Way-marking of old paths: cairns, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, longstones, milestones, cromlechs
desire lines/paths
Richard Long – did a piece where he created his own footpath (by walking repeatedly along a strip of ground), but it didn’t lead anywhere – an it still be considered a footpath?
paths need walking to maintain them – without it they become grown over – there was an old tradition of hanging a scythe at one end of a path and anyone walking the path could use it to trim back any branches, and then leave it at the other end for the next person to use
“For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?”
to the Thcho people of Canada the words for ‘footprint’ and ‘knowledge’ can be used interchangeably – the idea that walking is so important to thought and ideas
“Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape: touch as sight”
Walter Benjamin – the idea of representing his life cartographically
chalk is the dominant formation of south-eastern England
high chalk ridges were well drained so dryer with less vegetation, hence the first footpaths emerged over these ridges
“lines of communication made easy by the trends of the landscape”
the invention and development of aerial photography meant “landscape ghosts” such as old/forgotten tracks could be re-discovered
Aerial photograph over the Icknield Way in Royston, taken by Major George Allen in 1936
“Horizontally across the image run a series of near-parallel lines. Uppermost of these is a railway track, upon which a train happens to be chuffing eastwards, trailing a long plume of steam. Below that is a road upon which a single car is driving westwards. Concealed to the passengers of either train or car, but clear to the bird’s-eye view of the camera, are the other lines in the landscape: the dark streaks of back-filled Iron Age ditches running north-south, medieval field boundaries, and – within a few yards of the Tarmac – the white rutted tracks of the Icknield Way itself.”
‘What is astonishing to the point of uncanniness is the way in which these ancient features…secretly share the landscape with the living as they go about their business.’ -Kitty Hauser
“there are certain kinds of knowledge which exceed the propositional and can only be sensed, as it were, in passing”
Broomway: footpath over treacherous mudflats that is covered by the tide every day, and thus has no traceable path in the ground
12,000 years ago (the last ice age) sea levels were 400 feet lower – Doggerland is the name of a land that existed and was lived upon, that is now under the North Sea – the Mesolithic retreat from Doggerland is one of the earliest examples of human adaptation to climate change – a look into the future perhaps?
paths of animals are the oldest of them all, particularly birds in aerial migration – some birds can actually see magnetic fields to help guide them
sea roads/ancient seaways also exist, but obviously physical traces are not left in the same way as on land
maritime traffic dates back to at least the Mesolithic
if you consider the seas as the main way of travel, instead of the land, this almost inverts the usual mental map of Britain – the edges are the focal points of culture and trade, and people may know their neighbours across the water more intimately than they know people inland
“Sula Sgeir” (small island off Scotland) is “prickly with cairns” as each time a fisherman leaves for the last time he will build himself a cairn “to mark his relationship with the island”
“The face of the water in time, became a wonderful book – a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve…it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
night-sailing in the English channel: “the world is reduced to code: the lights carried by the different vessels, the shared rules known by all participants as to who should give way to whom. The number of data-streams is minimized; inputs limited to night-murmurs on the VHS, blips on the radar and sequences of lights.”
toponym: a place name – toponymy: the study of place names
“The Pleistocene felt only a few weeks gone, the ice just recently retreated.”
“Most of the Hebridean footpaths are shown only on informal local maps, and in the memory maps that are carried in the minds of the people who walk them, their routes passed on by report and repute.”
“geography and history are consubstantial” – “history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically”
“A lot of the paths are becoming lost now, disappearing from memory and from the moor. There’s a stone track out by our shieling that has been almost sucked down into the peat, which my father made for the cattle to go to their water. It’s a beautiful thing.”
the trails on the moor are “archive(s) of past habits and practices”
atavistic: relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral
walking barefoot: one time the sole of the foot became coated in a layer of sap which then retained a trace of whatever else was trod on on the walk
remember walks done barefoot differently, as textures: “They are durably imprinted memories, these footnotes, born of the skin of the walker meeting the skin of the land.”
“Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand. Our heels have marks that look like percussive shockwaves. The arch, where the foot’s flex is greatest, is reticulated with shallow folds. The ball carries non-intersecting ripples. The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action.”
many paths don’t exist as lines on a map but as a series of cairns, for example “old coffin trails” where they would walk bodies over from peaty ground where bodies couldn’t be buried to deeper, richer soils – talking of these cairns: “when you see them from a distance they look spookily like a group of human figures, huddled out there on the moor”
Sami shamans call quartz “frozen light”
“I have always been more interested in the relationship between landscape and individual lives, and how the places we inhabit shape the people we are.”
“The Cairngorms are a landscape on which both history and snow lay thickly.”
landscapes that live on in memory: “Adam Nicolson has written of the ‘powerful absence[s]’ that remembered landscape exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest, warped though they are by time and abraded though they are by distance. The consolation of recollected places finds its expression frequently in the accounts of those – exiles, prisoners, the ill, the elderly – who can no longer physically reach the places that sustain them.”
“A mountain has an inside” – “Mountains are also defined by their interiors: their corries, caves, hollows and valleys, and by the depths of their rivers, lochs and lochans. Once our eyes have learnt to see that mountains are composed of absent space as well as massy presence, then we might also come to imagine walking not ‘up’ a mountain but ‘into’ a mountain.”
talking of the difference between being able to freely wander in this country and the restrictions in place in countries such as Palestine: “Sometimes the evidence of the spans of geological history, the knowledge that he was walking on limestone which had formed as the bed of an ancestral sea, crushed his frustrations at the Palestinian predicament to a wafer.”
“Bryony with its baroque-heart leaves snaked up stands of teasel: unexpected botanical rhymes with the chalk-lands of Thomas’s English South Country.”
“With each rainfall, water-drops are sent wandering across the surfaces of the limestone, etching the track of their passage with carbonic acid as they go.” – in limestone landscapes, the pattern that these raindrops form down the mountain are decisive in where humans and animals go – “Humans and animals, seeking a route, are guided by the pre-configured habits of the terrain.” – pedestrians then “etch the track of their passage with their feet as they go” “In this way the path of a raindrop hundreds of thousands of years ago may determine the route of a modern-day walker.”
Many people are now walking for walking’s sake – in a way we become pilgrims when we do this
“There is no road, the road is made by walking” – we might feel dictated by our landscape, but we are the ones who made it as it is, placed the restrictions on where we can and can’t go (can we really consider this a collective decision?)
Miguel Angel Blanco – owns a library where every book contains collections/souvenirs from different walks – “the Library of the Forest”
“the summits of Alpine peaks had once been seabeds” – “deep-time conversion of the submarine into the aerial”
‘Caminar es atesorar‘ – “to walk is to gather treasure”
“The granite extended thousands of years below me”
‘As I watch [the world], it arches its back, and each layer of the landscape bristles.’ Nan Shepherd, 1954 – considering the landscape as not a fixed, passive object in a frame but as a constantly shifting, all-encompassing being that exists alongside us – “landscape scapes” (us)
foot transects: “Foot transects make possible an otherwise unattainable acquaintance with a region: the walker records and locates what he or she sees – species, scat, scrapes, weather, erosion – and the accidental encounters born of the transect’s line are part of its virtue as a method.” – ethnographic approach?
When walking in snow, footprints make areas of compacted snow – when the rest melts/blows away a trail is left of footprints sticking out of the snow – footplinths
“At Avebury and Silbury, an ease of relation is expressed between topography and belief.” – the paths between all the important prehistoric sites are just as important as the sites themselves
Silbury Hill: “landscape theatre”
Roads go on // While we forget, and are // Forgotten like a star // That shoots and is gone.
“historical synchronicities of the chalk: the ancient path-lines that were echoed in form by yesterday’s plough furrows. The evidence of human mark-making and tampering over millennia – tumuli, long barrows, chalk-pits, dew ponds – testifying to a landscape that was commemorative, tending to the consecrated.”
