Walking

"The Old Ways" by Robert Macfarlane is a challenging read. Though the main text finishes on page,364, the book contains a further seventy pages that variously include indices, notes, acknowledgements and a bibliography. For the author, it was all undoubtedly a well-considered labour of love.

This is mostly  a book about walking. Not a series of recommended routes or how to read a map but about the history of walking, about its spiritual dimensions, about how walking affects people and what it means to walk where others have gone before.

Following paths and the processes of walking are woven into our DNA like the arteries and veins that criss-cross our bodies just beneath the skin. Ancient hunters and gatherers walked and so did pilgrims. Soldiers walked back from battles, brides walk down aisles, we have funeral processions and today desperate Syrians walk to safer, happier lives. 

And when we walk the rhythm of our footsteps echoes the beating of our hearts. Paths and steps and strides. Moving onward. Leaving the past behind. And where there are junctions, where routes cross, we try to pick the best paths though sometimes our judgement fails us.

Some of these thoughts, my own experience of walking and the immediate aftertaste of "The Old Ways" made me create this poem before dawn today...

* * *

The Path

After a mile
You will cross an old stile
Walk on by a chirruping hedge
Then cut across
That broadening field
Following a line
That others have trod.

Down to a brook
That burbles its way
Through a sycamore stand
Then over a rustic bridge
And up to a grassy ridge
Where
If you look back
You will see
Where you have been.

Ahead the tower of
Saint Cuthbert’s
Will be visible
Beyond the ruins of a barn
With a copse
Sitting squat
Like a bonnet
On a bulbous hill
To the west.

Walk on
Along an old green track
That clings to the contours
Of the rising land
Till you come to a sign
By a galvanised gate
Then head straight
Along the line
In the sod
Where others have trod

Across a tapering meadow
Beside a hedge of laurel and beech
Where unseen sparrows
Quarrel and screech
Soon to cross an old stile
With another mile or so
Still left to go.