“Anyone wanting to use The Canterbury Tales as an itinerary for a walking holiday will be disappointed...”
From Chaucer to the PS4: storytellers have long known that walking makes a great tale…
SHAKESPEARE, THEY SAY, wrote King Lear
during lockdown. This makes me feel bad. Not for him, for me. My masterpiece remains defiantly unfinished; unstarted, if truth be told. Perhaps
I too might have come up with a timeless study of familial strife against a backdrop of the twilight of an ageing patriarch, had I not spent so much time playing Death Stranding on the PS4.
Death Stranding is a video game (funny how we still use that out-of-date term ‘video’) designed by the maverick Japanese genius Hideo Kojima. A detailed description of the plot would alienate and annoy those readers who’ve come here for talk of walking and not video games, but suffice to say you play an immortal porter tasked with reconnecting a shattered America ravaged by some unnamed technological disaster. There is very little of the ‘shooting ’em up’, the car chases or the other trappings that the uninitiated might think the stock in trade of such games. Far from it: a quick online search reveals scores of articles asking, ‘Is Death Stranding A Hiking Simulator’, as 90 per cent of the game seems to involve trekking across desolate and beautiful mountain landscapes with a backpack on.
Some gamers find this a bore. I loved it right from the first sequence involving a scramble down a valley when I thought, ‘man, this is just like the Langdales!’
There are many other modern games that are essentially walking simulators, although the phrase is often used as an insult by people who prefer blowing stuff up. Dear Esther, Virginia and Ether One
spring to mind. But art that has journeys on foot at its heart goes back way longer than that; at least as far as Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims and the yarns they told to amuse themselves on the stomp from London to Canterbury. Anyone wanting to use The Canterbury Tales as an itinerary for a walking holiday will be sorely disappointed, however. Route details are scant and directions confusing, suggesting a lax editor.
It would never have made it as a Country Walking route card I can tell you. Although if you’re interested in talking chickens and dodgy clergymen, it’s first rate.
But there are other acclaimed books whose itineraries make for great walks. You can take a walk around Dublin in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, recreating his famous day as narrated in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In fact, many people do, as it’s a popular tourist tour. You are probably less likely to fancy recreating the walk in Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road, in which an unnamed father and son head for sanctuary on the coast through a post-apocalypse landscape with a supermarket trolley filled with all their possessions, ever-watchful for marauding cannibals. Slightly gentler in tone was Rachel Joyce’s 2002 hit The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which involves a pensioner from Kingsbridge walking to a hospice 672 miles away.
And for several years now, the non-fiction chart has been full of treks, trips and perambulations. Robert Macfarlane’s justly and wildly successful
The Old Ways has been the standout superstar of this particular genre, but a quick glance at Amazon also reveals The Salt Path by Raynor Wynn, Ian Sinclair’s brilliant London Orbital, Tom Chesshyre’s From Source to Sea and Bernard Levin’s From The Camargue to the Alps: A Walk Across France in Hannibal’s Footsteps. Some dude even recreated a protest march from the North East to London in
Long Road From Jarrow; still some copies available.
Of course the daddy of them all, at least as far as fiction is concerned, is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which is to a great degree a thousand pages of shouldering packs, tightening belts and ‘putting a few more miles behind us before sunset, Sam Gamgee’. That and some dragons. Looks a bit niche, but I might give it a go. Just hope there are clear directions for the tricky traverse of Minas Morgul. I always go wrong there.