll be on the moors.  There's a pub,

                               The Drovers, where it's warm inside, a tiny room,

                               you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculiar.

                               For a moment everything will be all right.  You're back

                               at a beginning.  Soon you'll walk into Yorkshire country,

                               into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.

                               You'll walk for hours.  You'll walk the freshness

                               back into your life.  This is true.  You can do this.

                               Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,

                               you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,

                               the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,

                               you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,

                               cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,

                               making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.

On Moors Between Nine Standards Rigg and Whitsundale

Notes:  Both photos taken on my walk of Wainright's Coast to Coast Path in 2010; Joseph Stroud poem, "Directions," from Below Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 1998).

A NEW YEAR, HAT ON HEAD, BOOTS ON FEET

                                                    As the year concludes—

                                                    wanderer's hat on my head,

                                                    sandals on my feet

                                   

                                                                  Basho

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

           Anatole France 

         Not all who wander are lost.

            J.R.R. Tolkien

Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself—if I may use that expression—as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.

                                                        Jean-Jacques Rousseau

                                           
                                            We are the music makers,
                                            And we are the dreamers of dreams,
                                            Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
                                            And sitting by desolate streams;
                                            World-losers and world-forsakers,
                                            On whom the pale moon gleams:
                                            Yet we are the mover and shakers
                                            Of the world for ever, it seems.

          Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy 

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering.  The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes part of the tangible world.  It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now and for ever.

Freya Stark 

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.

Ray Bradbury

                     Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least

                     possible baggage, and discover the world.

                     It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property,

                     triviality, to simply walk away.

                     That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, 

                     so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

                                                     Thomas A. Clark

                                              from "In Praise of Walking"

Happy New Year to my treasured blogging friends!  May our paths continue to intersect, here and elsewhere.

WALKING THE COTSWOLD WAY

A couple of weeks ago, I returned from a nine-day walk of the Cotswold Way, a U.K. national trail that runs approximately 102 miles from Chipping Campden to Bath. Set forth below are some photos taken along the way.  While I will occasionally describe the scenes, I will allow most photos to speak for themselves.

Gatehouse of Parish Church of St. James, Chipping Campden

(suggested by some guides as the preferrable starting point for the Cotswold Way)

Chipping Campden Market Hall (ca. 1627)
(official starting point of the Cotswold Way)

Thatched-roof cottage in Chipping Campden

 A pleasant place in Chipping Campden that could have persuaded
an old romantic such as I not to leave at all, but, of course, I did . . .

Leaving Chipping Campden Behind

Broadway Tower, Built in 1798 as a Landmark Folly for the Earl of Coventry

Descending into Broadway

Broadway Cottage

Leaving Broadway

A Rather Ornate Kissing Gate

On the Path to Stanton

Jacobean Gatehouse in Stanway

Common Waymark for U.K National Trails

Ruins of Hailes Abbey, Built by Richard, Earl of Cornwall and Brother of Henry III

Sudeley Castle
(the final home of Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII
 and the only one who was neither beheaded nor divorced)

Neolithic Burial Chambers

Top of Cleeve Hill, Highest Topographical Point on the Cotswold Way

Church in Painswick

Neolithic Burial Site (contained the remains of eleven persons)

Hang Gliding off of the Cotswolds Escarpment

Fruit and Vegetable Market in Wotton-under-Edge

Path Near Tower That Honors William Tyndale, 
Who Translated the Bible Into English

Dyrham House (where much of "The Remains of the Day" was filmed)

A Garden at Dyrham House

A Cotswold Farmhouse

Encountering Other Walkers as I Descend Into Bath

Bath Abbey (the southern terminus of the Cotswold Way)