Walking, Landscape and Environment

David Borthwick, Pippa Marland, Anna Stenning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351807593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Walking, Landscape and Environment explores walking as a method of research and practice in the humanities and creative arts, emerging from a recent surge of growth in urban and rural walking. This edited collection of essays from leading figures in the field presents an enquiry into, and a critique of, the methods and results of cutting-edge 'walking research'. Walking negotiates the intersections between the human self, place and space, offering a cross-disciplinary collaborative method of research which can be utilised in areas such as ecocriticism, landscape architecture, literature, cultural geography and the visual arts. Bringing together a multitude of perspectives from different disciplines, on topics including health and wellbeing, disability studies, social justice, ecology and gender, this book provides a unique appraisal of the humanist perspective on landscape. In doing so, it challenges Romantic approaches to walking, applying new ideas in contemporary critical thought and alternative perspectives on embodiment and trans-corporeality.

Part I

Walking in

Lines, contours, pilgrimages

1 Walking in

(900 questions concerning walking)

Gerry Loose

It’s quite clear, axiomatic almost, that to walk in different landscapes is to think different thoughts and thus in different vocabularies and thus also languages. Conasg or conaisg is not the same as whin or furze or gorse, nor yet the same as Ulex europaeus. On the strand, I have no, or few, names for the sea plants that I come across in their reds, ochres, browns and livid greens.

When walking, does one follow a train of thought or a path? Or a Way? Or can it be both?

Is it to follow one’s nose or one’s feet?

Do we walk the same paths day after day, coming to know the hidden bends, the wayside dockens? Or are they the paths of tradition, those of our forebears, the familiar headlands; Gallows Rock; the wee field known to grandparents as Johnny Mara’s? Do we nod in recognition as we pass?

Are we in place?

And what do our bodies tell us? Are we tired after the first mile? After ten miles? And when do we relax into time and place?

And those of us who, for whatever reason, cannot walk, do we walk in our memories or our imaginations?

And when we walk in new places as we sometimes must, do we see the familiar or the novel?

What are our waymarkers: shepherd’s purse at our feet or the view between hills?

If we set off at sunrise, do we walk until sunset?

When we walk at night, do we wear dark glasses? Walking nights, do we wear owls?

Is it wet underfoot, or dry, or are we joyous, walking on air? Where is the black dog of despair?

When I walk with another, does my pace quicken or slow?

Do we walk on geology or pavement? Are those the same thing?

Why does that hare cross my path just here? Why does the purple thistle grow?

Why are the greenblue mountains constantly walking?

What are the numbers and names of the bones of the foot?

Is walking a science or an art? Or an alchemy?

Are there walking styles; walking rules?

What are walking aids?

When we walk, do we ride clouds? Are we still when we walk?

Are we walking toward a home we never find? A home we never had?

Is it toes in or toes out?

Is going for a walk the same as walking and if so how?

Sleep walking?

I was out for a walk when I met the shepherd at the top of Carrauntoohill, the highest mountain in Ireland.

Is there walking with purpose? Is it marching? Or is it when I walk to the foreshore to gather kelp or in the woods to gather mushrooms? Is the goose-step fascist walking?

Is marching on a protest demonstration liberal walking? Are dance steps ritualized walking?

When I tore my Achilles tendon in two, I limped for two years. Was I still walking?

Why did Dorothy Wordsworth walk in Scotland? Was it in pursuit of the Romantic or to stretch her legs?

Maighister Alasdair, the father of the great Gaelic poet, a Minister, walked a sixty-mile round trip on Sundays from his home in Dalilea to preach in Kilchoan church. Thoreau had political feet. Flâneurs may be true Buddhists.

Who are the unsung of walking? Is it quadrupeds or the folk who deliver our post?

Is there such a thing as wild walking, and what would be tamed walking and guerrilla walking?

When the great stag comes down to the glen, is that walking?

When a sign reads Private: No Admittance, do we walk on anyway? Why are certain streets barred to us with large iron gates? Are politicians afraid of walking?

Are we too busy to walk? If so, why do we teach our children to walk?

Why do wood ants walk in single file?

