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.