Why Walk?
Another lockdown has descended and, again, I find myself longing to be outside rather than inside. Perhaps this is a strange, contrarian impulse in me, however, it seems that I'm not alone in feeling this way. With people being restricted to their immediate locale, unable to go out and work, socialise, or do any of their usual civic activities, walking has presented a welcome escape from the drudgery and stuffiness of being stuck indoors for weeks and weeks on end. I can see this as only being a good thing – roads are less busy and more pedestrian-friendly, people are immersing themselves more regularly in nature, for some it has been a source of creativity. People are re-discovering the places they live and for many this has been a meaningful experience.
I have always found this to be the case when exploring my local area. For me, walking provides the closest thing to a religion – it is a time for solace and reflection, communion with nature, discovery and revelation. As long as I have walked I have also photographed along the way. Walking and creativity are closely interlinked for me, the act of losing myself deep in a somewhere and experiencing through my senses triggers my imagination. I enter a sort of meditative, primordially creative state, something I find in common with many of the best nature poets. In these moments I have to have my camera with me, not to capture the mood as such but to engage myself in some sort of positive, creative act.
Often, I find these creative acts to be both belonging to the landscape, but also deeply personal. They reflect a particular time, place, temperament, mood, and are therefore completely unique. Reading the likes of Wordsworth, or looking at romantic nature art, it might come across that this is an activity for the misanthropic outsider. But I believe that this level of engagement with nature and locale is something available to everyone. It is only in the cultivation of my photographic skills that I would set myself apart, I have consciously worked towards making a craft out of my experience. But I believe that everyone, if not already steeped in their own form of appreciation, is capable of revering nature in a way that is meaningful.
I have a vague, straw-man of an argument which has been the locus of my thinking around this issue. I wonder if the unequal global distribution of power influences how we perceive certain places. Growing up in an edgeland-rich environment around the outskirts of London, a weird mish-mash of nature reserves, motorways, woodland, tower blocks, where canal-boat populated rivers sit beside industrial estates, my experience of the “English Countryside” felt completely foreign to the one I encountered later when I discovered writers like Wordsworth, Gilbert White, or Edward Thomas, or artists like Gainsborough or Constable. There was a glaring contradiction here. It would be unfair to pin it on these writers or artists, but their work has certainly been co-opted and become part of a cultural legacy which has stripped these works of their radicalism and subversion, turning them into a haven for the rich and reactionaries.
Travelling through pretty much any of the southern shires of England this conservative cultural hegemony is very much apparent. Many southern bits of countryside are more like museums than living parts of nature. The misanthropic side of nature writing and art has come to dominate here as the urban rich can afford to escape the city and shore themselves up in their country retreats, far from the madding crowd. Indeed, part of this hazy, nostalgic idyll is the complete severance from the demands of the present altogether – consider the popularity of the heritage industry, the National Trust and conservation. Consider the strange way that fox hunting, badger culling and golfing seem to be exempt from ethical and ecological inquiry. Consider the fact that Downton Abbey was a thing. Programmes like This Country have brilliantly demonstrated the flip side of this – a complete lack of investment and opportunities for the rural, economically disadvantaged.
Any plight by the less than privileged to dwell within and enjoy the countryside has been viscously opposed by moneyed interests. For example, the plot-lands movement in the earlier half of the century, where the urban poor were able to buy up land around the coast fairly cheaply (places like Canvey Island or Peacehaven) and erect prefab homes, was heavily opposed by interwar conservationist thinkers who decried what they saw as desecration of the landscape. As Colin Ward writes, “In retrospect, it is hard not to feel that part of this disgust was ordinary misanthropy. The wrong sort of people were getting a place in the sun” (Ward, 2011: 59).
Why do I walk? I know that this vision of the “English Countryside”, a fortress of money and power, has warped our perception of our own land. Our perception of the countryside is heavily shaped by our creative responses to it – thus we have regions like Brontë or Dickens country, an abiding love for country estates propped up by a tired treadmill of aristocratic heritage dramas, but also the foreboding strangeness of Throbbing Gristle's 'Beachy Head'. Our appreciation for places is informed by these cultural contexts, so they matter completely. The recent “folk horror revival” and “edgelands” movements have opened up a space to talk about representations of the countryside, but they are really only the beginning of something else.
Nature must be readily enjoyed by all. To destroy this fortress, this false representation of the countryside, we must have mass engagement with the countryside. We must have multiple visions of the countryside, of nature. Nature must be queer, inhuman, strange, a source of joy as much as transgression. It must be all these things and more. It must shift and change with each person who experiences it. I think that this is the only way we can simultaneously “save nature,” whilst ensuring people have the rights to enjoy it and live meaningfully with it. Walking and discovering the nature around you can only be a step in the right direction here.
Work cited:
Ward, C. (2011) 'Plotlands: The Unauthorised Version' in Wilbert, C. & White, D. F. Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader, Edinburgh: AK Press.
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