Read about my walk to London

Rambler’s rest

Putney to Westminster

When I started this walk people began to ask me where I would finish. I could have chosen Waterloo station as the destination of the train I take to London, but I was looking for somewhere more personally significant. I chose Westminster for my family connections.

A fine October day, with blue skies and wispy clouds, warm sunshine and cooler breezes, some of my favourite autumn weather. As my journey is easy to follow along the riverside, flat and around 10km I have plenty of time to saunter. As John Muir instructed I take my time to cover the holy earth (the saint terre). Although there is little traffic on the river, there is activity beside it. Gravel from a huge river barge scooped up into a great mound bankside, tidy houseboats occupy the banks, and there are even wildlife habitat barges off the park and the crows flying back and forth. The landing helicopter startles me, coming Bond-like along the river to settle at the Thames-side heliport. Cars enter a refuse and recycling area with their rubbish. Building sites have their own temporary hot food vans parked outside for hi-vis workers to grab a cuppa.

I am looking forward to visiting St Mary’s church at Battersea. I’ve seen this Georgian gem from the train going over the river to Imperial Wharf, and even painted the scene from the Chelsea side, but never visited. It’s a location that belongs in paintings, and Turner who lived across the water, thought so too. Holy ground with a welcome café van and seats to rest in the sun by the river.

Battersea Park is a treat. On a weekday morning in October there are few visitors but it deserves many. A tree-shaded riverside walk, a hidden English Garden, fountains, little cafes and more delights still to discover. I stop to eat a snack under the eyes of the golden buddha in the Peace Pagoda.

The Thames Path turns inland on the south side and I cross the river over Chelsea bridge and stay water-side for the rest of the journey. Across the water the re-purposed Battersea Power Station cuts an iconic silhouette, although its power halls are now full of apartments.

The tide is running out, leaving mud flats with birds picking morsels from the departing waters. There are gulls, crows, ducks, and herons at work. Mud larks, human, are also down on the shore looking for treasure. My favourite Thames find is the Battersea shield, a glorious Iron Age decorated shield that you can visit in the British Museum. I want to see if I can find anything or at least see the river from water level. Most steps down from the embankment are gated, and difficult to climb over but I find an open gate leading down some green steps to the water level. I enter a a different space down here, London rises like the sides of a canyon but the river runs on and the birds pick over the mud for scraps. Among the stones are shards of pottery, ageless, worn smooth by the water, there a pieces of brick round as pebbles, clouded glass, chalk eggs. Among these there are clay pipes, dress pins, buttons and other sundry treasures of two thousand years.

Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament reach up above the trees but I turn left into Smith Square where I know the basement café will be open in St John’s church. I have visited before in search of family history. Once this area was on the edge of one of London’s most notorious slums, called The Devil’s Acre by Charles Dickens. My people came from Wales around 1820 and stayed in the area, marrying neighbours from Norfolk, Leeds, Suffolk, Yorkshire and Shropshire, all drawn to the great magnet. My great-great-great grandfather, James Felton bought the license for a pub called the Ramblers Rest in Rochester Terrace, Westminster in 1867. That’s probably where my great-grandparents met. The pub is long gone, the space is a school playground now. But it seems appropriate to end my saunter at a place where the rambler could once rest.

Old English

Richmond to Putney

September

The Thames Path is easy to follow, no need for a map here. I wanted to celebrate this ancient way into London, to feel its history and enjoy its parkland but instead, I felt excluded, unwanted and unwelcome.

For 15km from Richmond to Putney I found no public toilets (except for pubs), nowhere to refill my water bottle or buy an ice cream. This path does not cater for distance walkers but can be dipped in and out of my locals and their dogs.

The place names remind me of the Saxon people who used this route. Before Henry VII renamed it, Richmond was Sheen. I hoped this was a reference to the sunlight on the water but it seems to come from Sceon which is Saxon for shed or shelter.

Around the Old Deer Park, the Thames Path is kept away from the Crown Land with its sports grounds, by a ditch and fences, the walker is not invited in. Next, the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew peek from behind their defences. I would have walked through the gardens if the entry hadn’t been £21.50. I can remember going as a child in the 1960s when the turnstile entry cost 1d. Another publicly owned place reserved for the elites.

Kew is named from an amalgamation of Old French and Old English, Cayho meaning quai and a spur of land. Kew bridge sits on the apex of this headland where the river turns from North-West to South-East. It must have challenged visiting sailors as they travelled along the twisting river and a steady breeze changed from side to side. The collier boat my ancestors sailed in to bring coal to London could even travel using the backs of their sails and going stern first across the busy river. (See pages 143-144, Coals from Newcastle by Roger Finch.)

I stopped at the National Archives, home of the Doomsday Book, for a break. Any other day would have offered me a shop, café and toilets, but they are closed on Mondays.

On to Mortlake, which sounds dead but refers to the young salmon, morts, and their stream. What joy to be in Saxon England when the young salmon swam in the Thames. This is where the Oxford and Cambridge boat race finishes, 4 Miles and 374 yards from the start at Putney. There are people out rowing on the river today but little along the river to celebrate this annual event.

Around another Thames headland with Chiswick on the north bank and Barnes on the south. Ceswican means "Cheese Farm" in Old English and Barnes is Bere-ærn “barn a storehouse for barley and other grain”.

Once again, I walk past a fenced off area, this time it’s the Barnes Wetland Centre where the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust charge £15.40 for adult entry.

Heading South-East into Putney where the Anglo-Saxon Putta had a landing place and I have a train to catch to Clapham Junction and home.

River

July

Berrylands to Richmond

The Thames and I are old adversaries. The river tried to drown me when, as a teenager, I attempted to row a skiff for the first time. After turning circles, the river tipped my craft over and I fell into its watery embrace. Into the murky brown liquid, airless and struggling, I emerged coughing and choking to be dragged to the bank. I swallowed enough river water that day to leave me sick for weeks after.

But you can never drown in the same river twice, and the waters of the Thames today have no memory of my immersion, they run softly on while I sing this song.

The Hogsmill and I emerge from suburbia to the Thames at Kingston. My old haunt is full of Sunday shoppers, busy with roast dinners and bargains. Down the steps beside the bridge I join the throng taking their pleasure along the Thames path. After so many solitary miles in the country, I merge with an endless stream of people, dogs, scooters, bicycles, and children as they weave their ways alongside the river.

Shaded by mature London plane trees, the path leads to the city but I feel I am the only one with that destination. The rest are enjoying a diversion, walking to ease their pain, stretching their legs, exercising the dog, attempting to tire the children so that they can enjoy a lazy Sunday afternoon. Got no mind to worry, close my eyes and drift away.

I walk on, accompanied by the spirits of my Teddington ancestors, who shopped in Kingston, drank at the riverside pubs, and learned to swim in the river. Same space, different time.

A hundred years ago my great-aunt Myrtle punted the family boat, Winkie along the water and up to Teddington lock, and perhaps thought of the three men on their journey.

“The river, playing around the boat, prattles old tales and secrets, sings low the child’s song that it has sung for so many years … and we fall asleep beneath the great, still stars, and dream the world is young again.”

No man steps in the same river twice, Heraclitus

Prothalamion, Sweet Thames run softy, Edmund Spenser

The Waste Land, Poem III, The Fire Sermon, T S Eliot

Lazy Sunday Afternoon, Small Faces

Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K Jerome

The Thames Path https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/en_GB/trails/thames-path/

Ghost

June

Ashtead to Berrylands

Going back isn’t history, or herstory but a ghost story. We haunt the landscapes of the past, unpacking memory and emotion by connecting to place.

Now my journey returns to spaces once known. The child me is still fishing for sticklebacks and tadpoles from the banks of the Hogsmill, she rides ponies through the fields of summer in a little piece of country surrounded by Friday Night Dinner suburbia.

