I’ve always liked walking. Its rhythms seem to set off a dreamy, contemplative mood that lasts well after the walk has ended. I was well into my thirties however before I realised that it was something you could do in the countryside as well as the city. I have been making up for lost time ever since.
What I don’t really recognise from my experience though is the kind of outdoor brand advertising puff you see to the right. You can find these images anywhere: they are unavoidable now. At a basic level, everything has to look ordinary enough to be achievable (models; kit; terrain; colour; weather) yet extraordinary enough to lure. It’s a tightrope that the photographers and copywriters have to straddle and I guess these are pretty successful as sales images. At the next level they promote certain values to restless urban populations: here, simplicity, perhaps, and self-reliance (also possibly the sheer ruggedness of eating straight from the packet). Yet, like car adverts which never show any traffic, they are a form of mythology, too. If you look a little more closely for example you may see that there is a carefully constructed use of religious iconography in the image. We have the bare feet of the penitent, the faraway look on the model’s face, the monk’s brown cowl about the head, the icon or pilgrim’s badge on the shoulder, and the essential sustenance (i.e. Holy Communion). That may even be a stave to the right. Transcendence is the name of the game, though wordlessly packaged as a consumer activity.
My walks are nothing like that. Just before lockdown I set out on a walk above Bolton, north of Manchester. There are several of these old cotton towns above the big city and the Pennine hills sit above them bringing in the damp weather and the lowering skies that create the characteristic mood of the area. On a bad day it can be awfully bleak, and on a good day it is God’s own country. There is something which draws me to the area and I have no idea what it is. I was born in Rochdale, one of these cotton towns, but my family left when I was a toddler and I have no memories of it. All I can imagine though, is that the tones characteristic of the area – an extended range of greys and greens mostly with small patches of beautifully washed out colour, imprinted themselves on my infant retina and I somehow still recognise them all these years later. I was looking at a blackthorn bush in a hedgerow recently and thinking just how beautifully the purple-blue sloe berries sat with the grey/green and orange lichen that dressed the bush’s bark. Maybe these childhood impressions stay with us for a lifetime not as memories but as dimly conceived preferences.
This was the first photo I took on the walk - a magnificent beech tree that soared straight up into the canopy maybe 100 feet above. The paleness of its root system caught my eye but as I clambered down a slope to its level I could see that the erosion under it did not bode well. Some of the roots have done a right-hand turn to embed themselves back in - which looks like intelligence at work. Beech trees can easily live to over 200 years so they must have their survival strategies. Being close to something so massive and alive is curiously reassuring and if you put your palm against it the sheer solidity is almost overwhelming.
The farms round here don’t look anything like the lush pastures of East Yorkshire where I used to live. There is little arable and the small fields and scattered sheep suggest a hard battle against the elements. As I continued uphill I came across this pony all alone in a field.
Two horses in a field look companionable but one, especially on these uplands, without any sign of human activity, always looks so lonely. They turn away from the wind and rarely show any interest in my passing. A pet; a mount; a trotter? I have no idea.
You do see the odd farm vehicle out and about, a landrover pulling a trailer or a quad bike, often with a very cool-looking collie behind the driver, rounding up sheep. But the landscape has an inherent loneliness about it. Farther on I passed by this seemingly abandoned farmhouse.
An empty house like this, with an empty yard, broken windows and flapping curtains, sitting above a wild landscape is a great place to stop and stare and listen to the wind and wonder: what happened? Who lived here and why did they leave?
I have been back a couple of times since that walk to lengthen it and to get right up onto Winter Hill over the town where there are massive communication masts and two memorials: one to a mass trespass back in the day when ramblers had to fight for the meagre rights they are accorded even now; and another to an aircraft flying up here from the south coast which crashed without survivors in the 1950s
The outdoor clothing companies with their breathless prose and their photoshopped imagery can suggest none of the sheer ordinariness of these surroundings yet their inherent interest: a slow drama playing out at an infinitesimally slow pace. The advertisers do their best, I suppose, to enthuse but they can never approach the reality of step after step across a small piece of your own backyard.