At the weekend we went for a walk to look at the bluebells. Nothing else was happening, so it seemed a good opportunity. They always look superb in this wood a couple of miles away from where we live and the sun even came out for a while. I reckon we might just be into Summer, now.
I had a conversation with a blogging friend a few days ago, in the course of which she asked me if I knew why it was that so many Westerners seemed drawn to Eastern beliefs, especially the more ‘esoteric’ ones.
I briefly mentioned the fascination the East has held for Westerners throughout history, and the fact that many in the West have drawn away from traditional religion – specifically Christianity – in the last fifty or sixty years especially, and that leaves a void: when you have been brought up within a belief system, that needs to be replaced by something. The Beatles nudged a whole generation in that direction by visiting the Maharishi in Rishikesh in the 1960’s / 1970’s, and there followed a whole slew of books on the subject, many seeming to want to outdo the others in sheer weirdness. But even before that there had been a lot of interest in both Buddhism and Hinduism from the late Victorian period onward, with a number of popular books available.
I can’t claim to be immune to this, either. I also rejected Christianity long ago, but felt I needed something to take its place despite deciding the concept of gods had no place in my life. The world is a wonderful and incredibly beautiful and fascinating place, all of which is explained perfectly well by science. But I do need something to satisfy the spiritual part of me – a part that, surely, all of us have?
I have read a lot about Buddhism, and for a long while thought of myself as a Buddhist. In a way, I still do, although I can’t entirely buy into the belief sets of any of the three major schools of Buddhism. But I did read Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. I can’t remember the details of the book, but that is unimportant, it’s the message of the title in this case. I like Buddhism. I like its core message, which pared down to basics is simply to be kind to everyone and everything. It is the only religion I know that has no need for gods. Oh, sure, they’re there if you want them, but no one is ordering you to have one.
This doesn’t have to be ‘esoteric’ or ‘eastern’, either. It can apply just as well here in the west. And it doesn’t require sacred writings or rituals, I find poetry or a walk in the woods does just as well for me.
I’m listening to the heavy rain as I write this – which is something that seems to happen a lot at the moment, but is something I find particularly soothing. I wonder at the origins of this; is it something primeval, hidden deep in my DNA from the times we lived in caves or rough shelters and we could take comfort from the fact we were snug, and perhaps large sharp-toothed beasts were taking a similar break somewhere and not out looking for early humans to eat? Or is it perhaps just a forgotten memory of a very calming experience I once had, which my subconscious has decided to hang onto for my benefit, but without telling me why? I am aware of a few of the times I’ve experienced it, such as lying in a tent at night hearing the pounding of the rain on the canvas, with a wonderful feeling of warmth and snugness. Then there was another time in the mountains of Spain, coming across an abandoned cottage just as a rainstorm hit and spending the next half an hour or so just sitting on a bench and leaning against the wall, listening to the rain and thinking. I’m sure there must be many more.
In these rainstorms, I feel as though I’m immersed in nature – something that always makes me feel calm and relaxed, and which is but a step from what the Japanese call Forest Bathing. Forest Bathing is essentially taking a walk in woodland, using all your senses to connect with that environment. This reminds me strongly of meditation, especially meditation as I learned it in a Buddhist environment, which is where I’m going with all this rambling. If I have an actual religion now, it has to be nature. A belief in nature as something important, beneficial and precious. I wouldn’t ‘worship’ nature – ‘worship’, for me, has connotations of supplicants on bended knees with hands clasped together intoning religious dogma and praying, but I do have strong feelings of respect and admiration for nature, which I suppose you could call the same thing.
It just seems a pity that more people don’t seem able to accord it the same respect.
We’ve been on the South Downs again.
That’s why you haven’t heard from me for a while. Here’re a few pictures.
We began walking from Amberley this time, and on the first day the weather was pretty meh. It was either raining or starting to rain or just deciding when to rain. But, as always, the Downs looked fantastic. This view reminded me of a Roland Hilder painting:
But it got steadily wetter throughout the day. We took a very welcome break in the Frankland Arms in Washington and if I was writing a pub review it would get five stars – especially as it served Harvey’s Old Ale. But I only allowed myself one of those, as we still had some serious mileage to do. And it was, as noted, getting wetter. We approached Chanctonbury Ring:
And as we began the descent from the top, the saddest part of the journey. We walked among a large number of ash trees, all of which were dead or dying from Ash Dieback disease. It looked like a picture of the Somme.
