Its an age thing?

England are doing well in The Ashes, so all is well in my sporting world.  Not so good if you follow football but since when has it been?

There is something a little miserable about shivering away at 3am watching people in T-shirts likely to suffer heat stroke if they clap too energetically but that is the wonder of modern media.

To compliment my Ashes watching I am reading Crickets Burning Passion. The story of how it all came about. (no it is a proper review not an effort to funnel you to my Amazon affiliate page)

As it is winter here in Blighty my reading matter usually tries to mirror the seasons, so it is polar adventure for me.  Walking Home Lynn Schooler.  A book I read in one long sitting, always a good sign.  Not sure if I stumbled on this book myself or some other outdoor blog had mentioned it.  Anyway its worth the read.  Middle aged man in crumbling personal relationship discovers time is passing.  Thankfully this is no ordinary middle aged desk jockey with a midlife crisis, this fellow lives and breathes the wild and going for a stroll along the Alaskan coast is just what he does.

Perhaps like a lot of people, I spend a lot of time wanting to be somewhere else.  Planning for the “next thing” which is usually down a long road and preferably ending with a muddy track.  This sort of changed when I read a book listing Britain’s wild places.  I happen to live in what is considered one of Britain’s top 50 wild places.  Not down the road, not nearby, about 5 minutes gentle stroll.

I have done for years, it is actually inhospitably wild protected by access problems.  Low lying saltmarsh that is pretty much useless for anything humans want to do today, unless they want to get stuck in mudholes which do kill you or get caught by rising tides which will drown you.  Fortunately you need some sort of boat to really get into trouble, but every year some fools have to be pulled from the mud on the periphery as they have sunk up to their middles.  Years ago of course you died, now you get busy on your mobile phone and pray you don’t die.

Its flat, bleak monotonous stuff to my eyes, but the birds love it.  So faced with this fact I have decided to expand my knowledge of birds beyond the seagull / duck / goose / wader / sparrow categorisation which has served me well for many a decade.

I am alarmingly ignorant of this stuff.  I know more about goretex and stoves made out of cans than I do about the natural world going on around me.  I have been putting the cart before the horse for rather too long when it comes to hiking.  Sure I have responded to the impressive landscape stuff, the sort of thing you see when overflying an area but I seem to have missed just about everything else of consequence.

Silence is golden.

 

Silence is an amazing thing, much more than the absence of noise, it has a quality of its own. Anyone having sat in angry silence knows this is a very different thing to a tranquil silence. The texture of it is such that someone walking into a room knows the difference and a very uncomfortable difference it can be.

We treasure silence, it has long been associated with a deeper level of thinking than is needed to simply function. Museums, libraries, spiritual spaces are associated with silence, these places almost demand it. Theatre and by extension cinema are places audiences listen not talk, rustling sweet wrappers is frowned upon.

Vows of silence are taken on the basis this is a higher attainment than talking. Fools prattle, thinkers are deep in thought. We value silence.

Noise pollution may not be a modern curse but its spread is. It was not so long ago in the scheme of things when the internal combustion engine first appeared and the ability of noise to travel in a manner it previously did not was born.

There is a gulf of difference between the noise you create yourself and the noise others force upon you. I live in an area invaded by tourists in summer, the local attractions attract by noise. Noise breeds noise. To maintain a personal sound-scape you either turn up your own noise to drown out that of others or you reduce the noise of others.

Reducing the noise of others on a hot day means closed windows and that is a poor option. Just recently I have acquired a pair of those noise cancelling headphones. They cut out a lot of noise by the mere fact they are headphones and then by clever use of compensating soundwaves it reduces further exterior sounds. Not perfect but an improvement.

Walking in the great outdoors is usually about escaping the unwanted noise of others. Some people seem happy walking along busy roads but they are the exception not the norm.

I take my mp3 which is often only used for audio books at night or during the day to reduce the impact the inconvenient noise of others. Sometimes it just helps a dull passage of a walk pass a little easier. Very rarely does it fill a "silence" on a walk.

I have notes from walks from years ago which continually refer to the sound-scape. Escaping the noise pollution is an essential part. I know I would be happier walking through a silent city rather than a woodland filled with man-made noise.

You talking to me?

Taxi Driver 1976.

Microsoft latest effort to wrest the internet from Google, well I presume it is. 

I am sure you have seen the adverts.  One person makes a comment which sends another off into free association.  The premise being we are all suffering from information overload and cannot differentiate between useful and not useful.

Microsoft presumably comes to the rescue and tell us what is useful and what is not.  Or rather fails to tell us about things it does not deem useful.  Well I am sure it is less Orwellian when Microsoft explains it and it is no bad thing skipping irrelevancies.

Think how much happier you would have been not having to read the last 3 paragraphs.

Information overload is considered a modern evil and something it would be nice to get control of.

I have been reading The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert.  It is a true tale about a modern day American that wishes to bring us all back to nature and bought 1000 acres of land to create a community to enlighten people about how to go about this.

It is perhaps not Utopian in its ideals, but certainly it is going along those lines.  I studied Economics and Utopia cropped up quite a bit, usually just because you needed a country where things were perfect.  “In this Utopian world of perfect information…” etc etc.  It was a handy simplified starting point before too much of the real world leaked in and Keynesian economics crashed down around your ears and you found yourself mumbling, “In the long run we are all dead”.  Keynes might have been wrong on that, it might be, in the long run we are all monetarists.

Back to the point (there is one, well the beginning of one anyway).

Utopian thinking is not the preserve of economists or lunatics (not mutually exclusive) but there is a very enjoyable history of cranks and nutters setting up societies outside of society and thankfully not all based on some sort of religious mania.

Although not its only geographical stronghold there is a long history of “Utopian society” building in England.   My current reading includes : Utopia Britannica: v. 1: British Utopian Experiments: 1325-1945 by Chris Coates.

I was browsing OS maps online and comparing the 1930’s/40’s OS maps with the current ones ( http://wtp2.appspot.com/wheresthepath.htm ).  Looking at the changing landscape and names because for the last year or two I have been walking “ghost landscapes”.  Basically landscapes which no longer exist, ie trying to trace the boundary of something more ancient in the modern landscape looking for a remnant.  If asked why, there is no quick answer and probably no coherent one either.

