Читать книгу Ramble On: The story of our love for walking Britain - Sinclair McKay - Страница 8

My grandmother was a keen walker all of her life. But she had a freezing disdain for the landscape of south-east England: it was too flat, too undramatic, too safe, too cosy. What on earth would be the point of walking anywhere within easy reach of London? Only the Highlands would do, or perhaps parts of Northumberland at a pinch. It is a prejudice shared by veteran rambling campaigner John Bunting, who spent so many of his formative years being chased by gamekeepers in the Peak District. Would he ever fancy a walking tour, say, of the South Downs? ‘When I get a bit older,’ replies the ninety-three-year-old.

For a long time, I shared my grandmother’s dismissive attitude towards the southern Home Counties, which in my case was shaped by many very dull train journeys from London to Brighton. Is it insane to judge a landscape from a railway line? Apart from anything else, many better people than me have been drawn to walking in this gentle area. Throughout the nineteenth century, this part of Surrey not only formed the backdrop to some immortal literature, but also captured the imaginations of a generation’s finest thinkers, who strode across these sleepy fields, hopped over these stiles and bounded up these silent hills with all the enthusiasm and vigour that the Victorian age could summon.

I find myself wandering through silvery mist at the top of a wooded hill, admiring the thickness of the silence, and the darkness of the cover of the oaks, and the mysterious low shapes of the old sprawling yews. I have to take all my own shallow prejudices back. After all, I am only a mile and a half outside Dorking and just a few miles from Gatwick – yet there is a subtle splendour in the quietness of this country. As for gentler walks, in the early nineteenth century, before Victoria reached the throne, Jane Austen practically turned southern counties roaming into a sub-genre of literature.

In all of Austen’s novels, characters walk, and each walk always carries its own significance. Sometimes it will be triggered by a banal reason – a carriage is not available at a particular moment, say; but the walk that follows either carries emotional or symbolic resonance. Be it an act of social defiance, or a response to a moment of romantic crisis, the gentle paths and fields and hills are as delicately and closely suggested as the figures that move across them. And it is broadly the pastures and meadows of the southern counties that Austen’s characters walk about in. In Emma, we often find Mr Knightley striding from his house; even Mr Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, sometimes ventures out on foot, as opposed to horseback. Walking is frequently indicative of mood; there are times of upset when an Austen heroine wishes to walk alone and refuses a companion. For these heroines, the very act of walking itself can be taken as an assertion of independence: the exercise is sometimes cathartic. At other times, as in Emma, it is distinctly pleasurable and the company stimulating:

As a walking companion, Emma had very early foreseen how useful she might find [Harriet Smith] … Her father never went beyond the shrubbery, where two divisions of the ground sufficed him for his long walk, or his short, as the year varied; and since Mrs Weston’s marriage, her exercise too had been too much confined. She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to a walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges.

These days, walkers are enticed into sampling ‘Jane Austen country’, following trails that wind around Chawton in the county of Hampshire, where she lived so long. A little more vigorous is the walk up to the scene of one of Austen’s most famous passages from Emma. A party ascends Box Hill for a picnic. Emma Woodhouse humiliates Miss Bates and is roundly picked up on this by Mr Knightley. Distress and embarrassment are signalled by members of the party detaching and going for their own small walks atop the Downs. For Emma herself, she ends up wanting to be ‘sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in observation of the tranquil views beneath her.’

There are other walking crises to be found in Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is accused of ‘conceited independence’ when she undertakes a mighty 3-mile crosscountry walk to visit her ill sister.

That she should have walked three miles so early in the day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs Hurst and Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt for it.

The accuser, Miss Bingley, also wonders what effect such an expedition might have upon Mr Darcy. It is clear that one unspoken source of her discomfort with the idea is that Elizabeth has done something quite improper; that there is a forwardness about a young women walking such a distance out in the open all on her own. In fact, Miss Bennet is such a keen walker that when, at one stage in the novel, a proposed tour to the Lake District is altered to a journey to Derbyshire instead, she vents her irritation loudly. The pursuit of recreational walking seemed to have become part of genteel ‘English culture and comfort’ about a century before Austen’s fiction. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote, in Journal To Stella:

I have always been plying you to walk and read. The young fellows have begun a kind of fashion to walk, and many of them have got swinging strong shoes on purpose; it has got as far as several young lords; if it hold, it would be a very good thing.

Young lords and gentlewomen were obviously not alone in their sensibilities; by the middle years of the nineteenth century, pleasant prospects were sought out by increasing numbers of highly organised rambling groups from a wide array of social and professional backgrounds. There was an element, for ordinary working people, rather lower on the social scale than Austen’s heroines, of raising themselves up. Walking became not just about fresh air; there was also an element of virtue, and sober fellowship, and education. In the industrial towns at this time, there had been a huge rise in entertainments such as the music hall and the public house. Walking groups were being founded to stand deliberately apart from the noise and vulgarity of such pursuits.