The next day was dull, but at least it was dry. We walked past the Devil’s Dyke which I never seem to be able to get a good picture of, no matter which angle I take it at. The Devil’s Dyke is so-called because for some reason the Devil wanted to destroy Sussex, and got talking to Saint Dunstan and asked him the best way to do it. Why he did that I can’t imagine. Never ask a saint for advice if you’re the Devil. It won’t end well. Anyway, Saint D suggested he dig a channel through the South Downs and flood it. Right, thought Old Nick, and set to work. Saint D let him toil away for a few hours and then caused all the cocks in Sussex to crow. Thinking it was morning, Old Nick threw down his shovel, twirled his moustaches and hissed ‘Curses, foiled again!’
Alternatively, it might have been caused by melt-water during the ice age, but why spoil a good legend?
And the best weather? During our rest day in Lewes. And, oh look! There’s the Harvey’s Brewery! What a good rest day.
The following day was dull again as we left Lewes, and by now quite a sharp wind was blowing – into our faces too, unfortunately. But we had a pretty decent day and passed this church in Southease, one of only two (I think) in England with a round tower outside of Norfolk. The other is in nearby Lewes.
The final day began sunny but again with a sharp and unkind wind. We left Alfriston with its church on the edge of the village by the river and headed towards the coast. On the South Downs away to our right we passed a white horse carved into the chalk.
Soon we were up onto the Downs again, for the final walk into Eastbourne over the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. I tend to forget how tiring this leg can be, going continually uphill then downhill for the best part of six miles. For some reason, although we could see the Belle Tout lighthouse in the distance, it never seemed to get any nearer. Once I could do this leg of the walk easily, but…getting a little older…
An always fantastic view, though. Here we’re looking back across the Seven Sisters towards Seaford Head.
After all that, we could do with a holiday.
At last, the weather has got milder and it wasn’t raining so we thought ‘let’s go!’ Nothing outrageous, just seven or eight miles around Kent, in no hurry, looking for signs of Spring. So, have a browse through a few visual notes with me…
It looks very cloudy, but the clouds were thin and we got quite a lot of sunshine.
With birdsong thrown in for free! For some reason, WordPress won’t let me load this video directly, but is happy to load it from Twitter. *shrugs*
The celandines are out.
And a few early primroses.
We passed a magnificent oak
And some rather nice fungi on the end of this log
And, a poem. You may have read this before, as I’ve posted it before, but I’ve put up again because I rather think it just encapsulates how I feel when I go out walking.
If I could just wave a wand,
I would wander the world.
With my notebook in hand,
And a bag on my back.
.
I would sleep under hedges,
In hotels and haylofts.
Drink beers under trees,
And eat cheese on the moor.
.
I’d watch clouds over hilltops,
And boats on the ocean.
Shapes and shadows at sunset,
A moon with a view.
,
And I’d write trivial poems
Of snowfall and sunlight,
Birds singing at dawn
And the sounds of a stream.
,
There’s the lure of a skyline,
And skylarks above me,
Wine and woodsmoke my welcome,
At the end of the day.
,
To travel, to journey,
There’s magic in wandering
Over moorland and downland,
Through woods and through fields.
,
The world’s full of wonders
All waiting for wanderers.
Let me follow these paths
For as long as I can.
We went down to Rye harbour in Sussex, a few weeks ago, on a beautifully sunny but bitingly cold day. The actual harbour entrance is in the middle distance of the above photo with Dungeness Power Station just visible on the horizon in the distance.
This red-roofed hut sits on the shingle on the approach to the harbour and has become the iconic image that everyone photographs. I resisted the temptation this time, but took this one a few years ago. No one seems certain when it was built, but it was certainly in use from the early 1900’s onwards and was used to store fishing equipment.
The salt marshes behind the harbour constitute a nature reserve and are an important place especially for migrating birds. We walked around the marshes for an hour or so and did see quite a few birds, especially when we spent some while in a hide with the binoculars we’d brought. No close-up photos, because we were too far from the birds and I only had my pocket camera that day, but especially noticeable was was a group of some forty to fifty cormorants.
One of the tasks of the Environment Agency here is to continually move shingle in trucks westwards along the coast to shore up (pun intended) the sea defences. Due to the prevailing winds, longshore drift continually moves shingle eastwards along the coast and without this intervention it would choke the harbour mouth and undermine the sea wall at Pett (to the west). They load up the trucks with shingle from the shore, the trucks drive west and tip it out on the shore. The sea washes it eastwards along the coast again. The trucks load up with shingle from the shore…It almost feels a pointless exercise, but I suppose there’s no real alternative.