Then I noticed a large area of orchard on the 1940’s map which no longer exists.  Turns out this was just such a Utopian society just before World War One.  It then changes hands to assist unemployed Londoners around about the Great Depression.  Now it seems to have a prison on part of the acreage.

Utopian society, economics, changing land use and it has 3 Martello Towers to see along the route.  All this and a hell of a lot more from a bit of coastline that is combed over pretty regularly by the outdoor type programmes for entirely more obvious reasons.

While walking is just that, “plod plod plod” some landscapes live more in the head than the feet.  Which might be the best explanation I am going to manage as to why I walk ghost landscapes.

I can’t wait to set foot on the path, it has fired my imagination for a few days and will bring together some threads from my current reading matter.

One person’s data is another person’s information.

For those interested, here is the section of the map I am referring too:

http://wtp2.appspot.com/wheresthepath.htm?lat=52.04600001215836&lon=1.44211568412607&gz=14&oz=7&gt=6

Map replacement

After a good many years of service it is time to replace my OS 1:25000 series Dartmoor map.

Perhaps for some this is a matter of the totally mundane, not for me.

While it is not exactly seismic even for me, its not a five minute decision either.

The process could have a legitimate claim to have started two years ago when I first considered replacing the map.  From an informational point of view there was no reason;  things don’t change too dramatically and the progression of magnetic north has not been that astonishing.

The reason for change was the map was beginning to get “tatty”.  Areas of it had got wet and the crease lines where it folds were fraying.  There were also various areas of the map which were shaded various non-standard colours.  The colours represented bits of  meals which had sustained me along various routes.

Despite the map getting wet, it had dried pretty successfully and the folds were reinforced with micropore tape (significantly better than sellotape for this purpose).

The simple truth is the map had become part of the experience and its state represented no real danger to my safety.  The dog prints, the food stains, the rain, the fraying edges added to the fabric, it did not detract.

So the map limped on for another year, and then another.  While it is not used everyday in the field, the weeks of the year it does get an outing it gets a significant work out.

Oddly the decision to change the map was not based on the fact it was wearing out and becoming likely to fail me at a crucial moment.  It was based on the fact as a document it had become more than the sum of its parts.  It was no longer a map of Dartmoor, but a map of MY adventures on Dartmoor. 

Irreplaceable if lost, so time to replace it.

So the decision has been made, a new map is required.

Ideally I would buy a map at the location it represents, ie Dartmoor.  It would be “of the place”.  But it would potentially mean a restriction in choice and price. 

I cannot imagine a situation where I could not find one for sale, but equally the ramifications of that would be significant enough even an insignificant possibility is to be avoided.

The most significant disadvantage would be the lack of time to get to know my new map.

In truth given my location, online is the purchase choice, and this tends to be ebay, for better or worse.

25000 series or 50000 series?

25000, its the walking series, it is what I am doing.  Although the 50000 series does have logistical advantages to my mind, notably, more land shown in any given bit of paper.

OS or another producer of maps.

Again really a no-brainer for me, I grew up with OS, it is what I know.

The final decision was waterproof or not, and if waterproofing, what type.  I have heard tell of various potions and incantations you can add to paper based maps which will make them impervious to water.  There would be a weight saving to this method, but I decided against it because if I am that determined to save weight, I will cut my shoelaces a bit shorter, or simply miss a meal. 

The real reasons:

The first being it would still not be wind-resistant, while the wind has never torn a map to shreds in my hands, there is the possibility.

Related to this my old map failed me at the creases, I imagine the waterproof OS series is less likely to give me this problem.

Finally I like the idea of being able to draw upon my OS map with a waterbased pen.  It makes route planning a good deal easier.

The map is bought, but there are downsides.  It is heavier, it does not fold so flat and I suspect the increased strength of the creases mean bending the map to my will is going to be significantly more tricky.  Finally this map is just not going to age in the same way my old paper map did, it seems unlikely to gather character. 

Functionally I believe this is a more robust map, and it has reduced the chances of wind – rain destruction, which given its Dartmoor is no bad idea.

My old map gets hung up on the wall, it deserves the retirement and it is great to just let my eye wander over the landscape I know so well while running the movie of various walks on the big screen in my head.

Good Heavens

I sit here watching the rain come down outside the window.  Did that yesterday, did that the day before.  The day before that there was a break in the routine, it was cold and windy, which it had been for the 4 days previous to that.
Summer is becoming a distant memory.  I imagine there was something approaching a summer three years ago but my mind could well be playing tricks with me.
It has been a long time when walking has been more than just theory for me.  It says something of the current weather conditions that work has become a viable alternative to walking. 
This is perhaps a little odd given I work outside in the elements rather than indoors.  The distinct advantage work has over walking is I can stop work when the weather becomes to unremitting in a way you cannot stop walking.  A side effect of working is earning, which again is something that walking does not provide.
Compensations for not actually getting outdoors in anything but the most mundane manner is I get to watch some truly dire England football.  The World Cup is the only football I watch and only when England is playing.  A few matches every 4 years (if we qualify) is enough to remind me why I have no interest in football.
Just finished reading Steve Blease, End to End.  He did LEJOG during a world cup year and he had a lot of bad things to say about England’s world cup efforts in 2002.  By contrast to this competitions effort Blease was living in beknighted times.
It was a pretty slim volume, but it was not a page turner, or perhaps I had too many distractions going on.
Sport, sport, sport, all from my armchair while spinning outdoor adventure in my head.
Outdoor adventures fuelled by reading matter.  Steve Blease was a follow on from a John Hillaby reading session which is culminating in Journey Home at this moment.  John’s account of his “LEJOG” during the late 60’s reminded me how remarkably different the “recent” past was.
When not reading about walking from one of Britain to the other, I have been ploughing forward with the books that were written about the Sunday Times round the world yacht race, again late 60’s, again a world so devoid of electronic gadgets it seems near mediaeval.
Donald Crowhurst did go bonkers, read the book, see the film.
Bernard Moitessier : The Long Way
At times I thought he had gone bonkers, or perhaps started off mad as a hatter.  At other times he just seemed very French.  A great read.
Robin Knox-Johnston : A World of my own.
Never any doubt about the sanity of Robin.  Solid British stock, wasn’t going to be beaten by a Frenchman.  Wasn’t.
The other reading theme has been last Ray Mears series concerning Canada (it was on last year).  Slowly been chewing through the various explorers he referenced in the series, and mighty find reading it has been too.
Of the three current reading interests there is a much higher chance I will walk from one end of Britain to the other, but the odds are slim I will do that.
In the meanwhile my kit list is refined, fiddled with, equipment is updated, improved upon, all waiting for a break in the weather to coincide with a break in the schedule that will allow me to take off for a while.