This wildlife corridor is also a human-paced entry to the big city. The Thames Down Link and London Loop paths squeeze their way through the built environment like a plant in a pavement, finding a little green space to grow.

The Hogsmill is a rare chalk stream, determined to reach the Thames, hiding behind back gardens and playing fields. It used to flood and so kept some green space around its banks where wary builders gave it room. This suburban stream was once the subject of great painters, out from London and looking for countryside. Millais’ Ophelia lay singing in the Hogsmill, although she didn’t because he painted her laying in a bath tub, but he did spend five months in 1851 painting the stream and its plants. Other members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood visited and painted landscapes. Now our contemporary artists paint the scene by tagging signs and benches. I looked in vain for O heart H carved in the trees.

Now I have walked back to where I came from. I spent 15 of my first 16 years here but had no idea of how the places connected. As a child I walked to the shops, bus stop, school and the Hogsmill. Everything else took a car or a train to reach. I never ventured under the A3 to discover where the Hogsmill came from. I never considered that I could walk from home to central London.

My journey isn’t over but it now etches a thin walking line that joins my present home to my childhood. In my mind I can retrace that walk and connect the places and my ghosts across the landscapes. I hope they will walk the final sections with me.

For more on landscape and memory, I enjoyed The Blue of Distance in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

More on Millias’ Ophelia

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-ophelia-n01506

Thames Down link

https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/culture-and-leisure/countryside/what-can-you-do/walking/long-walks/the-thames-down-link

London Loop

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/walking/loop-walk

Bad request

Using the rail system to organise my walks has created a whole labyrinth of ticketing possibilities. I could just walk up to the station on the day and buy a ticket and get on a train. That’s what I did in the early stages of this journey. Buying a return ticket to the station I was walking to was more economical than buying two singles, and there was no problem with just getting off the train a stop or two early to start my walk.

The real challenge began when I needed to change trains and rail companies to complete my journeys. Then I faced a new level of complexity in deciding whether it was better to buy two singles, or a return, and when to travel and where to buy my ticket.

I don’t know what’s wrong with the National Rail journey planner but I find the website will only allow me to try one journey to find times and prices before it crashes off the rails and decides all my subsequent attempts are “Bad Requests” and won’t stop at my station any more. This is very frustrating when I need to test different options of single and return journeys so I had to find another track.

The Train Line website offers a better and more stable piece of potential passenger interface and allows me to test a range of journeys on different days and with different times. The unique selling point is the Split Save ticket options that mean I can find cheaper tickets on this site than anywhere else. Although it does charge a fee if I decide to buy tickets through the site.

So, my third option is to choose one of the rail company’s websites and see what they can offer. Of course, they won’t sell me a ticket without mining my data, asking for a password and generally side tracking me. However, their interface is generally stable.

Once I’ve discovered the most efficient way to travel to and from my destination, worked out if its better to buy a ticket in advance and commit to using a train at a specific time, or to wait until I reach the station and get my ticket then, I still face the final signal.

Arriving at the station with a few minutes to go, ready to purchase my ticket, I discover the platform ticket machine is out of order and there are big signs warning me of a £100 fine if I travel without a ticket. I try to use the internet to reach a ticket supplier but the wi-fi is useless. The announcement says, “the next train arriving at platform two…” I begin to panic, then the ticket machine is reanimated and I manage to buy a ticket just as the train appears.

I’m exhausted by the process and I haven’t even started walking.

The road once travelled

May

West Humble to Ashtead

I walk this journey once on foot, although there are also many mental excursions -  planning, measuring, calculating distances and train times. This section follows Stane Street, once a Roman road linking what is now Chichester to London, a legacy of invasion to connect and rule a new territory. The Roman name is lost and we call it “stane” from the old English for ‘stone’, a paved road in a county of tracks. It is now a wooded track in a land of paved roads.