But longshore drift means that the shorelark on the South coast of England has a chance of finding rocks and stones (and all sorts of other things) that originated further to the west, and we spent some while searching among the stones here to see what we might turn up.
Shorelarking? It’s like mudlarking, but on the seashore. ‘Larking’ in this sense means looking for…well, anything. Coins, interesting rocks, anything lost or old or, preferably, both. Not that we found much, not that we ever find much, but we don’t do it as seriously as some folk. And as nice as it would be to turn up the sort of finds some people find in the mud of the Thames, we’re not that dedicated. But in the past I have found bits of flint tool while fieldlarking, and usually come home from a walk with an interesting stone or two.
We did find a couple of interesting things that day – they don’t look much, do they? But the grey stone in the centre is possibly a Mesolithic hammer stone, used for shaping flint tools while the nail had a tiny piece of wood still attached, but this crumbled away as soon as I picked it up. How old is it? I’ve no idea. Nails like that were in use from the 1800’s through into the 1900’s but it’s impossible to pin it down further. My immediate thought was it could be part of the beach groyne, but when I looked they seem to be constructed entirely with rivets. Maybe it is from an old shipwreck. The rock at the bottom is simply a lump of sandstone from further west along the coast, a piece of what was called Hastings Sandstone when I studied geology, but now known as the Ashdown beds. Nothing special, again.
Just an interesting few finds on the beach on a cold sunny day before we headed off for a warm drink.
I’ve been feeling a bit flat recently, although that’s not uncommon at this time of the year.
I know I’m currently craving solitude and simplicity, wanting to spend some time somewhere a little remote. An area of moorland, such as Dartmoor or the Pennines, would do me very nicely. Even better if there were some woodlands nearby, too. Although there would be no people around (ideally), there would be wildlife to watch and hills and valleys and those woods to explore. Maybe some interesting ruins nearby…
Simplicity, that’s what I’d want. Somewhere with no wifi, no TV, no phone signal or even radio. A decent supply of food and a few beers because, as Jerome K Jerome said, thirst is a dangerous thing. A fire to sit beside in the evening. Somewhere small and basic with no luxuries.
I’d take some books. Several sorts, so I could pick one up or swap to another depending upon my mood. At least one book of poetry, perhaps Stranger in the Mask of a Deer which I read for the first time a few months ago, and then re-read recently because it was so damned good. Maybe a Seamus Heaney collection, including the ‘Station Island’ sequence of poems, or a collection by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko for the marvellous long poem Zima Junction. Maybe I’d just take all of those.
I’d include some sort of detective novel for pure escapism, then one or two books by the likes of Robert Macfarlane – books that would inform me about the landscape I had decided to inhabit for a while.
I wouldn’t just be walking and exploring, or reading. I have a few poems I need to finish off, one about salmon and one about the Winter Solstice. In this environment I think I’d be inspired to finish them, hopefully write some more.
A week would probably do it.
Well, damn this blasted Covid.
March really isn’t going to plan at the moment. Having already messed up my creative plans for the month, even my Plan B has now fallen apart as we’ve coughed and groaned and generally felt sorry for ourselves. I did manage to write a couple of poems before the yuck set in, though, so all was not entirely lost.
We had plans to do some long walks, now the glorious Spring weather has finally arrived, getting ourselves ready for going away to walk some of the South Downs Way again next month.
At least we’ve got a sunny back garden to sit in, I suppose.
In the meantime, here’s an old photo randomly of a decorated window on a house in the Nepalese Himalaya I took in 1988.
Feels like quite a long while ago.
We’ve had rain recently, and everywhere was muddy again. Much more like I would expect February to be. The ground had dried out quite a lot over January, but the soil was still saturated just beneath the surface and it doesn’t take much for it to turn back to thick, claggy, mud. But the weather was better than had been forecast; and as I set out the sun was glinting on the stubble fields and in the shadows there was just the faintest blue hint of frost. It felt so Spring-like. Everything was suddenly green and growing.
Soon, I was much too warm in all my layers. Mornings like this inevitably remind me of other favourite walks; long walks on sunny, clear days. I walked through a valley which was filled with birdsong – blackbirds, robins, blue tits, the demented cackle of a green woodpecker, and the determined drumming of a greater spotted one. In the future I will probably take walks that remind me of this one.
