Walking the talk of the Land

Seeing the countryside at pedestrian pace means that I hear the sounds and experience the smells, feel the movement of the air, and have an earthy sense of myself within the spaces defined by hills and horizons. These are the sensations that make the particularity of place - and they are utterly inaccessible from inside a car or train. So it could be said that my walks are pilgrimages - meaningful journeys undertaken with others in search of inner and outer understanding, traversing auspicious routes and leading to heightened awareness of who we are and where our place is in the world.
Stories add a key layer to this experience of the land. These may be the stories of people who've lived here - sometimes people named and known, sometimes stories from and about the countless folk who've made their contributions to the land by their living and dying, hunting, gathering, cultivating or building. These contributions are usually marked only by the changes made over millennia to the land - changes which we may have to look closely to see and surmise about.
There are also stories about plants and creatures, hills and rivers and stories that have been told often enough over time to become folk tales. And we also value contemporary stories made by people who love the land and whose imaginations and creative spirits are fired by that love.
I see these walks as a way of working against our current cultural loss of a meaningful sense of locality. During the twentieth century it became the practice of more and more people to travel miles at high-speed to visit "special places" for a few hours. Doing this makes it impossible to experience a grounded sense of connection with a place, however special it may be. Many countryside dwellers have little knowledge of the land around them since they mostly leave their homes by car. And for city-dwellers, access to the land has been reduced by the curtailment of public transport (look at the Beeching branch line cuts in the 1960s) and by the loss of footpaths often due to contemporary farming practices. All these walks are accessible by public transport and we are passionate about keeping footpaths available - one way to do this is simply by walking them (and reporting when they have been blocked or planted over).
I am also committed to finding walk routes that start from where many people live and that therefore include parts of towns and cities and their margins. A sense of place, and even of sacred space, can be found in surprisingly urban settings - just try sitting under the oldest tree in your local park, or following an old footpath route to the surrounding hills. I have no wish to sentimentalize the land and its history though, and want my walks to recognise and acknowledge the many layers and possible meanings of stories and place and to leave plenty of room for people to find and make their own meanings.

Pat Bowen