The army’s road once had a central mound, an agger, and ditches either side. In places, a ditch still parallels the straight path but there is little else to link to the past. The route is quiet on a weekday morning but below the bird song there are voices. Indistinct mutterings that may be Roman ghosts still travelling to London. When a golf course shows between the trees, it seems the voices may belong to golfers. The soldiers’ ghosts distain the soft men driving their buggies around the course while the Romans march by with their burdens of conquest.

Another sound increases, a constant roar. A bridge takes the Roman road over the M25 that circles London like an enraged serpent, head to tail, on forever. Crossing the M25 is the gateway to a new world. Like a watershed, the path now descends towards the Thames and city.

Beyond the serpent there are still woods and green places, although fewer and narrower as the path leads forward. A smashed car is disintegrating among the trees. Stilled at last in the dappled light of green wood.

At Ashtead, St Giles’ church has a prayer labyrinth with winding paths that gravitate to the centre, a symbolic journey taken to a still point and back out again. My destination calls me on, but not as a meditation, more as a dark force drawing me in.

Thames Down Link

 https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/culture-and-leisure/countryside/what-can-you-do/walking/long-walks/the-thames-down-link

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Protect

May

Gomshall to Westhumble

Early May and I can almost feel the sap rising by touching the smooth trunk of a beech tree. After the tentative first steps of spring there is a rush to leaf as every tree unwraps its new soft, shiny green leaves ready for sunshine and a summer of growth. I am bathed in green light walking under the trees again after a long winter of bare branches. The energy is so powerful I would hear its hum if I could tune my ears to the frequency.

Up on the North Downs in the chalk country, an ancient, fragile land with old tracks and coppiced hazel, views south deep into the fertile valley and up to the Greensand ridge beyond. The National Trust protects these hills at Blatchford and White Downs. Shady woods and chalky meadows shimmer with a gift of wildflowers and later there will be orchids among the grass.

This ancient trackway, pilgrimage route and ribbon of green is something else as well. Along the hillside, strung like a necklace of bricks and concrete, a line of pillboxes built in 1940 as part of London’s defences. This thin line was a chance to protect the city, to stop the march of an invading force.

Like toy forts in a landscaped estate, these brick defences look small and vulnerable. It is hard to imagine how long their guns could stall an approaching army, even if the troops had to climb up the steep side of the downs to reach them. London was far more vulnerable to attack by air and the idea of invaders approaching by land across the Surrey estates is a script from a war games fantasy.

Inside, the pill box is dark and smelly, dry leaves crunch but instead of bullets a stream of green light flows in through the loopholes. Is this the bunker, is this how we survive, protect ourselves, cut off from the light, spring, from the energy of growth and renewal? Step outside.

North Downs Way: https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/en_GB/trails/north-downs-way/

Naming of Parts, poem by Henry Reed 1914-1986

On time

April

Shalford to Gomshall

Stage seven 13.5km

I don’t want to be late for the train home. They only run every two hours from Gomshall station so being on time is important for this walk.

Getting to the start of the walk at Shalford takes time with a long wait at Guildford station, a place where time passes in a combination of boredom and a constant anxious frisson of station announcements about delayed trains and altered platforms.

However, my train arrives on time and I start walking. Once I’m walking time feels different.  I know I walk at four kilometres an hour. It’s my comfortable pace for hours of walking. When I’m walking I’m in a different time to the rest of my life. I move slowly through the world and my thoughts range from noticing flowers and birds to remembering people and places. I feel my mind expand. It’s a different brain space to the usual time-boxed everyday world with deadlines that my phone insistently reminds me about.

Walking slows the brain, makes space, makes time to just be.

Of course, with a train to catch there is always a little clock somewhere in my head counting down towards the departure time.

But, by the time I’ve walked ten kilometres I know I have plenty of time and I relax for a while at a picnic table with a welcome cold drink from a café caravan.