Many of these walking clubs had a distinctly Methodist or Non-Conformist flavour; some were organised directly by churches. For instance, in the Lancashire mill towns, a Saturday half-day holiday was established in the mid-nineteenth century so that workers now had that afternoon for leisure. A great number of churches – many of them congregationalist – leapt in to try and ensure that this time would not be ‘wasted’ on drink or other such ‘worthless’ recreations. Rambling expeditions were proposed instead. A number of temperance associations also encouraged group walks out into the country.

There were other associations such as the Ancoats Brotherhood, based in Lancashire and formed by Charles Rowley, the founder of the Sunday Recreation Movement. In part, the group was about ‘rambling with a bevy of chums’ in places as far away as Wales. The group would also attract impressive guest speakers, such as William Morris and Ford Madox Brown.¹ The act of walking in such organised groups was a very different thing to the solitary, dreamy rambles of the Romantic movement. This was about urban dwellers roaming about the crags and the moors and the coniferous woodlands as a deliberate means of breaking out of the work–recreation patterns that were being laid down for them.

There was a strong element of self-improvement; the working man who took a lively interest in the world around him, in the paths beneath his feet, had a greater claim towards shaping that world. Such walking groups were keenly interested in ideas to do with the spread of democracy. Early industrialisation, with its remorseless demands of time and energy of its workers, could also have the side effect of infantilising them. Walking out on to the Cheshire Plains, or into the vales of North Wales, on the other hand, gave those workers the sense of a certain independence of movement and of thought.

One of the most inspirational and pivotal figures in the walking movement, G. H. B. Ward, formed the Sheffield Clarion Rambling Club at the turn of the twentieth century. He was an engineer at the Hecla works, and an active Labour Party man. Indeed, as the years went on, he would rise to become a senior Labour figure. But it is his passion for walking that is remembered today. The explicit aim of the Clarion Club was the mental and physical improvement of the working man. Interestingly, the Club also posed an explicit challenge to the church; and that was over the use of the Sabbath. According to G. H. B. Ward, Sundays would be more satisfyingly spent out in the refreshing air. On this point, the Sheffield ramblers, and a small club of middle-class intellectuals down south, intriguingly mirrored one another. For as the walking movement grew – and despite the best efforts of the churches to get involved – it was also clear that it had a certain cerebral and secular appeal to many. There were also those who went out rambling on Sunday mornings precisely in order to get away from the church and its influence.

This corner of Jane Austen-land – that is, the countryside clustered around Box Hill and Leith Hill – was also deeply favoured by key members of the Victorian rambling group the Sunday Tramps. The ‘Tramps’ were a small and perhaps rather self-conscious assembly of intellectuals, scientists, writers and naturalists. They started meeting in 1879, led by Sir Leslie Stephen, a formidable Cambridge intellectual, editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and enthusiastic mountaineer, among other things.

In this club, the men – there were no women – got out of London on Sunday to go for rather austere, brisk 25-mile walks. The fact that they missed church was all part of it. These men wanted to escape the ‘dreary Sabbath’ in London. Sir Leslie Stephen revelled in his ‘flock of cranium tramps’ and wrote that ‘tramping with them, one has the world under review, as well as pretty scenery.’²

The Sunday Tramps were by no means unique in finding the Sabbath dreary. Though our image of Victorians is that of respectable, upright families, occupying the church pews without fail, the truth was more complex, especially towards the end of that century. In rural parishes, and certain parts of Scotland, there was practically no escape from the Sunday service, simply because in a small community, any absence from the rituals of any particular day would be extremely noticeable. By contrast, in the vast sprawling towns, parish priests had a far more difficult job. In the poorer districts, the community was transient – families moving in or moving out according to the fluctuations in their economic circumstances. Among a number of the intellectual middle-classes – mostly educated men, who had read Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology – the church no longer had any real grip.

According to historian A. N. Wilson, had the Victorian middle classes thought to seek out the opinions of the urban working classes on the subject of the church and its teachings, ‘they would have found religious practice (except among Irish immigrants) all but unknown, and indifference to religious ideas all but total.’ One contemporary observer noted that in ‘the alleys of London … the Gospel is as unknown as in Tibet.’³

It is not quite as if the Sunday Tramps were dedicated atheists; they simply looked at the dull city, which was sullen and silent apart from church bells. The shops were all shut, the factories were still, and the Tramps took that opportunity to worship the beauty of Home Counties countryside instead. They charged across those small green fields, pointed themselves towards the startlingly abrupt hills of the South Downs, and took in the neatly proportioned prospects of downland and meadow. In In Praise of Walking, Leslie Stephen is especially clear on the pleasure of temporarily shaking off the capital, escaping its ‘vast octopus arms’ and mapping a course ‘between the great lines of railway’. The benefits were almost instantaneous; in counties such as Surrey and Kent, the old rural ways still held hard, and there was great hospitality to be found in even the most humble cottages. In many ways, Stephen was as great a romantic as Wordsworth, though he laid claims to being rather less sentimental. When once writing about the Lake District, he declared: ‘Much as I respect Wordsworth, I don’t care to see the cottage in which he lived.’