I must sometimes be a frustrating person to walk with – I like to stop frequently and just look around me. Absorb the landscape. The air smells fresh, now, but without the over-sharp coldness that stings the nostrils. Even though it is too early to smell flowers in the air, there is something on the breeze…Something evocative, much like the scent of woodsmoke causes me to instantly think of trekking in Nepal, or campfires closer to home in Sussex.
Suddenly there is a kestrel overhead…I never seem to get those shots of foxes or buzzards and don’t know whether I’m just too slow or if everyone else just walks along with their cameras in their hands, ready to take that photo.
At least flowers and trees tend to keep still. I do find my camera can be an unwanted distraction, though. If I am walking along looking for something to photograph, I feel I’m not really seeing the landscape around me. I’m just searching for a subject. For that reason, I often don’t take a camera with me on walks.
The first peacock, in fact the first butterfly of any kind I’ve seen this year. But talking of green woodpeckers and kestrels, I think there is a case for replacing all their somewhat dull modern names with the ones they used to have in the past: the green woodpecker was the yaffle, named for its wonderful manic call, the kestrel used to be called the windhover – how wonderful is that? And in the seventeenth century it was actually commonly known as the windf*cker. Perhaps the prudish Victorians banished that name the same as they changed the perfectly named white arse to the bland (and meaningless) wheatear.
I think we should reclaim the names; they add extra interest to a long walk.
January’s project was to tidy up the scrappy notes I had on my family tree and fill in a few of the gaps. Successful? I reckon so.
It’s in much better shape than it was this time a month ago, and I feel I now have a developing narrative; I’m beginning to know a bit about the day to day lives of some of my ancestors, in a way that makes them real people rather than just a series of names and dates. Working class folk in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – poverty, sickness and, frequently, early death. Large families. Both rural and urban poor.
Then we had some milder, sunnier, days, and I guess I got a little distracted, going out and walking as often as I could. It was good to get some miles into my legs.
February’s project, then, is to finish the final draft of A Good Place ready for the final round of editing. Currently I’m reading through the manuscript and making notes, and will hopefully get down to some serious writing in a couple of days. I know what I want to do with the storyline, and it’s really just a matter of filling in some gaps.
Other than the editing, of course.
If all continues to go well, my project for March will be to spend the month painting and drawing. I’m not sure what the thrust of it will be, but at the moment I’m thinking skies and evenings and trees, or maybe a whole load of other things. We’ll see.
And then April? Whoa! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
22nd April 1994
Today the intention is to take it as easy as possible.
Last night, after a fruitless search for treats I cooked myself some supper and then decided to walk on for another half a dozen miles or so with a view to just leaving a token walk into Kyle of Lochalsh. But I’d already done a good twenty miles already, and it was a really stupid move. Eventually I bivvied just off the side of the road, with the weather closing in rapidly. Clouds were rolling down the mountainsides and coming up the loch. By the time I was in my sleeping bag all hell broke loose. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like it. The wind howled and shrieked and at times it screamed. And the rain that accompanied it absolutely hammered down. It seemed to go on for most of the night and I lay there unable to sleep for the noise.
But by six the rain had stopped and the wind dropped, although it was still having a good old blow. I got up, packed up, then walked a mile or so back up the road to get a photo of Castle Eilean Donnan which I’d passed in semi-darkness the previous evening.
Through the rest of the morning I walked along the side of the loch through alternate rain and sun and constant gusting winds. Or perhaps ‘limped’ would be a better description, since I was now extremely footsore, and perhaps that contributed to a slight sense of let down when I got to Kyle. Still, that was my target and I’ve achieved it in around three and a half days. I will have covered around eighty to eighty five miles and since a lot of it was over steep hills and bog, I’m quite pleased with that.
I think it’s important to state here that even if I still enjoyed the same levels of fitness and stamina I enjoyed almost thirty years ago, and was able to repeat this walk, I would not do it this way.
I’ve no wish to set records and, really, I did not wish to do so then, but there is a sort of perverse pride that says ‘Look, I can walk thirty miles a day’, although that is not the only reason I covered so much ground each day. It was the middle of summer in Scotland, with very long daylight hours. The temptation to use them to do ‘just another couple of miles’ was too much at times.
And now I’m in a cheap guest house and about to have a shower and go out to find a café. Or maybe even a pub.
I suspect I’ll sleep well tonight.
Mick Canning 