The railways delivered a standard time to the country with their timetables and trains to catch. Trains bring a need to plan and watch the clock. Because I have chosen to make this journey using trains I cannot escape from their timetable. When the walk is over I am back in the world where the seconds flick by on the station’s digital clock, counting down to an inevitable finale.

North Downs Way: https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/en_GB/trails/north-downs-way/

You may be interested in Chapter Two, The Mind at Three Miles an Hour, in Wanderlust. A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Temptation

March

Stage 6

Witley to Shalford 24km

I have a weakness for holloways. There’s something elemental about walking a path below the tree roots, deep below the ground and yet with the sky above. The light is green, ferns cascade down steep earthy banks, tree roots hang in the air. This is a separate realm, a liminal space, a secret out of time.

So I was tempted from the path of the Greensand Way, and down a holloway that led me astray. I lost my bearings and walked an extra four kilometres in a loop back to the place I had been an hour before.

Surrey is wilder than I expected. There are straggly coppiced woodlands, deep muddy tracks, unmarked paths and steep dark holloways that require a commitment to descend because the return trip would be a breathless, slippery struggle.

I knew this part of the journey would be long, and once I had realised my mistake I had to decide whether to go on or turn back. If I went on there was no knowing how I would manage the extra distance or if I would lose the way again. If I turned back I would come and walk the tracks again another day. I stood at the point of no return and it seemed better to go on than to go back, so I chose to continue.

Later, I lost the way again and ploughed on by dead reckoning in the most likely direction. I hadn’t been tempted off the path this time, I had simply lost it on a poorly marked road crossing where the exit of the path was staggered from the next entry. By now, I was fully committed and walked on along unmarked tracks until I came to a road.

Few country roads are walker-friendly and this one had fast cars and no verge. I walked where it seemed safest and stopped as cars passed me. I crossed into some woodland and found a landmark to take me back on the path again.

Through well-kept farms and then a junction where I left the Greensand Way and took a route of my own planning down to the Wey South path. I had an hour to reach the station at Shalford and found the Wey South path closed. A detour along the streets took me to another section where the warning tape had been torn down and dog walkers, runners and cyclists were all happily ignoring the path closure on a Sunday afternoon. The temptation to break down the barrier was too strong for them too.

Pressing on, I reached the station with a few minutes to spare. Sore feet and legs, but glad I had chosen to go past the point of no return.

Greensand Way: https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/culture-and-leisure/countryside/what-can-you-do/walking/long-walks/the-greensand-way-long-distance-route

Read more about walking and holloways: The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

Spring

March

Stage five

Haslemere to Witley, 12km

The calendar Spring started on 1 March although the Equinox isn’t for another three weeks. This was a radiant Spring day and my last walk as a 62-year-old. I have been looking forward to Spring since this journey began in December and today’s walk felt like the seasons’ turn of the wheel.

Yellow in the hazel catkins like glowing chandeliers, yellow daffodils trumpet the new growth and a few yellow celandines like shining yellow stars in the green grass. The birds know it is Spring too and even the blackbird sports a yellow beak to call his territory.

These are the days I love to be out in the country, feeling the warm sunshine on my face and seeing the land come to life. Everything feels refreshed and full of new energy. It is the annual exuberance of renewal when nature commits to the year ahead.

I walk through metal-making country full of old furnace names and ponds. The woods of the Weald were burnt for charcoal to make cannon for the Tudor and Stuart wars. This landscape was once an industrial heart-land where iron ore, water for power and wood for fire met. Now the land is quiet and lush, with carefully restored Tudor buildings and pond bays of wildfowl.

I leave the Spring idyll and step into a place where the energy of new life has drained away. Into hostile territory as I take a footpath through the woods with signs that warn of “Extreme Danger” and firearms in constant use. I cross the railway and beyond is a felled wood, deep in sticky mud, with fallen barbed wire fences and I am glad I only have to walk through, and not fight for, this terrain.

