‘Different paths have different characteristics, depending on geology and purpose. The prehistoric trackways of the English Downs can still be traced because on their close chalky soil, hard-packed by centuries of trampling, daisies flourish. The thousands of work-paths that traverse the interior of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides crease the moorland, so that when seen from the air it has the appearance of worn leather. Certain coffin paths in Cumbria have flat ‘resting stones’ on the uphill side, on which the bearers could place their load, shake out tired arms and roll stiff shoulders; others in the west of Ireland have resting stones with recesses, into which each mourner would drop a pebble.’ (3)
‘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 follow a line in the land – onwards in space, but also backwards in time to the histories of a route’s presence and its previous walkers. As I walk paths often I wonder about their origins, the impulses that have that led (sic?) to their creation, the records they yield of customary journeys and the secrets they keep of adventures, musters and departures.’ (4)
‘Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It is hard to create a footpath on your own. The artist Richard Long did it once, treading a dead-straight mark into desert sand by turning and turning about dozens of times. But this was a footmark, not a footpath: it led nowhere except to its own end, and by walking it Long became a tiger pacing its cage or a swimmer doing lengths. With no promise of extension, his line was to a path what a snapped twig is to a tree. 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. // Paths are consensual, too, because without common care and common practice they disappear: overgrown by vegetation, ploughed up or built over (though they may persist in the memorious substance of land law). Like sea-channels that require regular dredging to stay open, paths need walking.’ (5)
‘The ornithologist W. H. Hudson pioneered a pastoral psychogeography, tramping for months along England’s footpaths, waiting for what he called the ‘charm of the unknown’ to set his rods quivering, questing for a genius terrae britannicae’ (7?)
‘I have 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 Hudson’s phrase – to ‘slip back out of the modern world’. Repeatedly, these wanderers spoke of the tingle of connection, of walking as a séance, of voices heard along the way. Basho is said to have told a student that while walking north he often ‘held forth’ with Chinese and Japanese poets of the past, calling one such occasion a ‘conversation between ghost and ghost-to-be’. In Thomas Hardy’s novels, particular stretches of a path possess the ability to carry recollections of a person, just as a person might of a path. Richard Jeffries, in a notebook entry from 1887, described reaching a Bronze Age tumulus in Gloucestershire and feeling ‘[a]s if I could look back and feel then; the sunshine of then, and their life’. Paths were figured as rifts within which time might exist as a pure surface, prone to weird morphologies, uncanny origami.’ (8)
‘The proposition that cognition is both motion-sensitive and site-specific pre-dates Romanticism, though it was Rousseau who made it famous. It’s now a familiar suggestion, and one which we are wise to be sceptical about when it is asserted as a rule. Sometimes walking is the mind’s subtle accomplice, but at other times its brutal antagonist. As you will know if you’ve ever walked long distances for day after day, fatigue on the path can annihilate all but the most basic brain-functions. But in non-Western cultures, the ideas of footfall as knowledge and walking as a mode of thinking are widespread, often operating in particular as a metaphor for recollection – the past as something to be walked backwards into. Keith Basso has written of how, for the Cibecue Apache, the past is figured as a path or trail (‘intin), trodden by ancestors but largely invisible to the living, which has to be re-approached indirectly, via the prompts of certain memorial traces. These traces – which include place-names, stories, songs and relics – are called by the Apache bike goz aa – ‘footprints’, ‘tracks’. To Native Americans of northwestern Canada, walking and knowing are barely divisible activities: their term for ‘knowledge’ and their term for ‘footprint’ can be used interchangeably. A Tibetan Buddhist text from around six hundred years ago uses the word ‘shul’ to mean ‘a mark that remains after that which has made it has passed by’: footprints are shul, a path is shul; to encounter such impressions is to be drawn backwards into awareness of past events.’ (14)
‘Who knew that ‘to learn’ means, at root – at route – ‘to follow a track’? I am grateful to the etymologist-explorers who uncovered those lost trails connecting ‘learning’ with ‘path-following’.’
Anna Harris 