Paths

The dictionary definition is of a way or track laid down for walking or made by continual treading. It is the course or direction in which something moves.

There are so many routes to this topic, (pardon the pun) and so many literal types of path, never mind the metaphorical kind.

pathway (author's photo)

I love paths, wandering along letting the mind free itself into the ether or countryside or rain, not really caring about destinations and definitely not counting steps is my idea of life enhancing. Of course there are the popular walks where there will be people in passing but if I can find one that is “off the beaten track”, where I may have to contend with brambles and unexpected obstacles and being surprised by where I’ve ended up and feeling at an advanced age that I CAN STILL DO IT!! pure joy.

Many have disappeared, that short cut through the field or byway gone to car park or other concrete sites and farmers hate us chancers, marauding on paths they have thought were grown over long ago, and disturbing their cows and sheep.

illustration for The Salt Path (artist Angela Harding)

Cliff paths are really exciting, being conscious of the dangers but so worth it for the views and the interesting flora, fauna and bird life. I have been recently reading “ The Salt Path”, by Raynor Winn, a novel she wrote after walking the South West Coastal Path with her husband Moth ,who had been diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s Disease and at the same time they were made homeless and destitute. They had nothing to lose so set off with only a tent for shelter and somehow managed to walk 630 miles, they coped well enough to continue walking and covering more mileage on more walks. The interesting result was Moth improved under duress! Now it is a film.

I have to mention Robert Macfarlane’s slim but quite beautiful book “Holloway”, which is “ an impressionist piece of landscape writing”. Hol weg, Holwy ,Holway,Holeway Holewaye, Hollowy, Holloway, is a sunken path,” a deep and shady lane, a route that has been harrowed into the land by centuries of footfall, hoof hit, wheel roll rain run” and existing only where the stone is soft e.g. chalk. In places they are 16 or 18 ft below the level of the fields. He states these ways are the result of repeated human actions that relate to other old paths and tracks, ways that still connect place to place, person to person. He also feels they are places in which you can “ slip back out of this world” or within which ghosts may quietly be - citing Edward Thomas and Eric Ravilious having mystical experiences.

illustration for Holloway (artist Stanley Donwood)

Looking at the artwork in this book, these places seem magical and spooky places where someone could hide away for days undetected ( think priests).The oldest Holloways date back to the Iron Age, none less than 300 years and began as sites of pilgrimage, ways to the sea or markets. Now they are too narrow for use and overgrown but seem to hold an otherworldly message for us in our everyday preoccupations.

The Distance Forward

The afternoon rolls out
it’s carpet of seduction
limestone outcrops, balsam
somewhere a river.

Bees dark and brimming
from unexpected hives.
A farmer in the background
nurtures his field.

At one with sensation
from a quicksilver spine,
I’m lost but content.

I’m lost and a follower
of overgrown lanes, the couple
with their dog who tell
in North Country vowels

that lull me to my past;
the distance forward is the same
as the long walk back.

Cynthia Kitchen

First published in “That Untravelled World” 2015.

Thanks for reading.