Home sweet home
The finest walks aren’t only found in the superstar landscapes. Features editor Jenny Walters believes any route can become something extraordinary.
How any walk can become something amazing.
IMAGINE A GAP in a hedge at the top of a field. It’s an ordinary hedge in an ordinary field with an ordinary woodland beyond, but through that gap is one of my favourite walks in Britain. For me, it’s like Narnia – stepping through the back of an innocuous wardrobe (or gap in innocuous hedge) and into a magical land.
Walk here and you’ll likely wonder what I’m on about, for this magic is a very personal thing. You probably have a spot just like it, though – somewhere near home you have walked so many times you’ve lost count, a place so familiar you’ve come to love it like a ragged old jumper. Maybe there’s a certain curve in the path, or a footbridge where you always stop, or a view across a park, but there’s a place that makes you feel glad. Sometimes the joy of walking these woods is so strong I feel it physically in my chest.
If you don’t have a spot like this yet, you can make one. With 140,000 miles of footpath in England and Wales alone, and a plethora of city parks and canals, there’s a walk to fall in love with near all of us. You don’t need to live in a jawdropping land of origami peaks and wild valleys, because this is about time – and footwork.
When I first walked into Southwick Woods about 11 years ago, I thought they were nice, but nothing much more than that. But each time I returned, I liked it a little more, I got to know it a little better, and now I adore it like an old friend. Whenever I come home from holiday, I cannot wait to get back among these trees. And when you walk in places that are literally on your doorstep, it couldn’t be easier to explore. You can pop out in any spare half hour; make the most of the shortest glimmers of sunshine. You don’t need a map or to pack a rucksack. It doesn’t matter if dusk is falling; you know the way.
And while places like Snowdonia or the Isle of Skye will always offer staggering views and indelible memories, walking again and again in one place – wherever that may be – forges a different, deeper, connection. So much of a landscape’s beauty is in its alive-ness and its change, and a familiar route lets you watch the seasons ripple across the world as you discover what’s altered since your last walk. It turns a snapshot into a moving picture.
If you’re like me, you will jump for joy at the first sight of leaves budding on the broomstick-bare trees and watch on every outing for them to burst into zesty spring leaf. As summer moves in, you may notice the greens darken and the undergrowth sag in the July heat, while crickets chirrup. The white umbrella blooms of cow parsley dry to antique lace; the thistle seeds blow thickly on the breeze like summer snow. You may spot acorns held in tiny cups that look like woolly egg-cosies, or hear a field of crop stubble crack like popcorn in a pan.
And then one day the earth has been ploughed into deep black furrows and the first tints of autumn break the summer green. There’s a deep red in the hawthorn leaves and the blackthorn is purple with dusty sloes. Black fungi oozes like rubber from a fallen tree; the sunshine turns syrupy. The leaves start to fall and if you stop you can hear them scratching through the branches on their way down. At first crisp and coppery underfoot, a week later the leaves are turning to a deep mahogany squelch. You can smell the mulchy rot, and maybe a blast of cider if you pass the fermenting fruit beneath a crab apple.
The winter wind picks up to a roar and strips the trees to their bones. The branches clatter and squeak together. On a rainy day, all is brown and soft and beaten down, with moss-covered logs the only strips of colour. After a frost the woods turn clinical. The ground is iron, everything is sharp with ice, the cold air stings like antiseptic in my throat, and all fragrance has gone. Every walk brings something new. One day, a fox sprints onto the path, gasps through gritted teeth as it clocks me, and bolts. Another day, a birdsong solo highlights the background silence of the winter woods. On another, the young beeches seem to shiver as the North Wind rattles through their brittle leaves. It’s so cold that moving my face feels like moulding play-dough. Then, just two days later everything is still and I can feel warmth in the sun once more. Spring is returning.
These are just a few things I saw in a couple of square miles of Northamptonshire. You’ll discover all sorts of things that fascinate you, and bind you to the place you live. And you’ll be in fine company with your love of home turf. The parson, Gilbert White, collected close observations of walks around his Hampshire house into a book, The Natural History of Selborne. Since first publication in 1789 it has never been out of print and Virginia Woolf praised it highly: ‘No novelist could have opened better.’ Henry Thoreau spent two years living in the Massachusetts woods for his most famous book, Walden. And more recently, there’s Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk, and Rob Cowen’s Common Ground.
And all these walks give you a chance to meet other people who call this place home. While splashing through a muddy yard I chatted with a farmer who told me his family has worked this land
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea...teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.” JOHN LUBBOCK, POLITICIAN AND PHILANTHROPIST
since the 1600s. Another I met apologised for a path choked by summer brambles, then walked with me through his field of cattle, telling me how the soil differed from his neighbour’s. You can’t learn this stuff from a book or Google or in any other way.
While there’s always something new to notice each time you walk, the familiarity also lets your mind wander. I once set off on a trek across Wales, imagining the time and space would encourage deep thoughts. How wrong I was. My head was always in the map, or the new view, or marvelling at how a small backpack could weigh so very much. But a halfhour mosey round my local woods shakes out all kinds of problems and I now carry a notebook to scribble down random thoughts.
The therapeutic effect of a well-known walk has a noble heritage. One of our greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, had his sandwalk, a route around a small copse in Kent which he strolled every morning and afternoon, going round and round as he worked at a problem. He’d kick a pebble off a pile each time he passed to keep track of how many circuits of his ‘thinking path’ he’d walked, quantifying problems by the number of loops they took to solve.
Wherever you live, there’s an extraordinary walk to discover just outside your front door: a place to puzzle out problems, a place that feels like home, a place to fall in love with.
“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller trees.” than the HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WRITER