Walking Home by Simon Armitage

This is Simon Armitage's account of his attempt to walk the Pennine Way, travelling against the wind and with the sun in his face from North to South, towards his home village of Marsden in Yorkshire.  Kindly strangers offer him a bed for the night, transport his luggage (a vast suitcase nicknamed the Tombstone) between stops, or simply walk with him along this most demanding of paths.  Every evening, he gives a poetry reading, in venues that range from pubs to village halls to people's sitting rooms, and the trip is funded by the donations people leave in a (clean) hiking sock.  Armitage has written and spoken a lot about walking, and recently was part of the Stanza Stones project, writing  poems to be carved into rocks in the hills between Marsden and Ilkley.

The links between writing and walking are well-explored, not least in Rebecca Solnit's marvellous Wanderlust, but this book adds a great deal more to our understanding of the connection between these two fundamental activities, and of the importance of walking to an individual writer.  It's also a compelling account of what it's like to walk a difficult, arbitrary long-distance path, of the fears and doubts that pull at the sense of achievement.  At the outset of his walk, Simon Armitage realises that he is "the weakest link" in the chain of strangers and friends who are making his walk happen: "Failure seems unavoidable, with humiliation and shame the inevitable consequence".  Lost in the mist on Cross Fell, "a truly terrible place" pitted with shafts from old iron workings, he experiences "the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud".  Near the end, however, he contemplates the possibility of not finishing the Way, a deliberate act that transforms apparent failure into "the triumph of personal accomplishment over public affirmation".

A lot of books about long walks are not terribly well-written and can't avoid the obvious label of pedestrian.  This is not one of those books.  It is beautifully written with an attention to the details of the walks, the readings, the spare rooms of strangers, and especially to the textures of the places Simon goes.  Here is a typically precise and evocative description of walking through a forest:

Stumps of old trees are footstools upholstered in velvety green moss.  Pine resin is the first thing I've smelt for hours.  Except at the very top where their tips bend and flex like fishing rods in some mad struggle, the evergreens absorb the bruising gusts and deafening surges of wind, so there's nothing but static and stable air at ground level where I walk.  And somewhere above me, where their coats are thickest and fullest, the trees have absorbed all suggestion of rain, so down here it's dry and cushioned, every footfall received and relaunched by a thick mattress of spongy,brown needles.  A form of twilight gathers under the canopy, a cloistered stillness.

As well as being beautiful, it is also very funny, attentive to the bathetic moments that inevitably follow feelings of achievement; Armitage is comically self-deprecating about his performance at the readings, something he describes as "little more than a man in a creased shirt holding a book in his hand for three-quarters of an hour".  Every turning-out of the sock after the evening's reading is a source of humour.  I love walking, and have dabbled with shorter long-distance paths, but even if you never want to walk further than the corner shop, this is a really rewarding book, absorbing, funny and moving.

Simon Armitage is undertaking a similar walk on the South West Coast Path in August and September this year, so there will be another book to look forward to soon.

Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit

An expansive, exhilarating history of walking, Rebecca Solnit's book encompasses walking as transport, as pastime, as pilgrimage and as protest.  She moves between her own experience of walking, theories of the evolution of walking and philosophies of walking, stopping off to look at the key thinkers and writers who have shaped our understanding of this everyday activity.  Inevitably, a history of walking also becomes a history of the places we walk, and the people who did (and didn't) walk there.

The breadth and depth of her research is remarkable and she pays close, critical attention to the theories she reviews, drawing out some of the ironies of trying to think about walking as well as presenting her own theories of the symbolism of walking.  She describes artists who have used walking to form their works, as well as writers who have relied upon walking to drive their literary endeavours, with a whole chapter devoted to The Legs of William Wordsworth.  Walking in streets, parks, gardens and the wider countryside are all considered.  Walking can seem elemental and free, but has of course been as much constrained as any type of activity; Solnit tells the story of the struggle for access to the countryside and the struggle to preserve urban environments that can be walked.  She also links the act of walking very strongly to the notion of narrative, and to the narrative of human history in particular: "Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker.  They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens and reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist [...] Roads are  a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there."

This notion connects walking intimately to the idea of creativity, and the book reiterates its insistence on the psychological value of walking as a means of producing contentment, understanding, creative energy and new ideas.  "Musing" she writes, "takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been ploughed, developed or put to any immediately practical use.  Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop.  The same is true of the meadowlands of the imagination; time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated.  The fight for free space - for wilderness and for public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space." Solnit does not over-stress her argument, but her passing references to unwalkable places - towns that have no pavements or no road crossings, or places that have lost their walkers and are perceived as dangerous as a result - show us the consequences of marginalising such a fundamental activity.

Solnit's prose is elegant and her arguments compelling.  I enjoyed this book hugely, and found I was quite envious of her for having written it, for being able to combine a pleasurable activity with a fascinating research process.  Any admirers of Roger Deakin or Robert MacFarlane's books on similar themes will get a lot out of this book.  Solnit has written several other books which I look forward to exploring.