Communication

Floating about on a boat doing no more than not a lot in the name of fishing one of the main pleasures has always been that of being out of communication.

Twenty years ago this was pretty literal, you got on the boat cast-off and that was it.  There was the radio but that was basically there to let it be known you were sinking or in some other manner in need of help.  The assumption being, “no news is good news”.  Loved ones might not have liked it but that is how it was.

Off you went and after a day or so of floating about you got into the swing of things very much like hiking, the pace of life dropped as you became accustomed to the restrictions this mode of travel imposed.  Most obviously on a boat space was the restriction, in the same way weight is the thing when hiking.

If you were only gone for a week or two, there was no real thought of phoning home, you might make dry land, but usually you were a good distance from a phonebox and it was not a high priority really.

Now it has all changed, you always have the mobile phone.  It does not matter if you never use it, it is there and it really does change the dynamic.  For one thing if you are away for more than 48 hours it is almost impossible to be part of the modern world without the need to communicate with someone within that  timeframe.

The mobile phone breeds a dependency.  Rather like instant replay in rugby seem to have removed referees ability to think for themselves.  Gone are the carefree days in which a ref makes a decision on the spot, for the most part now its TV referral time, five minutes indecision in which things are often unclear and a decision is made which commentators then say was probably wrong.

Mobile phones looked like freedom, turned out they were the very opposite.

I was musing on all this when I went for a stroll along a quiet stretch of coastline the other day.  Well it would have been quiet but for two women.  One went past me at power walker pace, one arm cocked in salute.  She did not have time to look right or left or acknowledge my existence in any manner, she was too busy yammering loudly into the mobile phone clamped to her ear.

A few miles from the nearest house, she has gone for a walk, although it looked more like an exercise routine but rather than enjoy the sights of a wonderful sunset and the sound of waves she was involved in a high level board meeting.  Well maybe not, unless she was a judge on the X-Factor because this is what the conversation was about.

All about normal then.

Five minutes later something was going on behind me and I turned to see what it was.  It was another woman, this time walking about the same pace as me.  She too had the familiar salute of a mobile user.  I have no idea what the conversation was about, it was just a tedious drone from the distance I was at.  They were not talking to one another because from what I had heard both these women were holding one sided conversations.  They never actually stopped talking, indeed they seemed barely to dare take a breath in case the person on the other end got a word in edge ways.

From the fact they were both jabbering so determinedly into their phones I assumed they had instigated the calls.  They had gone for a walk, which would take at least 40 minutes and while doing so had felt the need to phone someone and in the one instance I knew had to unburden their thoughts about the X-Factor to some poor soul.

The second person was walking slightly faster than me, but not fast enough they were ever really going to over take me.  So now I had to quicken my pace a little to get some distance so I did not have to hear either of them.  I did not want to slow down to let her pass because our relative walking paces was not different enough and I had no intention of being the creepy bloke than stopped and then walked behind a woman.

I only saw two people on this stroll along the coast and both of them were jabbering into phones with what really must have been un-necessary conversations.

Noise pollution in all its forms is a growing problem and I guess over the next 20 years it will be more so.

And if you are wondering, yes I had a mobile phone with me.  I never leave home without one.  It is pay as you go, the five pound credit has lasted 4 years so far, one person on earth has the number (and that is not me, I don’t know the number).  There is a time and place for chatting on the phone and for me it is not usually when mobile.

Dartmoor Magazine.

As I was stepping out of the door on some miserable errand the real world enforces much too often the latest Dartmoor Magazine was sitting in the hallway, still warm from posties hand.

Remember the days you would wave to the postie on crisp cold mornings, the shared bond of the early risers.  Experiencing the day before the sights, sounds and air had been processed by millions of others, used up in the process, stale long before rush-hour.  A new day, just for you and the postie.  The milkman long since consigned to fading memory awaits the heritage industry to revive him in nostalgic adverts, postie will follow.

Now the early morning post has disappeared.  The lie was they were getting rid of the second postal delivery of the day.  More properly they were simply getting rid of the first post, now the mail arrives pretty much when it likes, 10am to 2pm is postie primetime.

Now postie is a faceless someone, an ever changing someone I no longer recognise.  So it is with the dustmen, must be 20 years since the dustman was a regular enough face to have a chat with.  Now it is just another stranger leaping from a huge machine wheeling a plastic bin large enough to hold a body to the back of the cart where the contents are forcibly hurled.  Now the only reason to converse with the dustman is when you have made some sort of error in apportioning the detritus.  Paper where plastic should go, the system grinds to a halt, dustmen perplexed, more than his jobs worth, no possible way can a recycling bin intended for plastic be moved when it contains a bit of stray paper.  The dustman as eco-warrior saving the planet by refusing to collect rubbish.

The human equation no longer adds up, the world is increasingly built on machine scale, we are at best cogs, at worse lubricant for the system.

Life.

Dartmoor magazine would be waiting for me when I got back, Autumn addition of the quarterly magazine, the cover image invites you to wander the landscape, which I do mentally as my body guides me through the days chores.

The internet is great, but the physicality of glossy A4 has to be experienced from time to time and this is the time and place for me, my only magazine subscription.

This year there has been an interesting series about Princetown Prison and this issue deals with Princetown more generally.

It reports on a reworking of Sherlock Holmes, which is part of an autumnal TV series “Tourist Trail” and how tourists relate to a literary landscape.  Seems this was recorded in mid-June and they had authentic mist and drizzle.

