Pilgrims’ progress
Afine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo,’ wrote American war correspondent Paul Scott Mowrer, who thought even cycling too fast. We are blessed in this country with not only fine landscapes, but the ancient and well-preserved paths that traverse them, romantically indented with the footprints of travellers past (Great journeys of discovery, page 30).
We may no longer travel these paths and waterways out of necessity—for trade and business, for war, for driving livestock, for religious belief, even to visit friends and family—heads bowed against the rain and gales, shoulders sagging under the weight of backpack, exhaustion and old age and with no time to absorb glorious scenery, because we are now licensed to enjoy them at whatever pace we please.
We can try to break records if we must or we can meander thoughtfully, dreaming of the ghosts of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hardy or inspired by the present-day musings of such lyrical nature writers as Robert Macfarlane. We don’t have to be uncomfortable either: we can wear snugly fitting walking boots and breathable waterproofs and call a taxi to carry our bags. And weather and landscape become inseparable when we’re at leisure: ‘Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating,’ wrote Ruskin.
Pilgrimage routes and ancient drovers’ trails are fashionable again, even if they are not undertaken with the same devotion and hardship as by our forebears, but then we’re probably healthier and fitter at retirement age than they were.
Offa’s Dyke, Hadrian’s Wall, the Cotswold Way, the South West Coast Path and now the Welsh equivalent: they’ve become ambitions to tick off, perhaps in a series of weekends, even over several years. Our stalwart volunteer culture and local affection for these precious, sometimes hard-fought routes, means they are usually beautifully maintained and signposted, leaving space in the brain for thinking and daydreaming.
There seems to be a renewed appetite for an end goal, the senses of movement and progress—an antidote to being grounded, maddened by officialdom, in an airport on a package holiday, ‘very little different from becoming a parcel’ (Ruskin again)—and, perhaps, with greater environmental awareness has come more appreciation of the myriad historic landscapes Britain offers.
it’s the nature of such journeys that there will be a Slough of Despond, however fleeting—midges, bogs, vertical ascents, unfriendly goats, an unappealing stretch of busy road, a puncture—as well as Hill Difficulty and By-path Meadow, but, happily, there will also be stretches of Plain ease, not to mention the Delectable Mountains. Make 2019 the year you discover it all.