Column: Stuart Maconie
A vintage guidebook can inspire more than just a great walk. It can take you back in time…
Old guides are so evocative.
IDON’T USE MY copy of John T Hilton’s Wigan Town and Country Rambles ‘in anger’ very much. Published in 1914, much of its advice regarding routes, viewpoints, access and the rest is probably pretty unreliable today.
But it is still a lovely thing that I found in a corner of a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, and I still take it down from the shelf from time to time, not for expert guidance on stiles or permissive paths but for the window it opens into a disappeared world. Here is the lost land of Edwardian England just weeks before the Great War changed the country and the world forever.
I know little of John T Hilton, but some of the sentences in his modest book have the same elegiac wistfulness as the music of George Butterworth or the poems of A E Housman. “To be in the lanes and meadows in the warm days of summer, within hearing of the swish of the scythe or the whir of the reaping machine, to see the work of tossing and the binding of sheaves, and to hear the voices of the harvesters, gives zest to life… the trilling notes of the thrush, the humming of the bees, the silvery rippling of the brook and the loud rushing of the waterfall.”
I have to say that this is not immediately reminiscent of the Wigan of my childhood. It was more a case of the silvery rippling of the Leeds Liverpool Canal and the rushing of the traffic on the A49. But advertised at the rear of the book are pubs and shops I did remember from my childhood; ancient institutions by then, but in John T Hilton’s day, shiny, glamorous and new. Among them is the Minorca Hotel and Grill Room (with its ‘private rooms for select parties’), which by the time I was in my teens held a cool northern soul night. He also sings of Pendlebury’s Furniture Store, which sold ‘Gunn’s Sectional Bookcases, the most satisfactory way of keeping your books commodious and adaptable’, and the Royal Hotel, convenient for all places of public interest and electrically lighted throughout’.
But anyway, contemporary accuracy is not really the point. Like the lovely Shell Country Alphabet from which this issue draws some inspiration, Hilton’s book offers a flavour of a time just out of reach. Travel writer Paul Klammer riffs on this idea of ‘old guidebooks as time capsules’ in a blog after finding a 1986 copy of one of the original backpacking bibles, Lonely Planet’s Africa on a Shoestring.
“It’s a freewheeling sort of book that speaks to Lonely Planet’s hippy trail roots,” he says. “There’s not so much on the mechanics of getting from A to B, but plenty on scoring dope in Guinea-Bissau or how male travellers can hide their long hair when crossing into Malawi (their dictatorial president-for-life hated hippies).”
Browsing around the topic online, I found a Guardian article predicting the death of the guidebook. Who needs these dreary relics when you can download an app, check TripAdvisor or ask for advice on social media? Amusingly, the article was written in 2010, since which time many blogs, apps and websites have disappeared into the ether.
Last time I looked, guidebooks were not just still alive, but thriving. Perhaps because you can’t go online when you’re on a plane or in a boat on the Pearl River delta, but you can pull a paperback from your pack. And no app in the world can replicate the feeling of pulling out an old guidebook and finding a blade of grass or coffee stain or grains of sand that reminds you that you were happy and free not long ago in the great outdoors – and you will be again sometime soon.