Although the magazine is Dartmoor focused, it has so many starting points for walking themes and different thinking between the lines, it is about everywhere.  Anton Coaker, has a regular column as a traditional hill farmer, he has a great chatty style and is thought provoking.  Anton has a beard you just have to stand and admire, its not one of those celebrity efforts, nor the designer stubble which is harder work than shaving.  His beard is the real deal, it has the appearance of being hacked with a pair of garden shears from time to time when more dinner is finding its way into the undergrowth than the mouth.  It is a statement of individual freedom so few of us possess and fewer still dare exercise.  More power to your chin Anton.

This quarter he talks about farm gates.  Not something I have really given much thought too over the years, other than how to get through them efficiently and securing them afterwards.  I knew reading it was going to cause trouble.  Sure enough, I was soon on the internet trying to plot walks that would encompass potentially interesting farm gates, photographic images forming in my head.  Now I am sitting here, cursing inwardly, wondering how many great farm gates I have literally let through my hands without giving them proper acknowledgement.

My neglect of this previously unconsidered element has been brought home by a search of my photo archive.  There is one legitimate wooden farm gate image.  It was a series of gates which must have been some sort of animal pen.  The gate was in an advanced state of decay with a sign requesting its closure, the irony being the only reason for the image.

Just to give a quick plug to one of the sites which rekindled my interest in Dartmoor as a walking location.  These gates appear here.

The gate was really on its last legs, probably replaced now or given it had no real purpose perhaps just a pile of wood.  There is one other gate image on a roll of film that has lain undeveloped for a decade or more.  Again on Dartmoor, it was a garden gate at the kennels which housed the local pack near Pew Tor.  That has been replaced, I saw the new gate a few years ago.

I congratulate anyone that can just let these things pass through their minds without undue concern, normal, well adjusted types.  By this I do not mean the lumps that think a good time is watching EastEnders then talking about it as if it was (a) real (b) mattered even if it was real.  These people are mal-adjusted in a special sort of way, the fact there are more of them just means it takes longer to come to the realisation it is not normal.  No, I am speak of the people that can read about regional variations in gate design, discover there is previously unrealised function in various forms and after a nod of the head, perhaps a “that’s interesting” move onto more important things in life having maintained a proper perspective.

I simply fail the test, perspective distorted, this farm gate revelation rates right up there with just about anything the nightly news is going to offer (if I listened to it).

Many years ago there was an episode of The Time Team, they were digging up a site which made no sense.  It was a cornucopia of treasures without rhyme or reason.  Experts were puzzled, but the suspicion mounted, these were treasures plundered at some point, maybe recently.  Experts asked to come in validate the goodies which could then be sold for healthy money.

Things just did not add up, the finds were oddly distributed along the time line.  Did the Romans really stick their coins back together with glue?

A bit of barbed wire ran under an ancient sword, the sword was genuine,  so was the barbed wire, but in the scheme of things barbed wire does not run underneath ancient swords.  The crew had an expert in all things barbed-wire to hand.  This was heavenly news, barbed wire can be dated and geographically located with varying degrees of accuracy as long as you have the right expert to hand.  However ludicrous you can find an expert, a life affirming and life changing moment.

The only problem with this magazine subscription is its arrival creates a Pavlovian response.  365 odd square miles of wilderness, a lifetime of exploration.   I will never be a giant of the Dartmoor landscape, history will not remember me like it does William Crossing.  The problem is I could still end up with a massive pile of mouse chewed paper representative of my life’s work which is only considered so much fire lighting material.

How much life do you apportion to your interests and in what order, time can only be spent once.

Here is Anton’s website.

Summer’s short season

Too long have I been in the enthral of the season spinners.  Those that will tell you of long hot summers.  They exist only in imagination, the good old days is the place for long hot summers, or perhaps long range forecasts from the Met.  August is over and with it summer to my mind.  There will be those, and I am among them, who will be happy to extol the increasing virtues of a sunny September, but it is an unexpected encore at best.  Summer is gone, it goes with August.

We have four seasons and we all know winter lasts at least six months in Britain, so we cannot expect much left on the timetable for the other 3.  Spring seems to have given up entirely as a season and has become more a state of mind.  Autumn seems only to be reflected in our diminishing stocks of ancient woodland.

I have the monthly stocktaking to do.  GPS files are sorted, images are backed up.  Once safely backed up the culling begins, secure in the knowledge if I really want the 100th photo of that fly, I can dig it out barring any significant problems.  Once the photo’s have been reduced to a more manageable number for the month they are geo-tagged, combined with GPS routes and put onto google earth files etc.  I can now virtually recreate my wanderings on cold dull days when the only travelling which seems worthwhile is down memory lane for a bit.  It seems tedious now, but I really appreciate it as the time lengthened between then and now.

By this stage the recriminations have already begun.  A whole series of “why?” runs through my mind, and it all revolves around why didn’t I do more.  Easily forgotten is the routine of ordinary existence, the eating, the sleeping, the preparing to eat and sleep, the need to earn enough so you can eat and sleep.  So many hours are lost to the daily grind still.  I only hope this week is not an indication of how things are going to proceed.  My plans of out and about were left in tatters by realities.

September is the point at which you begin to realise you have left it too late, there is more behind you than ahead of you and when you add it to the fact we have had another poor summer with a recession and feckless government looming over us when it has been pleasant.

Rather than head out into the madding bank holiday crowds, half-crazed people determined to enjoy themselves, entire cities moving out into the countryside to get away from it all I have sat quietly and made plans for a hopeful September.

Brecon Beacons is in the mix, but I fret over the weather, you can never know till you have gone, and then it is too late, you are there.  Are there better things to do than gamble on fickle weather for a week, that is the question.  It is balanced by the other part of the equation, if not now when?  I choose these times to avoid the herd instinct that populates the hills, but the downside is these migratory urges are implanted for reason.  “Get while the getting is good”.

There is actually a guided tour pencilled in as well.  The “nerd” factor is always dangerously high on these things but it is an opportunity to get to see behind doors which a local council usually keeps well and truly locked.  If they just gave me the keys I’d be happy to guide myself about, but that is not going to happen even if I was prepared to dive into local council red-tape and ignorance, I could be a cultural anarchist, where would it end if everyone that helped paid for the upkeep of these buildings wanted to see them?  Life is too short, I will just give them my tax to mismanage and wait till they ask for more.