“I placed an ear to the turf and imagined the depths of history the soil held – Neolithic, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Roman, Augustan, down through all of which the beech roots quested.”
“tension between roaming and homing” – two contrasting desires to just walk forever, or to pick a place and stay there forever and have “nothing to do with change”
“the mind is a landscape of a kind, and walking a means of crossing it”
“Above me, swifts hunted the dusk air over the scarp slope. They turned so sharply and smoothly and at such speed that it seemed the air must be honeycombed with transparent tubes down which the swifts were sliding, for surely nothing else could account for the compressed control of their turns. Their flight-paths lent contour to the sky and their routes outlined the berms and valleys of wind which formed and re-formed at that height, so that the air appeared to possess a topology of its own, made visible by the birds’ motion.”
“Folk songs and footpaths are both major democratic forms: collective in origin but re-inflected by each new singer or walker.”
“an old track to school through the woods that ‘wind[s] like silver, trickles on’. It is smudged by moss and leaf-fall, but kept open by the feet of children. The path is a riverbed and the children the water, running ‘the current of their feet’ over it.”
“We carry within ourselves evolving maps of the world.”
“His observation of the difference between being made to think, and being drawn out beyond one’s thinking, is tellingly precise; it records the transition from a perception exercised by the self upon the stones to the perception exercised upon the self by the stones.”
“the light-fall, surfaces, slopes and sounds of a landscape are all somehow involved in accessing the ‘keyless chamber[s] of the brain’; that the instinct and the body (the felt smoothness of pebbles, the seen grain of light) must know ways that the conscious mind cannot.”
“weather is something we think in – ‘the wind, the rain, the streaming road, and vigorous limbs and glowing brain and what they created…We and the storm were one’ – and that we would be better, perhaps, speaking not of states of mind, but rather of atmospheres of mind or meteorologies of mind.”
“Hedgeless roads over long sloping downs sprinkled with thorns, and covered with old tracks whose routes are marked by juniper. A clear pale sky. A faint sunset, a long twilight.”
at Formby Point the geological makeup of a certain stretch of coast causes 5000 year old footprints to keep being exposed and then washed away by the tides
so much can be gathered from a footprint: “two sets of prints, walking northwards. A man and a woman, companionably close, moving together, shore-parallel, at around four miles per hour: journeying, not foraging. This much we know: that the man was around 6′ 3” tall, and the woman just under a foot shorter. That the man had a sharp big toe-nail; that the woman had raised arches. That on the day of their journey, some 5,000 summers ago, the sun was bakingly hot, the wind was light and the waves were low. That red deer and roe deer were also out, moving over the intertidal silts, leaving their crisp slots. And that children were there too, a group of children, playing together, mud-larking, making a gaggle of small footprints.”
“Thousands of footprint trails were preserved, laid down in the stacked silt strata like a growing pile of pages.”
“The sea is reversing the flow of history, lifting pages from the pile of paper, so that even as time moves forward day by day it also moves backwards year by year.”
“The Formby prints are so evocative because they record specific journeys, and they are so mysterious because we know so little of the walkers who left them. Like the daubed handprints on the cave walls at Lascaux, they are the marks of exact and unrepeatable acts – the skin of that palm or this sole was pressed to this cave wall or that beach on this occasion – and in their shape and spacing they remind us of a kinship of motion that stretches back as far as 3.6 million years ago. Other than that, almost nothing is known. Who made these marks that are so particular and so generic? What were they feeling as they left them, in the same centuries that the first pictograms were pressed into Mesopotamian clay with a reed stylus? To track these tracks, to leave your own prints beside them, is to sense nothing so simple as time travel, a sudden whisking back to the Mesolithic. No, the uncanniness of the experience involves a feeling of co-presence: the prehistoric and the present matching up such that it is unclear who walks in whose tracks. It’s this combination of intimacy and remoteness that gives these trails their unsettling power. They are among the earliest texts, from a period of history devoid of recorded narrative. Following them, we are reading one of the earliest stories, told not in print but in footprint.”
Anna Harris 