Then into the sandy country once more, and the first flowering blackthorns celebrate the sunshine and a new year’s walking ahead.

Women Walking

Unrecorded, unsung, unknown women walking. For transport, for leisure, for exercise, for sanity. Just to get out of the house.

It costs your time but not your coin. It’s a choice to stay or go. To walk alone or in company.

My mother loved to walk. She connected to the countryside known since childhood.

“We gathered rosehips here,” she said. “And found parachutes during the war. My first kiss in these woods.”

In the end I could only drive her to these places to view the memory sites. She never said what she felt then. Her request to scatter her ashes on the downs at a place we often walked together means that corner, that view, is always her place and I acknowledge her as I pass. Up in the wild wind with the skylarks, close to the Saxon settlement and the Bronze Age burials. She is there as long as we remember.

Her parents loved to walk this countryside too. Names like talismen: Locksash and Exton, woods and heaths, farms and fields, they had walkers’ knowledge of them all.

On the other side of my family, my great-grandmother Emily Mary Ann Dorothy, an urban woman to her core, walked Bushy and Richmond parks for exercise and solace, and to connect with the world beyond the house, shops and sewing machine. Perhaps she passed Virginia Woolf around a corner.

Before her, before London, Sarah Rees walked to the capital from Wales. Keeping pace with drovers bringing their beasts to market. Their regular ways across country to known resting places, fields for the stock overnight, a campfire, a haystack.

So my walking continues the path. We have all walked and made our journeys. For me it’s about the new and unknown. The risk of weather, insult, injury or losing the way.

And it’s the known and the remembered, each place recalled from another time, another life.

Paths and steps, walking up a story.

If you would like to read more about women walking: Wanderers. A history of women walking by Kerri Andrews

My Way

February

Stage four Liphook to Haslemere. 9km.

I have a passion for maps. Real, folding paper maps. They are the places where journeys begin, a magic paper carpet ready to deliver me to a new county.

Planning a walk means considering the options. Which path to take? An unfolded map reveals terrain and possibilities. I can take the longer way or find a place with woods or streams but whichever way I choose, it will be my way. When I walk alone, I always get my way.

Instead of knitting a mass of connecting footpaths I choose to follow the Sussex Border path for most of this stage. I have been sharing foot prints with parts of this long-distance path since I began this journey. Today would be my last chance to share this way on my walk to London.

I don’t like to walk map-in-hand if I can avoid it. By walking a signposted way I can keep my eyes ahead, enjoy the mist and sunlight between the trees, listen and then look for birds in the branches, and ponder the  texture of the earth as it changes from sand to mud and back.

Through Stanley Common with its birch and gorse, to Linchmere and past a field of Belted Galloway cattle. ‘Beware of the Bull’ the sign warns, but I can’t help but think of these shaggy bovines as ‘Doctors’ cattle’. They became so synonymous with doctors as wannabe gentleman farmers in Australia, that they were almost obligatory in the lush east coast small holdings.

From Marley Common down to Haslemere. Somewhere I crossed the county line and left Sussex for Surrey. I consulted my map but the streets wouldn’t reconfigure to match my expectations. I found myself on a busy main road where the footpath disappeared on a blind corner. Then I heard and soon saw the railway but apart from following the iron way there were no clues for the walker looking for a station.

Of course, I found it soon enough glad to have made my choices and walked my way.

Sussex border path: https://www.sussexborderpath.co.uk/

Common

January

Stage 3, Liss to Liphook.

Behind the station at Liss, an old railway bed makes a shady pathway. The sun is warm on the tree tops and the birds are chattering about spring.

But as the path follows the Mint stream winter persists where water has frozen into ice on the road, a caution for walkers and birds that spring is still only a wish.

Under a clear sky, across a bright field and over the railway foot crossing where warning signs attempt to put fear in to the nervous walker. As I cross I stop for a moment to look down the tracks, my link to walking start and finish. The corridor of peril is quiet.