The other venture has been inspired by a number of things.

Firstly The Solitary Walker blog post regarding Gavin Maxwell and his otter set a thought in motion.  The other great otter work being Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson, which is now something of an industry, crammed in with Lorna Doone et al.  As luck would have it, I am, at this moment, reading Waterlog by Roger Deakin.  A wonderful book in which he reminds me Henry Williamson also spent time as a Norfolk farmer.

Norfolk became a destination in my mind at this point, but what on earth to do there?

The final bit of the puzzle fell into place with my current disappointment surrounding the locked church door.  Norfolk has far more than its fair share of Round Tower churches.  There are 185 existing examples in England, 124 of them in Norfolk.  These worthy structures are often over 1,000 years old, it is time I put a few more of them on my CV.

Many years ago I visited one example in Belton while exploring The Broads.  It was very nicely maintained and quiet enough to lose yourself for a while.  It was also the start of my growing concern regarding the role the church had in barbaric justice and persecution and quite how much injustice this building had witnessed in the name of truth. 

This was sparked off by a casual notification that trial by ordeal took place in the church during the Middle Ages.  It was not something till that point I had associated with the Church, I am not sure why.  I have since separated the architecture from the institution and recovered an interest in church buildings.

In one of a series of excellent websites concerning Churches in East Anglia, Belton gets a mention.  But it is a sad vandalised, closed off church without a service that is recorded in 2008.

There is also quite a bit of walking mileage to be extracted from churches as their longevity within the landscape has meant a network of ancient rights of way has often sprung up around them.

If I wish to catch a glimpse of things barely changed for 1,000 years I need to hurry, every chance in my lifetime most of it will have gone.  I am too late for some of it, the Norfolk coast is increasingly eroded and the govt. considered response is to do nothing unless significant areas of population are concerned.  So Norfolk and more especially it’s coastline has a simple choice, become more like London or disappear.  There is still enough space left for imagination to work its magic though.  This is one of the main reasons I walk, to catch a glimpse of things missed at any other pace.

The final piece of the jigsaw, I have yet to take a decent picture of a church, if I am not inspired by these architectural rarities then maybe I will never take a decent church photo.

Lets hope I do more and talk less in September.

Give a walk a name

A few days ago Martin on his blog highlighted this:

http://summitandvalley.blogspot.com/2009/08/yawn.html

The list of Munro’s is being revised, once again. 

They are named after Sir Hugh T Munro, who in 1891 published a list of Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet.

283 made the list, it also included “tops” which are peaks over 3000 ft but do not have enough re-ascent to be classed as mountains in their own right.  This brought the list up to 530.

That could well have been that but Munro either was fortunate or unfortunate in the timing of his list depending on your viewpoint.  OS Maps appeared soon afterwards and they were not in whole-hearted agreement over the classification of the 3,000 ft hills.

Munro died in 1919 while revising his original list.  Life is a work in progress, but this does seem somewhat harsh on Sir Hugh.

The first two people to achieve compleation, that is bagging (what normal people call climbing), all the munro’s were men of the cloth.  First to do so was in 1901 and then it was done again 22 years later.  There seems to be many energetic clergy during the Victorian era.  It probably bears out the joke about only working 1 day a week, or it might be a desire to experience all god’s work, or it might be because they were stuck into the wrong job as something to do with the “spare” who was not going to inherit the family fortune.  Every hole in Dartmoor at the time seemed to have a clergyman at the bottom of it scraping away, finding “little of interest”.  When not doing that, they could be discovered repairing stone rows and circles, although “re-imagining” might be a more modern term for some of their efforts.

We have got more sophisticated with our measuring techniques over the years, which may or may not include metrication.  This now means Munro’s are 914.4m or higher.  Metrication has not improved the romance of Munro bagging.  The list is revised, like Saints, some hills are promoted, some relegated.

The Munro’s are now a product, and part of the tourist industry.  On the understanding “there is no such thing as bad publicity” change that gets talked about is good and who doesn’t like the idea we can still disagree about the height of a mountain in this day and age?  Local newscasters with that slightly bemused expression they develop when such stories are about to be shown, just love them.  It is a chance to send the new-boy/girl out in hideous weather, hopefully up to their waist in a stinking bog.

So another revision is pending.  In 1997 eight Munro’s were discovered, and one thought to be a Munro was revealed to be an imposter.  One of the new Munro’s was 4,127 ft in height.

All good news for guidebooks, tourism, and generally getting your product back in the public eye.  “New and Improved”

Like any other successful formula people love to repeat it.  Developmental costs of original thought is very high afterall, much easier and quicker to adapt someone else’s work and stick your name on it. “Winterings, made with Munrovium technology”, this sort of thing being a favourite of advertising.  Vaguely scientific names that on reflection are daft.  I spend rather to long making up pseudo-scientific names in this manner.

So now we have a most unlikely series of named elevations.

Corbetts · Donalds · Fells · Grahams · Hewitts · Marilyns · Munros · Murdos · Nuttalls · Wainwrights

Humans just love naming and categorising things, even better if you can get your own name on it.  I realised this many years ago with the discovery axes went by different names, weight and handle length being the criteria.  In the absence of names you make your own up.  A classic example for me being “Rabbit log”.

Rabbit log defines a patch of ground about 10 foot by 3 foot.  It is featureless, it has no name on any map.  25 years ago a friend’s dog caught a rabbit, much to everyone’s astonishment, but having caught it was at a loss as to exactly what to do next.  By the time we caught up with it, the rabbit was in a sorry state, but still alive.  I had the job of dispatching it.  The rabbit met a swift, violent end involving my boot and a log seat, not pleasant.  Rabbit log has long since gone, it is a bare patch of ground, but it will forever be so named on my mental map.

The naming of it has made it a destination, part of a dog walk.

Wainwright created the Coast to Coast walk to show people they did not need to follow guidebooks, there were plenty of walks just waiting to be discovered by those able to see.  Few of us have Wainwright’s vision, so we simply follow his footsteps on a walk that although pre-existing, would never have been done.  Now it is an industry, grinning fresh-faced TV presenters jog along it with rucksacks which put ultra-light hikers to shame.  All you need is a camera crew to achieve this effect.