To The River by Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing's book is a love-letter to the river Ouse in Sussex, a poetic blend of travel narrative, history and memoir.  After a personal crisis, Olivia sets out to walk the Ouse from the source to the sea, her backpack stuffed with cheese and oatcakes, on a journey of healing and discovery.  Her narrative takes in the history of Sussex around the Ouse.  We meet the amateur geologist Gideon Mantell, a doctor in Lewes in the early nineteenth who discovered the iguanadon; Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Lewes; Richard Dawson who gave us the Piltdown Man hoax; and Leonard and Virginia Woolf.  Laing also ponders those who have loved rivers, and been endlessly drawn to them, like Kenneth Grahame, and the effect of rivers on the landscape, and of humankind on those rivers.

Laing's style is reflective, turning over for the reader her thoughts and wonderings about the landscape and the characters who populate it.  We are privy to her indecisions and confusions, which makes for an intimate, confiding text.  Her knowledge is demonstrated lightly and the stories and histories she relates make the narrative digressive and meandering, much like the Ouse itself.  I was faintly surprised by the depth of her botanical knowledge - she can spot a dozen species in a hedgerow - until I read on the back of the dustjacket that she used to be a medical herbalist.  She is also a fearless swimmer; I would not swim in the wide, grey, tidal Ouse at Southease, even without the awful example of Virginia Woolf before me.

Laing writes a lot about both Woolfs, looking particularly at the representation of water in Virginia Woolf's writings, and unpicking the notion that her suicide by drowning is foretold in her novels and diaries, extracting alternate readings of texts that have been read as sinister or portentous, like the diary account of Virginia wading into a flooded Ouse that covered the fields around Rodmell, unworried about getting wet because she was wearing Leonard's corduroy trousers.  But Woolf is an object lesson of the unpredictability of the river, which will take you, if you surrender yourself to it, but may not return you.

This book was particularly resonant for me because I've also walked the length of the Ouse, along the Sussex Ouse Valley Way which Olivia Laing also follows for the most part.  I can still see vividly the places she describes.  But the book has amplified  the memory of my walk by connecting it to history, geology and to Laing's own experience of the Ouse.  Above all, Laing's book celebrates the pleasures of walking alone in the landscape: "There wasn't a soul in sight, though I knew there were hordes of people beyond each ridge [...] I was nonetheless as purely happy as I've ever been right then, in that open passageway beneath the blue vault of the sky, walking the measure allotted me, with winter on each side [...] I felt untethered, almost weightless."  Like Waterlog, this book will make you want to stuff your swimsuit - and perhaps some cheese and oatcakes - into a backpack and set off into the fields towards the river.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

I spotted this in a secondhand bookshop, and was inspired to give it a try because a) Nancy Mitford was in love with Robert Byron, and I thought there was a good chance that it might be amusing; and b) because Bruce Chatwin was inspired by Byron's writing. This book describes, in diary form, a haphazard journey through and around Persia and into Afghanistan. Byron and his travelling companion, Christopher Sykes, struggle against authoritarian bureacracy in imperial Persia, and no less effective state control in Afghanistan; permits are capriciously issued and withdrawn, they acquire endless state escorts who attempt to prevent them drawing, taking photographs, or indeed noticing anything that might lead to criticism of the Shah, Islam, the government. Byron is a wily traveller, however, and knows both when to accept these constraints and how to outwit them. His encounter with Herzfeld at Persepolis, during which he flouts, flagrantly, the prohibition on photography there, is typical of one of his ways of dealing with authority: ignore it and do whatever you want.

Byron is immensely knowledgable about Islamic architecture, and much of the text is given over to mouthwatering descriptions of mosques and palaces, their tiles, domes, minarets and squinches. Interestingly, he visits the massive statues of Buddha since destroyed by the Taliban; he doesn't care for them, or for Buddhist art in general. Added to the varied, beautiful but often harsh landscapes he describes, this makes the book something of a feast for the inner eye. This is contrasted with the comic encounters with minor potentates, ambassadors, the military and servants. Byron's attitudes to the locals are fairly typical of the time, and can be uncomfortable for the modern reader, but his genuine respect for some, especially their guide and chauffeur Seyid Jemal, tempers this a little. Compared to Chatwin, this is a traveller less anxious to be liked, more purposeful and less haphazard, but his abilities to take pleasure where it may be found certainly seem to have been taken as a model.

Sea Legs: hitching alone around the coast of Ireland by Rosita Boland

I read, a few years ago, Rosita Boland's A Secret Map of Ireland, in which she visits a monument, oddity or spurious magical place in each county of Ireland. This is her first book, and describes a journey chosen following the purchase of a map of Ireland in Stanfords. Boland was born in Ennis, County Clare, but has lived away for enough time for the Irish people she meets on her journey to ask her where in England she is from. The real draw of the journey for Boland seems to be a need to reconnect with her Irish roots, to understand the country better, and perhaps, through her act of circumnavigation, to encircle and possess it. Lack of money makes hitching the only way to travel, and a B&B is an occasional luxury, most nights being spent in hostels of variable quality. Travelling in autumn and winter, she meets relatively few tourists, and has ample opportunities to enjoy the melancholy of off-season resorts. This is a looser, baggier book than A Secret Map; the contained nature of her individual journeys to castles and fairy trees in the latter book make for tighter, more focused writing. The pace of Sea Legs drifts and then hurries, replicating the nature of her slow-quick-slow journey rather well.