The route is too urban and the surfaces too sealed for real country enjoyment but I cross from Hampshire to Sussex and find the open space of Chapel Common. Sandy heath land, underrated until recently. A home for rare plants and insects, including the intriguingly named red data book solitary bee. Packs of domestic dogs shake off their confinement revelling in sandy spaces between gorse and birch and heather. A Roman road underfoot marches from Chichester to Silchester.

A common was once a shared space, although most are now owned and divided, fenced and forbidden, but here is a reckless expanse. There is sun and air, dogs and walkers are welcomed. Unlike the many footpaths that skulk along fencelines bristling with warning signs, tracking through mud and water, with no sense of the walker as owner of these Rights of Way but instead as a potential vagabond liable to trespass and destruction.

Under the railway this time and then yomping through mud and ice and water I find my way at last to the permissive footpath around a golf course. This narrow corridor under the trees is pleasant enough for subservient walkers who are reminded of their benefactors playing golf on the superphosphate-green grass. This ground is manicured, managed and monetised. Not a space for us edge-dwellers, not for the commoners.

And there is an ancient burial mound, sculptured into the greens. The King sleeps under the hill. Will he play golf when he awakes or ride to reclaim the land?

The book for this walk is On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester, the story of reclaiming Greenham Common.

You can follow this walk: http://www.lissparishcouncil.gov.uk/_UserFiles/Files/Walks/Liss%20walk%203%20web.pdf

Pilgrim

January

Petersfield to Liss

Stage two

I don’t know if poet Edward Thomas ever walked from Petersfield to Liss but it seems probable that he did. He was a dedicated walker, pacing the countryside to walk off gloom, exploring the woods, downs and streams from his home at Steep.

Walking is therapy for me too. It takes me out of my head and into the bigger world. The rhythm of the step, the rustle in the hedge, the light in the sky combine to extend my space.

Walking from the railway station at Petersfield it seems to take too long to break out of the streets. Even the heath with its Bronze Age tumuli and silver sky-mirror lake, feel too inhabited. The soil is sandy here after the flint and chalk of the downs, and there are birch trees and gorse with flickering yellow flowers, even in January.

I escape the streets and plunge into mud. These are the flood plains of the river Rother than snakes along the north side of the downs looking for a way south to the sea.

Across a fresh growth green field, boots toe-deep in clay, to walk towards the site of Durford Abbey. I make a poor pilgrim, just steps away from home and already complaining. The Abbey itself was hardly successful. It was founded in the 1100s, then robbed, burnt, inmates killed by plague, building struck by lightning and dissolved by Henry VIII. The nearby farm reused some of the stone and stands today.

Out of the mud on to the wide verge of the A272 where lichen has fallen from the oaks. I collect the seaweedy sprigs from the grass to boil up for ink. I wonder what colour they will make.

From Durleigh marsh farm climbing up a holloway cut deep into the clay. It is like being in a tunnel with bulging tree roots piercing the side and rooty curtains where the soil has been washed away.

Then out on the open again with views back south to the downs. Butser hill stands as a landmark with its tower. I feel I could navigate across country by the shapes of the downs. Piloting across the farmlands like a Viking mariner crossing the sea from John o’Groats to Orkney, then to Shetland, each island appearing over the horizon as the previous one disappears.

Into Durford wood where gnarled beech trunks make twisted sculptures and fallen oak leaves on the path look like the pieces of an impossible jigsaw jumbled from a box.

I emerge into the manicured rhododendron-rich lands of the big houses and their grounds. Walking along a private road and across the B2070 that I heard rumbling in Durford Wood. Along a deep and narrow lane to the tree factory of identical specimens grown ready for garden planners.

I’m too muddy for the café so I wait for a delayed train at Liss station, basking in the January sunshine.

This month’s book is Edward Thomas’ The South Country.

You can follow this walk. It’s walk five. http://www.lissparishcouncil.gov.uk/Liss_Walks_23187.aspx

Rite of Paysage

December

As I walked out one mid-winter morning, not just any morning but one selected for fine weather. A start for a year-long journey, Walking to London.