I am currently walking The Essex Way, among various more nebulous walking ideas.  There is no way on Earth if that named walk did not exist would I be walking from Harwich to Epping.  Why on earth would I do it?

Map it, name it, produce a pamphlet about it and it becomes more attractive.  A few years ago I fell into conversation with another hiker, it is a rare event.  He tells me about his Essex Way experience, it was a group thing.  The idea of getting away from it all with 20 other people talking about blisters has a distinct lack of appeal. I tell him about my early forced march version of it over a long weekend. We really are on different wavelengths but the walk is a point of reference we both understand.  If he had said, “I walked from Harwich to Epping last month with 20 people” the conversation would have been totally different, probably non-existent, as I took a few steps back from what was clearly a mad-man.  The name gives it legitimacy.

More and more walks are being “created” for us, pre-packaged by a tourist industry which knows heritage sells but to keep it selling new angles have to be created to keep it in the public eye.  As our attention span shortens the changes have to come faster and faster, the internet feeds into this.

All this by way of saying, no need to be shocked to discover you cannot even rely on a list of 3,000 foot mountains.  This opens up a whole can of worms regarding what compleation actually is.  That road is for another day.

When does the madness stop?

It is a fair question, but on the understanding prevention is better than cure, the better question is, where does the madness start?

Madness is largely a social construct, I am not worried about overstepping that line.  I am able to survive within conventional society.

But there is another sort of madness, more a turmoil, when you have more thoughts than you have categories to put them in.  An overspill of thought running about free of label.

The problem with tearing off the blinkers, removing the filters is sensory overload.  We must have all had the experience when surfing the net.  You are reading an article, its interesting to some degree or another.  It has a link to further reading, you cannot resist, “click”.  This is more interesting, it gets a bookmark.  Now thoughts are going through your head, “there must be books on this subject”.  Bring up the library service.  There certainly are books, it is easy to get a few reserved.

A few days later the library informs you the books have arrived.  Excellent, now you have a week or two of reading ahead of you.  You are learning exponentially, the books have further references, you want to read them too.

So far it is relatively healthy but you are fast approaching a line.  This is when you ask yourself, “How can I be actively involved in this?”

For me there is a looping mechanism at work.  I go for a stroll, an insect is seen, I wish to know more.  The internet is the instant educator.  Its turns out to be a common example, but there are many questions to be answered regarding this.  I see there are rarer examples, there is a survey going on, I can get involved, help map out the migratory habits of this brown object.  It can do no real harm to me, it will just be an added element on the walk, it will be fun.

It is fun, it adds something to the walk, I can identify various bugs as I stroll along.

I walk into a churchyard, as ever looking for the old and curious gravestones but the church itself is not of great interest to me.  But then I find an unusual element within the architecture of the Church, something not seen before.  How old is that oak chest that just sits there by the font?  How old is the font?

Now I am sinking deeper, there is easily 1000 years of church architecture to consider in most UK townscapes.  My history education is relatively extensive, British history 1485 – 1700 being a focus of it, religion is a major theme.  It interests me at the amateur level, freed from the constraints of having to learn it to regurgitate it onto A4 for an exam board it has become interesting again.

Things are beginning to get un-manageable.  I contemplate walks which will encompass esoteric church architectural feature.  But it does not come easily, this stuff has to be researched.  It can take days to organise a walk which was once just a matter of stepping outside the front door.

The experience is much more rewarding though, so it is worth the added effort, the planning, the effort is part of the process.  Ideas are springing into my head constantly.  Constructing the shortest possible walk between 3 churches with towers, 3 with spires, 3 with no such thrust, 3 with lychgates.  How many churches can I walk too in 3 miles.  The “Trinity tour” my basic building block.

Now I get there, its no good just seeing it, there has to be a record of it, my record of it.  There might be 10,000 photographs of it but there is a strong need for me to capture the moment I was there.

The photograph does not come out right.  It looks nothing like the better efforts I have seen.  My memory has been cheated, that blurry grey blob was not what I saw.  The answer is simple, more learning, more technique, more practice.

Interest piles on top of interest.  I am walking down the street, trying to see a bug which moments before was just a shadow on the pavement.  I am framing images in my head, trying different sentence forms for blogging.

I walked south of Mistley a few weeks ago, and just through a small section of Manningtree.  Along the walk I saw two hares in the field.  Hares long associated with witches.  Mistley and Manningtree, a dark history of persecution, stamping ground of the Witchfinder General.  He is said to be buried in a churchyard that is now only ruins.  Walks are planned based on witchcraft trials.  Once again the internet is surfed, the library consulted, the process continues, another layer of complexity and interest added.

This is still well within the sphere of the sane.  Planning a walk between my name (an old Hall) and my brothers name (a farm that no longer exists) begins to show signs of flakiness.  Given our names, there is probably only one such walk in England, certainly that can be done within a day.  Other “name themed” walks are considered.

Having discovered I can walk from my name to my brothers name in a day, via a farm that no longer exists a plan forms in my head.  A whole new walking theme.  Walks to places that don’t exist and of course walks from places that don’t exist.  Old maps are studied, place names, farms, barrows carefully plotted.  Can I follow old field systems that are now carparks, is there any evidence of the rural past?  A whole theme of rural walks in an urban environment exist develops in my mind.

This is just the stuff amassed to amuse myself between major, perhaps more mainstream, walking goals.  There is only one certainty, the next time I step outside of the door, it will be the start of many more walking ideas than it will complete.

As long as not for one moment do I think any of this will ever be completed in one lifetime a grip on reality will be maintained.

The madness starts when the ideas stop.

H.P Lovecraft

H.P Lovecraft (HPL) died before the age of 50 without a lot of fuss from cancer.  He never dragged himself out of poverty but seemed to live a fairly well paced life writing a lot of letters and some cracking good horror yarns (you can keep the poems).

He could look back on a failed marriage and a largely failed writing career (if you take prosperity as a measure of success).

Since his death his horror writing (weird tales for sure) have never been out of print and due to uncertain copyright issues can be found readily on the internet.  He would be rich by now if he had lived (which would have been impressive as he would be getting on for 120 years old).

He was a racist.

