Walking, throughout our history, has been the way to couple the short distances traversed daily at home with longer ones to other places. It is the most basic and natural way of measuring out the ground, and it is hardly surprising that our inherited measures begin with feet and yards (paces) and then jump to miles to make a day’s walk countable: long distances can also be measured in days. Our walking feet register the changing textures of the ground, and covering it step by step informs us of the effort and distance, as well as employing our senses of smell, sight and hearing in the manner for which they evolved. Rain and wind are felt directly, and the sun and stars provide a guide of direction to complement the unfolding of the landscape. We encounter along the way the plants and animals and other people with whom we share our world. Before modern transport, walking was the principal means of getting around, and people thought nothing of covering substantial distances on foot for purposes of daily life. In Lark Rise to Candleford, for example, Flora Thompson writes of children walking 3 miles to school,1 and, in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, one of his informants reports 4 miles, and a woman walked 20 miles to market once a week, and even 4 miles to a spring for water during periods of drought.2 That was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Walking was also a way of crossing countries and even continents. In As I Set Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee describes breaking out of the narrow routine of rural life in Slad at the age of 19, in 1934:
I was going to London, which lay a hundred miles to the east; and it seemed obvious that I should go on foot. But first, as I’d never seen the sea, I thought I’d walk to the coast and find it. This would add another hundred miles to my journey, going by way of Southampton. But I had all the summer and all the time to spend.3
Lee could have taken a bus and then a train, but that would have been expensive, and, at that time of few cars and no motorways, it was still possible to trudge from village to village, finding nourishment and conversation along the way. The land, still farmed by hand, was full of workers who walked about, and so there were tracks or footpaths everywhere. In contrast, walking across the country today is beset with obstacles, the landscape dominated by roads crammed with speeding traffic and no sidepath to retreat to, and pedestrians are banned altogether from motorways and railway lines, with few points at which to cross. Repeating Lee’s walk would need careful planning to avoid such obstructions and to enjoy the few rural bridleways that still exist, open for leisure, without constituting a reliable network.
In 1974, the film director Werner Herzog decided to walk from Munich to Paris, because his heroine, the film critic and expert on Expressionist film, Lotte Eisner, lay dangerously ill. He undertook this journey as an act of personal pilgrimage that he believed would save her life. He kept a diary, later published as Vom Gehen im Eis, describing his experiences along the way, interrupted by strange encounters, and ironically remarking, ‘Only if it was a film would I take it all as true’.4 The author of Aguirre the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and several documentaries about determined and eccentric people has always been interested in the wild and in human beings struggling against nature, but his walk across modern Europe revealed not just a battle against the winter elements. It was a section taken through a discordant and ruptured landscape, a secret landscape no longer intended to be seen by anyone. This has some parallels with the work of the architect–filmmaker Patrick Keiller (see pp. 244–50), whose Robinson in Space, a modern homage to Daniel Defoe, traverses the British landscape to assemble an unlikely juxtaposition of places and functions that remind us how much of an illusion is the cosy image of old-world Britain that we think we know.5
Orientation and memory
Herzog started by picking his way across the land guided by a compass, though he was soon compelled to take detours. We all have to know where we are going, as it is dangerous to get lost, especially if lacking food and water. The modern world’s ubiquitous paths and signposts are recent, as is even the subdivision of the landscape into fields and woods. Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter-gatherers, without roads, fields or footpaths, apart from tracks trodden clear by frequent human or animal use. The Australian Aborigines provide an example of such an existence. They survived, before European intervention, in a relatively barren landscape at very low densities, and yet maintained contacts over vast distances through marriage customs that compelled distant alliances and mutual respect. They were able to navigate right across their continent by relying on a socially constructed interpretation of the landscape that was mapped in symbol and performance. It was learned at initiation by the ‘walkabout’, a season-long tour on foot, visiting distant groups.6 The Aborigines’ reading of the landscape identified hills or waterholes as having been formed by ‘Dreamtime’ heroes, giant animals from whom they thought themselves descended, and whom they revered in holy cults. Their mythology, passed down in song, dance and drama, efficiently tied knowledge of plants and animals to their reading of the landscape and landmarks. It was, therefore, both a practical knowledge, concerning hunting, rivals and predators, and a way to map a kind of terrain that would appear to us wild and chaotic. Their uncanny ability to read tracks, to sense direction and to recognise the personal footprints of every tribe member provoked in some European observers the claim that they had ‘a sixth sense’, but it is surely enough to recognise a highly developed, but now unfamiliar, skill. Over the hundreds of thousands of years that modern humans have existed, they have mostly been hunters and gatherers, evolving presumably with this kind of skill to understand and interact with the landscape.7
Knowing where we are is a skill we take so much for granted that it is only when it is lost through brain disorders, or when we travel to very unfamiliar places, or when we try to design robots to do it, that we see it as a problem. Yet many of us can fly off to a foreign city, walk the streets for an hour or two and find our way back to our hotel, even without a map. It is more difficult when the cityscape is repetitive, but we are able to pick out representative landmarks and to remember them as a hierarchy and in sequence. London cab drivers are trained to recall an extraordinarily large number of streets, and the brain area involved in such memories expands in consequence.8 A telling feature of spatial memory is that it is used by memory-feat competitors, who set in their minds an image of a remembered building or landscape, and then imagine placing the items to be remembered in its rooms or along its paths, so classifying them in a retrievable way.9 In a similar manner, Marcel Proust, when retrieving his childhood in his famous novel about memory, A la recherche du temps perdu, structured it around a pair of family walks. The title of the first section, Du côté de chez Swann, is usually translated Swann’s Way, but this hardly reveals that it was a walk, and furthermore one of two alternatives:
There were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also ‘Swann’s way’ because to get there one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann’s estate, and the ‘Guermantes way’ . . . Since my father used always to speak of the ‘Méséglise way’ as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the ‘Guermantes way’ as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belong only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me a precious thing exemplifying the special excellence of the whole, while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal river landscape, were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets that run past the walls of a theatre. But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind that not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes.10