Recognising that not everyone can walk the whole 68 mile route, we have devised 20 mostly circular walks that explore sections of the VW and the regions it passes through. Walk distances are between 4 and 8 miles and the routes have been carefully devised to include varied and interesting paths and scenery, and to be fully accessible by public transport.
For each route Pat Bowen, VW Project storyteller, has collected stories relating to particular places, events and folklore as well as stories from contemporary local communities.

To access these stories click on the owl icons on the maps

Each number opposite links to different section of the route that contains its own walks.
1 Northern
2 Middle
3 Southern
 


Seeing the countryside at pedestrian pace means that we hear the sounds and experience the smells, feel the movement of the air, and have an earthy sense of ourselves within the spaces defined by hills and horizons. These are the sensations that create our understanding of the particularity of place - and they are utterly inaccessible from inside a car or train. So it could be said that our 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 is our place 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 this Project also values contemporary stories made by people who love the land and whose imaginations and creative spirits are fired by that love. Whatever kind of stories they are, when they are told and heard on walks in the land they enrich our experience and our develop our sense of connection to it.

We see our Project 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 by high-speed means to visit "special places" for a few hours. In this way it is impossible to experience a grounded sense of connection with a place, however special it may be. Mostly leaving their homes by car, many countryside dwellers had little knowledge of the land around them. And for city-dwellers, access to the land was reduced by the curtailment of public transport (look at the Beeching branch line cuts in the 1960's) and by the loss of footpaths often due to contemporary farming practices.

We have no wish to sentimentalize the land and its history though, and want our walks to recognise and acknowledge the many layers and possible meanings of stories and place.

And we want to contribute to keeping the network of footpaths open by walking them and reporting when they have been blocked or planted over.

A participant on one guided walk told me that in her culture of origin (somewhere in SE Asia - she didn't say exactly where) people lament the loss of connection with the spirits of place. She added that her people say that if you tell stories out of doors, the few remaining nature spirits will come to listen, because they too love stories.