He was born Aug 20th 1890. Hence this blog entry.

The thing about him which intrigues me beyond all else is the the anecdote that he kept a bottle of poison (cyanide?) with him at all times so he could end his life at the moment of his own choosing.

I like this idea very much, although I take solace in the fact there is always a handy window from which to leap, not for me the melodrama of poison vials.

What is interesting about HPL and this bottle is he never drank it.  He had more reason than most to take a swig of the thing but despite a life of genteel failure in the end he chose to die of some rather painful cancer.

So given the power to end your own life at your own choosing when is it you should choose to do so?

Anytime will do of course but that is part of the problem.

Should you when your life is at its lowest ebb?

Or do you decide, well it is going to get better from this point on and live on.

In HPL’s case it was not going to get better and he knew it.  So did he just decide the activity of killing himself was just too much effort given nature was going to do it for him without any effort on his part.

So if you don’t kill yourself when life is at it’s worst, then perhaps when life is at its best.  This arrangement would suit churches, as weddings and funeral services could just be rolled into one great orgy of celebration and despair and no need to send out extra invites.

This seems ludicrous also.

Which only leaves the option of just randomly killing yourself, but life seems to be so much more random (check the newspapers).

Perhaps fiddling with the natural order of things is a bad idea.  It seems as if there is never a good time to die.  This is heartening only if it was an optional extra you could turn down.

Nebulous voice: “Do you want the dying option sir?”
Me:”No thanks, I’ll stick with the standard eternal life package”

Suicide is of course looked on very dimly by the Church (despite the clear benefits outlined above) and the law is not so impressed with it either.  It seems rather odd these institutions have sanctions against those wishing to kill themselves.

Over the years I have spent many an hour wondering what the optimal height is for the window from which I can hurl myself.  I don’t say this too shock, I am well past those youthful years when shocking people seemed a worthwhile pursuit.

Too low and you risk a variety of ignominious results from looking foolish to crippled.  Too high and it appears you have rather too long to consider your imminent death at which point most survivors have explained they had changed their minds half way down.

Getting it right is serious stuff, lets face it.

It might be one of those things in which there is no optimal height, one of those little cosmic jokes the universe is so filled with.  Or would it be more funny if there was a church tower built at the optimal height?

Studies suggest a penalty spot is placed a fraction too close to a goalkeeper.  The goalkeeper has to guess which way the ball goes before it is kicked.  If he does not, the ball will be in the back of the net before he ever reaches it with the despairing dive.  The length of the cricket pitch however is just long enough that the cricketer has time to take in the ball and wallop it for six without need for guesswork.

HPL was good friends with Robert E Howard.  He wrote Conan the Barbarian.  A life long depressive he killed himself with a .38 after visiting his Mother in hospital to be told she was not going to recover.

Although he must have shot himself at point blank range (difficult to be more than an arms length without elaborate ceremony lets face it) he still managed to miss enough to linger for eight hours.

One of the pleasures of walking is you get to turn these sort of odd little facts over in your mind.

A BT advert used to say “it’s good to talk” they would say that wouldn’t they. 

It’s better to think.

“Only thoughts which come from walking have any value”

Nietzsche

Inner exploration.

John Wayne on-screen tough guy:

“What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture? Spell it out? Don't ever ask me! Long as you live, don't ever ask me more.”

The Searchers.

There is a special Ray Mears programme.  He goes into the jungle with a very eager Ewan McGregor.  I am not sure if it was a pilot concept, but it seems never to have been expanded on.

This was no “I’m a celebrity get me out of here".  Here being a hotel carpark somewhere leafy by the looks of it.  Knee deep mud and if you want a nights rest you better get your camp in order, nobody else is doing it.

The programme charts Ewan from enthusiastic ignorance to knowledgeable misery.  At the end of the programme, the helicopter lifts skyward, Ewan is glad it is over.  But, it gave him the opportunity to work out “issues” he has left a lot of mental baggage in the jungle.

This seems to be a common theme, while out in the “wilderness” inner exploration is going on, you get in touch with your inner being.  Things become clearer, mental knots untie, surplus weight shed.  It is all a bit new age, smacking of rebirth and touchy feely.  Ethan, as portrayed by John Wayne would not be having any of it.

At the age of 11, eager young students, legally obliged to attend students with nowhere else to go, were set an essay.  What is heaven, what is hell.

My effort boiled down to, hell is the repetition of your life for eternity with the sure knowledge of what happens next, it runs on rails, a journey you know.  Heaven is new experience.  Personal growth does not seem to be a priority for me, I’ve not really changed this attitude.

While walking I do plenty of thinking, but it is usually a forward projection from the point of now.

I suspect the “walking cure” is an extension of the “talking cure” concept.  Healthy mind, healthy body.  Talk about it and it gets better.

It cannot be very contentious to assert a persons inner landscape is at least as complex as the landscape of the natural world.  There are many places in the natural world having been mapped that clearly would be a bad idea to go and visit.  The core of a nuclear reactor would be an extreme example.  Not much good is going to come of popping in and giving it a look-see.

Why then is there the idea that exploring your inner landscape is a good idea.  There is much danger to be uncovered and harmful materials locked away.  “Get it out in the open” seems to be the consensus for these thoughts, but people are not so keen to open up plague pits or anthrax dumps.

If you are skilled enough at handling these toxic thoughts and are able to jettison them into the rainforest then by all means do so.  If you are not, medalling might be a very bad idea.

Introspection must be doomed to failure.  There are people that profess if they had their time again they would not change a single thing.  Either they are totally devoid of imagination, incapable of introspection, or lying.

Finish this sentence in seven words or less : “I would like to be reincarnated because…”

I would hope those that write “to do it all the same again” would be eternally damned to wander the earth as shades.

Introspection finds the cracks, the fracture, and like an old gramophone needle gets stuck in it.  “What if….” begins and it never ends.

Even if you divine the correct path, the one you should have taken, the phrase you should have used, you cannot be sure how it would affect the next instant.  Even in the movies, the most controlled of lives, you only have alternate endings, they don’t do alternate beginnings or middles, it makes no sense, the complexity is total.

