Taking a Walk Patrick Barkham
Taking a stroll with Richard Long is to find oneself trotting alongside a tall, elegant mile-eating machine. Long, who is 72, eschews huffing and puffing, and fancy gear. There’s an irrepressible ease in the way he strides over the grass, and a thirst for it, too. He leaned into each stride with relish, after we had spent an hour sitting indoors, talking.
He’s a professional walker or, rather, he has made an artistic living from doing the thing that is essential to his life. Writers who find inspiration – or book deals – from walking are ten a penny. Walking artists, however, are rarer.
Long is the best known and longest practising British exponent of land art, a form of conceptual art which uses natural materials directly in the landscape. As a student at St Martin’s in 1967, he had the clever idea of taking a train from Waterloo, dismounting almost at random in the countryside, finding a grass field, and making – and photographing – a straight line across it by tramping back and forth.
‘A Line Made by Walking’ has led to a lifetime of similar lines, and circles, which Long has etched into wild places he has explored on his own two feet (and occasionally two wheels). The surprising demand for a type of artistic creation that looks rather hard to commodify has enabled him to walk around the world.
I would have loved to have gone for a proper trek with Long but time was short when we met at Houghton Hall, in west Norfolk, home to an exhibition of new works by him. Instead, I got to scamper around the grounds of this graceful Palladian mansion built by Sir Robert Walpole. Any further, and although I’m thirty years younger, I would have struggled to keep up: Long still clocks up thirty miles in a day during a road walk.
Long positions himself somewhere in the middle of the divide between artists who create monumental works outdoors, such as Sir Antony Gormley, and nature- lovers who advocate depositing only footprints and taking only photographs from the countryside. In Houghton’s classic English country park landscape, some of his work is rebelliously intrusive – a cross of Cornish slate erupts from the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley’s croquet lawn – but other pieces look like an ancient part of this place. The sixteen uprooted tree stumps, which Long placed upside down to create ‘White Deer Circle’, is a perfect echo of Seahenge, a Bronze Age wooden circle uncovered at nearby Holme-next-the-sea at the end of the last century. The two henges are almost directly linked in a straight line by the prehistoric Peddars Way, so I am astounded when Long reveals he made his circle without ever having heard of its ancient echo.
It’s clear that Richard Long does not simply see walking as grist for his artistic mill. He seemed to unwind and become more expansive as we walked; walking is a fundamental requirement, an essential part of being alive. I asked whether he would’ve gone mad if he’d been confined to a studio for the past fifty years. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I absolutely do have a need to seek out the wilderness.’
EARTH SKY: Richard Long at Houghton runs until 26th October (selected days). 01485 528569, www.houghtonhall.com. It is a fine thirteen-mile walk across peaceful rolling countryside from Long’s circle to the site of the Bronze Age circle at Holme Dunes. From Houghton Hall, walk west through Big Wood and south through Bunker’s Hill to pick up the Peddars Way near the Bronze Age barrow of Anmer Minque (Grid ref: TF757285). Follow the long-distance path north-west, to join the Norfolk Coast Path by the beach at Holme. The original Seahenge is now preserved at Lynn Museum, King’s Lynn, 01553 775001 www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk