16 October 2024

An ode to aimless wandering

After years of trudging along paths, I’ve learned to stop seeing their completion as an accomplishment.

Photo by Brighitta Moser-Clark / Millennium images

People have got me pegged as a walker, and they’re not wrong. In 2010 I walked the Pennine Way. It goes right past the house where I grew up, so in some ways was always beckoning. Or goading. I wrote a book about it called Walking Home. Reviewing it, one critic described me as the Eeyore of hiking – not unfairly, given that I moaned about the whole thing from start to finish. The fog, the rain, the mud, the cold, more rain. Turns out there’s rarely such a thing as summertime on the top of Cross Fell and other equally forlorn northern summits.

I’d been giving poetry readings at every stop along the way, and at the end of the book I made a solemn promise not to do anything so stupid ever again. So three years later I set off once more, to walk the north coast of the South West Coast Path. Now I was Walking Away – geddit? I did less complaining this time on account of favourable meteorological conditions, but as a walk it isn’t without its frustrations. For a start, the route is essentially a high-wire act along a narrow path with a fence on the left-hand side (with gangs of rampaging bullocks just beyond it) and a potentially fatal fall down a steep cliff to the right. On those sections where the South West Coast Path finds the beach, as its title seems to promise, a second problem occurs in the form of the sea.

On a shoreline walk with the family I once pronounced that the sea is “boring”, a statement I haven’t been allowed to forget. If we’re on holiday and suddenly the vista before us is a sunset-tinted ocean with pods of dolphins darning the surface and breaching humpback whales throwing up glittering rainbows of spray as RMS Titanic emerges from the depths in front of our eyes, I am obliged to repeat my one-word assessment, and everyone has a good laugh. Only boring people get bored, right? Several teachers in the course of my education said this to me, including two who taught me to love poetry. But those people haven’t trudged alone for three weeks along the edge of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, and let me tell you, as a fellow traveller, the sea ain’t great company. Sure, it has its changes of mood, colours, noise, and for those people attuned to the micro-nuances of the marine environment, it is probably stimulating beyond human expression. To the weary and solitary land-lubbing plodder, though, it is a big, cold, flat, wet no-go area of indeterminate size and few points of reference, impenetrable to the human eye despite being transparent, culminating in a distant optical illusion called the horizon.

That said, if it’s true self-inflicted punishment and despondency you’re after, try the Lyke Wake Walk: 42 miles from Scarth Wood Moor in North Yorkshire to Ravenscar on the coast, to honour the carrying of dead bodies along ancient corpse roads. On a clear day you can see Middlesbrough! It must be completed in 24 hours; those who succeed receive a card from the Chief Dirger offering “condolences on your crossing” and a badge in the shape of a black coffin. I did it twice: once with some lads from the village, and once with school during a heatwave, resulting in severe burns to my arms and legs, for which the treatment (according to my tough-love dad) was being thrown in a hot, salty bath.

I think what I’ve learned from those walks, apart from the protective and soothing properties of petroleum jelly when applied to friction-sensitive regions of the body, is to stop thinking of such journeys as accomplishments, with a fixed distance to be covered under the jurisdiction of the clock. Better to be a wanderer these days, I reckon, with no deadline other than sundown or closing time. Better to roll with the contours, be somewhat aimless, engage with nature and be engaged by it, rather than trying to conquer it. And to enjoy the view along the way – even if it’s the sea, which I’m sort of coming round to.