Imagine the horror if you could plot your alternate life from that crossroads, the result would drive you mad.  It’s a path never travelled however beautiful it will be eternally denied you.

Travelling the backwaters of memory is a bad plan, you could very easily get lost.

The advice “Don’t look back” has never been more apposite.  I think there is a simple truth.  Those that do not wish to be lost realise it is not worth travelling back, the surest way to avoid the backward glance is to forget or by sheer strength of will never return to it. 

It is as simple as that, like so much excess weight, the memories are not untied, made coherent, understood.  They are simply dropped as the complex tangle of unexplainable, unchangeable clutter they are revealed to be.  There is no resolution just an understanding, the past has past.

You’ll never walk alone…

This is the sort of thing the Chinese might issue as a curse alongside, “may you live in interesting times”.

Probably best known as a line from The Kop as a load of sentimental people sway back and forth in their identikit overpriced polyester, scarves held over their heads.

The camera zooms in on some over emotional fan head thrown back bawling the anthem, a tediously clichéd football commentator warming up with the usual banalities.

Sport as quasi-religious event complete with two minutes silence  like as not.

Then its kick-off, time for the racial abuse and threatening the opposition and failing that just giving a kicking to the bloke that has last years strip on.  You have to be in the right mob.

John Hee, in his excellent blog, comments on an article in the recent TGO magazine.  It concerns the mental side of being out on the hills alone. (here it is)

I left the sort of comment that comment fields encourage.  Short and to the point(less?).

I am a loner, perhaps anti-social, although I can function adequately in society if cornered by it.  Usually society steers clear, its got better things to do, a happy balance is struck.

I see rambling groups from time to time.  Invariably of a certain age, an age I have yet to reach.  Gaiters and poles seem to be the thing and flaccid rucksacks, a virtuous aura emanates, strapping women, spindly men .  They march past in tight groups jabbering to each other, it is gossip, probably about the group behind. 

I never see them out on the fields, I see them walking along the local seafront.  The equipment for its own sake, its the uniform.

It would be one of the circles of my personal hell, its ghastly.  I suspect its some sort of church splinter group, “Walk for Christ sake”. 

Walking is not a large group activity, that’s marching, protest, regimentation and cause, it makes authorities nervous,  something for a populous to fear.  A whole different paradigm.

I walk alone, it is effectively a life choice, the whole level of organisation becomes factors more simple.  I am never actually alone, certainly never lonely, as I have one or two dogs as companions.  They need help at times and always need thinking of.

This is useful as while I might be slightly inclined to take the odd risk with my own personal safety I will never risk them.  They also seem to be more in tune with the landscape than me, closer to it, with less between them and it I guess.  More than once I have been warned off boggy ground by a dog, I’ve learnt to recognise that.

The dogs themselves are happy to follow me, it is all the same to them.  They have total trust I am going to get them back in one bit and feed them as necessary.  I do not have to give much thought about how they are feeling during the walk, it is pretty simple for them.

Safety is a serious concern.  I have been wandering about desolate places with the thought in the back of my mind, “What if I did break my leg?”

I’d be in trouble without a mobile phone signal, that is for sure, likely in some problems with one.  But to dwell on this sort of thing is about like wondering what would happen if you got hit by a car crossing the road.  You could die is what might happen.  Urbanites dismiss the car possibility and obsess about the falling down the well possibility.

I make people aware of where I am at least well enough that hopefully the search parties have found me before the dogs have eaten me.  Beyond that I take the attitude, “those are the chances you take”.

There are most certainly places where safety issues mean you don’t go alone.  Mountaineering, potholing, places where adverse weather conditions are likely are instances that spring easily to mind.

Every so often I would like to share a view with someone, or a thought, but it presupposes they would be interested.  How often have you had an experience ruined by a moments thoughtlessness of another?  You think the view is great, a visual pun amusing but they just grunt, shrug their shoulders, complain about a blister.  It cuts both ways, you find yourself rolling only half interested as your walking partner has something to add.  You’ve just lowered their enjoyment factor.  In the end you trudge in silence.

Human company is an additional layer of responsibility, you are always wondering if they are enjoying it, and how can you improve on that state.  It is also a compromise from start to finish.  You cannot really go on a wild goose chase after that butterfly that refuses to pose for the photo.

Part of the charm is people have different outlooks, interests and knowledge, but it is the essential weakness as well.  If someone had as much interest as me over ancient sweet chestnut trees as I had in my last walk, every chance we would still be there, boring each other to death with increasingly esoteric and unlikely facts.  If they don’t share the same interests then one or other is in an almost continual state of eye rolling.

And that is just a group of two.

Start expanding the numbers and before you know it, you are in small knots of people, heads down gossiping about the group behind and their unhealthy interest in tree bark.

Rogers and Hammerstein wrote Liverpool’s future football anthem in 1945.  Gerry and Pacemakers brought it to a new audience in the 1960s.  In between and afterwards a mind bogglingly eclectic mix of musicians have performed it.

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone

So it turns out this is the song for a solitary stroller not a chinese curse.

Wandering Mind

“Only thoughts which come from walking have any value”
Nietzsche

Neitzsche did not have a “good war”.  Dead by 1900, having spent 11 years going mad, he was not around to defend himself when the Nazi’s took his “superman” concept and ran amok with it.  Who knows what he would have made of it all, least of all the man himself.

I don’t imagine he will ever recover from it (perhaps for the best).  But it doesn’t really matter he was probably quite bonkers long before he got locked up for it and scribbling his “Madness Letters”

I am drifting off the path here, so lets find my way back.

The Nietzsche quote is a start point for an irregular series of walking blog entries which will chart some of the thoughts which evolve in my head as I stroll.

Possibly a rather dangerous exercise in self-absorption but sometimes wounds heal better for the fresh air.

Nietzsche did not say “All thoughts…” 

Archimedes “Eureka” moment might be one of the most famous moments of thought there is.  Which might appear to shake Nietzsche somewhat.  Fortunately though Archimedes was stepping into a bath allegedly when he had the thought, so it was a “walking thought” afterall.

Part of the joy of walking is the unshackling of the mind, although hopefully mine will never wander quite as freely as Nietzsche never too fully return to the leash.

It is no secret there is more to this walking lark than innov-8 and destinations.