AFON
Nature Reading Roundup: Walking. By Chris Foster.
Chris is a birder who is slowly evolving into an amateur naturalist, one increasingly keen on finding, learning about and promoting more ‘obscure’ wildlife. Through his writing he tries to get across the sheer beauty of nature, but also wants to highlight just how much fun – for want of a better word – wildlife can be. He is employed by Reading University as a Teaching Associate in the School of Biological Sciences, focussing primarily on engaging students with species identification, biological recording and conservation philosophy. He is in the early stages of a PhD in invertebrate landscape ecology, through which he ultimately hopes to make a contribution to conserving the sorts of bird and insect rich landscapes he loves to spend time in.
Ridgeway path in Berkshire, which features quite heavily in The Old Ways. © Chris Foster
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
Ostensibly a meditation on walking ancient pathways, Macfarlane’s hugely successful book, billed as the last in a trilogy on landscape and the human heart, is as much a journey of the mind as of the feet. Indeed, for a bestseller it’s an unexpectedly cerebral affair, peppered with literary references, including lengthy analyses of the life and work of poet Edward Thomas and novelist Nan Shepherd, and deep reflections on the meaning of place. However, MacFarlane wears his knowledge lightly, writing in beautiful, inventive prose which at time soars into pitch-perfect evocations of place:
“The sun set over the Atlantic. The water a sea-silver that scorched the eye, and within the burn of the sea’s metal the hard black back of an island, resilient in the fire, and through it all the sound of gull-cry and wave-suck, the sense of rock rough underhand, machair finely lined as a needlepoint, and about the brinks other aspects of the moment of record: the iodine tang of seaweed, and a sense of peninsularity – of the land both sloping away and fading out at its edges.”
Elsewhere his observations of nature are equally sharp and creative:
“Above me, swifts hunted the dusk air over the scarp slope. They turned so sharply and smoothly and at such speed that it seemed the air must be honeycombed with transparent tubes down which the swifts were sliding, for surely nothing else could account for the compressed control of their turns. Their flight-paths lent contour to the sky and their routes outlined the berms and valleys of wind which formed and re-formed at that height, so that the air appeared to possess a topology of its own, made visible by the birds’ motion.”
Biography, memoir, natural history, travel, geography, philosophy; this is a complex book, as befits the twisting, intricate ancient pathways that Macfarlane’s narrative traces over both land and, curiously, sea. At times I found it hard to fathom exactly where he was going, but I think that was the point. The old ways are not as linear as they first appear. Treading them in the company of so thoughtful a guide refreshed for me the simple joy of walking, but also began to open up some of its richer possibilities.
Ridgeway path in Berkshire, which features quite heavily in The Old Ways. © Chris Foster
Yates is quite happy to admit that he doesn’t know where he’s going, at least when he sets off for his annual pilgrimage into the dark. Every year, near midsummer, when the conditions are right, he leaves his house at dusk and walks out into the surrounding countryside. With no route or destination in mind, he simply allows himself to follow whichever path the night sets before him. Nightwalk is his account of one of these nights, coloured with references to past experiences. Whilst more limited in scope and neither as learned nor as ambitious as The Old Ways, Nightwalk is an equally affecting book in its own way.
It helps that I straightaway warmed to Yates. Not only do we share a first name, but he’s a bearded, hat-wearing resident of Hampshire – my home county – to whom almost no object is more important than his teapot. You could say I sensed a kindred spirit. I also enjoyed his evident ability to slow down and avoid the worst of the rushed modern human condition, aided by cover of darkness:
“With its phases, pauses and unpredictable slips, night not only contradicts the clock, it makes a mockery of it. So it was impossible to say how long I had been in the trees. It felt like hours, but when I emerged again onto the open hill the moon had not curved much further westwards, nor had the glow beyond the northern skyline noticeably increased.”
As the usual procession of time fades away, Yates finds himself better able to concentrate on the present:
“Normally, the present is just a transition point, a bit of a blur between one thing and the next, yet in the untroubled and mostly unrevealing dark, past and future have less relevance and I can find myself in a place of endless immediacy, a place known to every wild animal, timelessness.”
As well as slowing and stilling us, Yates notes how the night holds power to reawaken the nascent sense of wonder at nature that we would, he contends, all have known as a child. To see an animal’s “glimpsed, half-seen shape” in the dark is to perceive things in that child-like way, “innocent, unclouded and reverent,” a mystical experience almost akin to a kind of pagan spirituality.
Though Yates is best known for writing about fishing, there is some quite lovely observational nature writing here, too. I particularly enjoyed his synaesthetic musings on the nature of different bird songs, variously comparing a skylark’s song to the taste of apricot or a blackbird’s voice to “the delicacy of a blueberry plus the velvet depth of a vintage grape.”
At many points in this book I found the consolation that I believe we’re seeking in nature writing, those moments when we want to say to the author, “Yes! Me too! I’ve had that experience. That’s just what it’s like.” In this way we read our own experiences as much as we’re reading the authors. For Yates, to walk at night is clearly to come under a kind of spell that transforms ordinary experience, and this lovely little book enables us to fall under it with him, for a while. If I close my eyes, and breathe slowly, I’m there, still, in the quiet of a Hampshire night.
One a twisted and complex analysis, the other a deceptively simple narrative, but in both of these books I found that the simple act of stepping out of the door and putting one foot in front of the other takes on almost revolutionary significance, at odds with a society perpetually in a motor-driven, clock-watching hurry. We see more clearly, know ourselves more fully, and experience the world more deeply when travelling on foot.