It is the best travel writing I've read since Patrick Leigh Fermor. The page I'm on right now, as the author and his friend David walk the Broomway ("allegedly 'the deadliest' path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked") across the Maplin Sands from Wakering Stairs to Foulness:
Several years ago the sculptor Antony Gormley buried a full-size iron cast of his own body upside down in the grounds of Cambridge's Archaeological Research Institute. Only the undersides of the iron man's feet show on the surface. Two days before coming to walk the Broomway I'd slipped off my shoes and socks and stood barefoot in the rusty prints, sole to sole with that buried body. Now that act of doubling had itself been unexpecedly repeated out here on the sands. Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both. Hinged cuckoo-calls; razor shells and cockle shells; our own reflections; a profusion of suns; the glide of transparent over solid. When I think back to the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strong disorder of perception that caused illusions of the spirit as well as the eye. I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing mind that mind's own substance was altered.
But just in case you think it is all going to dissolve into philosophy, here's the next block:
You enter the mirror-world by a causeway and you leave it by one. From Asplin Head, a rubble jetty as wide as a farm track reaches out over the Black Grounds, offering safe passage to shore. As we approached the jetty the sand began to give way underfoot, and we broke through into sucking black mud. It was like striking oil—the glittering rich ooze gouting up around our feet. We slurped onwards to the causeway, the rubble of which had been colonized by a lurid green weed. Sea lavender and samphire thrived in the salt marsh.
I walked alongside the causeway rather than on it, finding that if I kept moving over the mud I didn't sink.
This is one of the pages without much science or history or literary archaeology; Macfarlane is very good at identifying not only the ghosts he sees in any path he walks (or that others have seen before him), but why he sees them there in the first place, and whether they were left consciously, and what it means that humans are almost incapable of seeing place without seeing time. I wasn't looking for it, but it is a good book for a year in which I wrote a lot of ghosts.
And you must read Edward Thomas. He's very much your sort of thing, hedgerow and trench.
I was intrigued by reviews of the play about him earlier this fall, and then I remembered reading an article about a year earlier—Robert Frost I recognized, nothing about the other guy. So I will look him up.
no subject
It is the best travel writing I've read since Patrick Leigh Fermor. The page I'm on right now, as the author and his friend David walk the Broomway ("allegedly 'the deadliest' path in Britain and certainly the unearthliest path I have ever walked") across the Maplin Sands from Wakering Stairs to Foulness:
Several years ago the sculptor Antony Gormley buried a full-size iron cast of his own body upside down in the grounds of Cambridge's Archaeological Research Institute. Only the undersides of the iron man's feet show on the surface. Two days before coming to walk the Broomway I'd slipped off my shoes and socks and stood barefoot in the rusty prints, sole to sole with that buried body. Now that act of doubling had itself been unexpecedly repeated out here on the sands. Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both. Hinged cuckoo-calls; razor shells and cockle shells; our own reflections; a profusion of suns; the glide of transparent over solid. When I think back to the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strong disorder of perception that caused illusions of the spirit as well as the eye. I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing mind that mind's own substance was altered.
But just in case you think it is all going to dissolve into philosophy, here's the next block:
You enter the mirror-world by a causeway and you leave it by one. From Asplin Head, a rubble jetty as wide as a farm track reaches out over the Black Grounds, offering safe passage to shore. As we approached the jetty the sand began to give way underfoot, and we broke through into sucking black mud. It was like striking oil—the glittering rich ooze gouting up around our feet. We slurped onwards to the causeway, the rubble of which had been colonized by a lurid green weed. Sea lavender and samphire thrived in the salt marsh.
I walked alongside the causeway rather than on it, finding that if I kept moving over the mud I didn't sink.
This is one of the pages without much science or history or literary archaeology; Macfarlane is very good at identifying not only the ghosts he sees in any path he walks (or that others have seen before him), but why he sees them there in the first place, and whether they were left consciously, and what it means that humans are almost incapable of seeing place without seeing time. I wasn't looking for it, but it is a good book for a year in which I wrote a lot of ghosts.
And you must read Edward Thomas. He's very much your sort of thing, hedgerow and trench.
I was intrigued by reviews of the play about him earlier this fall, and then I remembered reading an article about a year earlier—Robert Frost I recognized, nothing about the other guy. So I will look him up.