2 Lines, walks and getting lost

Contemporary poetry and walking

Garry MacKenzie

What exactly does walking have in common with writing and reading poems? How do modern poets bring some of the attributes of walking – pace, linearity, unfolding sensory experiences – into their work? What happens when a poem doesn’t simply comprise a lyric account of a speaker walking through a landscape, but instead implies multiple, perhaps imaginary, walks through places? In this chapter I examine how three modern poets – W.S. Graham, Susan Stewart and Thomas A. Clark – bring together poetry and walking. The walks in Graham’s and Stewart’s poems aren’t grounded in their own subjective experiences of travelling on foot, but use hypothetical walks in order to explore the relationships between movement, imagination and poetic creativity. In Clark’s poetry, walking is presented as a means of closing the distance between self and world. His prose-poetic aphorisms, In Praise of Walking, address the question of what walking means, and his accumulation of lines treading and re-treading this intellectual path is a form of answer. Graham, Stewart and Clark take walking as their subject in the poems I discuss, but their work also shares with walking aspects such as movement, contingency and doubling back.

In his 1967 lecture ‘A Poem Is a Walk’, A.R. Ammons makes a comparison between walking and poetry that goes some way towards the elision of physical and mental movement found in Graham’s, Stewart’s and Clark’s poems. For Ammons there are four ways in which poems resemble walks. Firstly, ‘each makes use of the whole body [. . .] as with a walk, a poem is not simply a mental activity; it has body, rhythm, feeling, sound, and mind’.¹ Negotiating its spatial, aural and other formal qualities is akin to bodily movement. Secondly, both are ‘unreproducible’: just as you can never take the same walk twice, you can never write the same poem twice.² Thirdly, both poems and walks involve ‘turns’ and ‘returns’, sequential movement through lines comprised of thoughts, images and tones.³ Finally, poems and walks share a motion that ‘may be lumbering, clipped, wavering, tripping, mechanical’ and so on. This motion can only be apprehended by entering into the process – by writing a poem or by going on a walk.⁴

Ammons’s argument is not about walking per se. His analogy of poetry and walking functions as a way to introduce elements of poetics, mapping these on to recognisable attributes of a familiar activity. For the four points I’ve highlighted above, a similar analogy could conceivably be made with knitting, furniture making or shipbuilding. However, Ammons concludes his lecture with a point that doesn’t readily apply to these creative activities: a poem, like a walk, is ‘useless, meaningless, and non-rational’.⁵ A poem can’t be boiled down to a single paraphrasable meaning that replaces the original work. Likewise, there’s no definitive reason for taking a walk, and no universal meaning that can be applied to every stroll, hike or march. For individual poems and individual walks, their meaning is their happening.

Ammons’s subject is poetry in general, and he says little in detail about poems which are concerned with actual walks. Neither does he fully examine the question of why poets are drawn to walking. In Walks in the World, Roger Gilbert examines numerous manifestations of what he terms ‘the walk poem’. For Gilbert, a walk has something of the ‘formal unity and lyric concentration’ of an artwork, and therefore poets can bring intensity, ‘closure’ and ‘the contingent blend of thought, perception and encounter’ to their work by choosing to write about excursions on foot.⁶ A walk poem tends to close the space between experience and poem, with an occasion enacted and re-enacted as it’s written and read about.⁷ For Gilbert there are three kinds of walk poem: those which start with a walk and use it as a means of approaching an underlying truth; those which emphasise how the meandering process of thought is like a walk; and those which focus on the sensory experience of walking.⁸ The ultimate aim of all three kinds of walk poem is to give particular attention to the world, by which he means not an individual place, but the world as ‘the very horizon of experience’.⁹

For all that the genre attempts to close the distance between poem and experience, Gilbert’s walk poem might nevertheless imply another distance: between people and nature. His ‘world’ is a reality seemingly external to the poet and accessed through walking. As Timothy Morton argues in Ecology without Nature, such differentiation perpetuates the idea of ‘nature’ as distinct from humanity, rather than as a series of ecological, cultural and geological systems of which we are a part; it also tends to homogenise all ‘natural’ things – landscapes, animals, clouds – into one ontological category.¹⁰ This tension between distance and contiguity is inherent in much landscape poetry, but for Gilbert walk poems have the advantage that their subject is an unfolding experience rather than a static scene. The speaker moves through a landscape and encounters a succession of shifting phenomena, and so nature is less likely to be regarded as a distant totality.¹¹

Both Ammons and Gilbert suggest that poems and walks resemble each other in that they unfold in a defined space and time. The poet, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Walking In: Lines, Contours, Pilgrimages
• PART II Walking with: People, Places, Politics
• PART III Walking On: Routes, Directions, Steps
• Index