The magnetic north
Walking the Great North Line By Robert Twigger Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20
Robert Twigger has turned his hand successfully to most forms of writing. Everything he writes is filled with the restlessness of a mind in search of meaning, or perhaps a landscape in which the many shapes of his consciousness fit. No such place exists, and so he invents it. Walking the Great North Line is ostensibly the description of a
400-mile tramp across England, from Christchurch in Dorset to Lindisfarne, along a line running 1 degree 50 west that links ancient sites, from Old Sarum to Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor.
On one level, the book hovers in the Celtic shadows. In keeping with Twigger’s taste for awful puns, you could say it is a woad trip. But it is also a funny critique of fashionable nature writing. Twigger exhibits a stubborn personal – even national – character that pursues a speculative, passionate form of nativist exceptionalism in the face of law, comfort and reason.
The author’s mind bounces along in pleasant companionship with Wittgenstein (writing about Frazer’s Golden Bough) and Carlos Castaneda. ‘The Line was an alignment of ancient sites,’ he writes. ‘Alignment is a key aspect of shamanism.’
Practically speaking, the book introduces many ancient sites that are little known, because of access issues. Twigger has no special regard for fences or opening times, and lurks apprehensively overnight in monuments or brews up in church porches. History does not interest him much and he’s not lyrical about place. Quite a lot of his England is shrouded in rain and mist.
The author’s writing is the antithesis of the carefully poised authorship of Robert Macfarlane and his followers, for whom each step is a bog of antique meaning into which the author sinks, while declaiming the sacred etymology of that which devours them.
Twigger prefers the liberated subjectivity of Geoff Dyer. He is likely to be found in a real bog, cursing the stubborn streak that made him walk where good sense knew he would drown, because the line goes across that field and one must be true to the line. Even though the line doesn’t exist, it is at least one’s own line.
He is no shaman. A cyclist competing for the path reduces him to ‘unmitigated rage’. He owns up to insulting cows with ‘uninhibited pleasure’. His nights are disturbed not by banshees, but by stabs of middle-aged jealousy because the manufacturer of his too-small sleeping bag chose to sponsor Ben Fogle (‘who I naturally hated even though I know nothing about him’.)
But he likes people – those he walks with and meets, or who lived a long time ago, such as the 18th-century farm labourer Stephen Duck, whose wife (née Sarah Big) changed her name to Sarah Big Duck.
He walks in his fancy with long-dead Twiggers. They include a great-grandfather who was murdered and thrown into a Birmingham canal while working as a detective for the Transport Police and ‘mad uncle Harry’, a garage owner who ended up in the Lubyanka for his support of the White Russians. There are shits and blisters, booze and blues, and he is remarkably candid about others’ personal struggles, as if he presumes they are as happy to share their insufficiencies as he is.
His account seems the truer for its personal leakiness. Perhaps he should have gone further; been stranger. It could have been a poem rather than a book. Twigger (a former winner of the Newdigate Prize) has the instincts, but maintains that he somewhere lost finesse with words. I suppose even this book is not about the language and description, but about the experience.
With obstinate persistence, Twigger imposes his line across England. Along footpath and across private estate, over walls and barbed wire, across Birmingham and on to the Peak District he trudges, blazing his eccentric path into the landscape.
It is not a journey of certainty, or reward; it is haunted by depression and he is, touchingly, in constant dread of being told off (though he is shouted at just once for trespass and the only assault he suffers is when he walks into a road sign and cuts his head open).
By etching his personal line, he gives us his unique picture of the extraordinary, compressed and changing nature of England. He reminds us that travel is not about following a literary script. We should park our preconceptions and walk our own line.