I begin with the familiar rights of way, along field boundaries, through small woods, across the top of the grassy downs. This is my territory, walked many times, familiar, known, marked with memories.

I look for oak galls in the hedge where I have found them before. Brown, woody marbles that I will make into oak gall ink. I pocket ten of them. I watch the clouds in the winter sun, a pinky, yellow colour at the edges and I wonder if Naples Yellow will be the best choice of colour to paint them. Down through a steep beech hanger treading carefully so as not to slip on the wet leaves and earth. Sylvester, my hazel stick, helps me with these tricky places.

Then climbing up the gentler side of the down, looking ahead and around at other paths and woods, explored at other times. At the top of the down, a curved green horizon and the site of a Saxon settlement next to an outcrop of Bronze Age barrows. The air is bright, I can see the sea away on the horizon and skylarks are singing overhead. There is a hedge layed across the field with a gate to pass through and this feels like a moment where a boundary is passed along my right of passage through the country.

Then slowly down to the village with the Saxon church and medieval pub, and a cluster of farm buildings with pedigrees that date back to Earl Godwin, before the conquest.

From the village I begin to climb again, slowly gradually up to the edge of the beech forest, Queen Elizabeth Country Park, where there are suddenly walkers and dogs, after only meeting two on my journey so far. I do not know these paths so well and follow two horse riders down towards the road. I realise my mistake and take a steep track up though the beechwoods to the main walk. Then down again through woods, past damp ferns and into muddy fields.

I am on the South Downs Way for a moment. This east-west track follows the downs parallel to the coast and I have walked and cycled along it, I know this section well but it is not for me today. Instead I descend off the downs through the old limeworkings where the cheese snail lives and under an railway bridge to a village pond with ducks and the exotic colours of a goldfinch in a tree.

I rest for food and I know that beyond this point I walk on new paths. This is where the rite of passage begins. In a new country beyond the downs, I will find new experiences and places, see new visions and find inspiration. I bring out the map and follow the signs up a road, past a house and onto a muddy track. An ancient oak is alive with twittering birds, I look up and see the chestnut feathers of a nut hatch. There are old coppices with many straight trunks, and I look back to the north face of the downs, dark against the sun, and stop by a green pool of water cascading under a little bridge. The country is different, a new paysage to explore. And then it ends in a muddy field with signs warning people to keep their dog on their lead. Houses, streets and the railway station. My train is cancelled, so I ask for a lift home and return in twenty minutes the 10 miles it took more 4hours 15 minutes to walk.

This month’s book is Laurie Lee’s As I walked out one midsummer morning, which is glorious, poetic and inspirational.

Walking to London

I have travelled the journey back and forth from London to my part of Hampshire since my childhood. Sixty years of cars and trains up and down, seeing and forgetting the view from the window. Now I want to really engage with this journey by doing it on foot over a year. I will divide the path into bite-size, or perhaps hike-size pieces using the rail network to get me to the walk starts and home again.

Each stage will provide its own inspiration for art works. I’m expecting to make sketches, ink drawings, photographs and paintings. I’m thinking about foraging for materials to make my own inks from what’s available along the way. I’m working on ideas for hand-drawn maps about the places I visit.

It will be a home-grown adventure in serial parts. This blog will tell the tale. Take the first step and follow me.

Ramblin’ on my mind

December 2022. The year draws to the shortest day, the pivot point where we can start to look forward again. The Holly King rules the woods as they sleep through winter and I am walking through the landscape all my senses tuned. Some call drawing taking a line for a walk, I’m taking my art for a walk.

9am the temperature is minus 2, and cloudy but with only light winds, and sunshine is forecast. I wrap up well and head out over long familiar paths from my door. Eyes open, trying to see the familiar as new.

Frost path

Sky blue pink

Ice scape

Frozen dew pond