Another of the prominent Sunday Tramps, the novelist George Meredith, lived in a house on the side of Box Hill, and his enthusiasm for exploring the surrounding countryside was undinted. His 1885 novel Diana of the Crossways contained evocative hymns of praise to the downland: ‘Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of service-tree or the white-beam, spotted the semi-circle of swelling green down, black and silver.’

Stephen and his assorted followers were not dreamers; this was walking as a highly masculine – and, in some curious way, acutely Victorian – activity; they marched across the land as though they claimed it for their own, in the true Imperial manner. In his obituary of Stephen, George Meredith paid this tribute, recalling the boisterous energy and enthusiasm of these Sunday Home Counties hikes:

A pause … came at the examination of the leader’s watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and void was given for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and fellows, past proclamation against trespassers, under suspicion of being taken for more serious depredators in flight.

The chief of the Tramps had a wonderful calculating eye in the observation of distances and the nature of the land as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often said of this life-long student and philosophical head that he had in him the making of a great military captain.

The mere fact of a ‘no trespassing’ sign had always been enough to pique Stephen, and goad him into doing that very thing. He wrote:

I looked out for signs saying trespassers will be prosecuted … That gave a strong presumption that the trespass must have some attraction. Cyclists could only reflect that trespassing for them is not only forbidden but impossible. To me it was a reminder of the many delicious bits of walking which, even in the neighbourhood of London, await the man who has no superstitious reverence for legal rights.

There speaks the true vigorous Victorian. Although his near contemporary A. H. Sidgwick, who published his Walking Essays in 1912, had this to say on the subject:

There is a definite type of walker who loves trespassing for its own sake, and exults, as he climbs a fence or turns up a path marked ‘private’, in a vision of the landed aristocracy of England defied and impotent … There is much excuse for this attitude: as we review the history of English commons and rights of way, of the organised piracy of the body politic and the organised perjury which supported it, it is difficult to stifle an impulse to throw at least one pebble … at the head of Goliath.

He added with a semi-humorous shake of his head, ‘To indulge the love of trespassing involves ultimately making trespassing an end rather than a means, and this – like the twin passion for short-cuts as an end in themselves – is disastrous to walking.’⁴ Sidgwick’s view was that no matter how unjust the circumstances of its creation, the fact was that the enclosed English countryside was also, paradoxically, the thing of beauty that the walker admired so, and that fulminating against the landed aristocracy could only leach pleasure away from any walk. Added to this, it has always been rather easier for the patrician middle classes to trespass simply because, if confronted, they could sound eminently reasonable in perfectly modulated tones of Received Pronunciation.

Over 100 years on, the territory of these Sunday Tramps would now give Stephen little of that ‘delicious’ sense, though. Box Hill and Leith Hill are now firmly National Trust territory. What would either Leslie Stephen or indeed Emma Woodhouse make of it now? And so off I stride, out of Dorking station – and thanks to my airy dismissal of maps, I inevitably, immediately, take a wrong turning. As a result of my mistake, the next rather stressful thirty minutes involve following a busy road running along the base of Box Hill, heading towards Reigate. Walking along, I look yearningly up at those thick woods on the steep slopes – but without seeing any hint of public footpaths or indeed any particularly promising field I can simply trot across. In the meantime, my attempted Jane Austen-esque promenade has suddenly narrowed into a flinching, shrinking-back-from-vast-delivery-lorries ordeal. If I resemble any Austen figure at this moment, it is probably the oleaginous, cringing vicar Mr Elton.

What might have ended with a frustrated about turn – is there anything worse than having to go back the same way, over unlovely territory? – thankfully culminates in a side road, marked as a dead end. Following this a little way, past the eerie howling of a combined kennel-cattery, and just a quarter of a mile on, you are in business. I find a right hand turn, with a lane leading directly up the hill. When you are directly beneath it, the hill looks absurdly steep.

The lane soon gives way to some discreet National Trust signage. What previously looked steep, actually becomes steep. This lovely wooded path, slightly wet with the spring mist, moist flint-stone and mud, angles upwards through a tunnel of old trees. The cover is so dense that there is no possibility of looking out at the view – just a fairly solid climb. It doesn’t last long, you are at the top surprisingly quickly. Now you can see the prospect before you. Except, that is, on the day I have chosen to climb. I can’t see anything. There is a delicate yet impenetrable mist all around, and the Mole Valley beneath is a gauzy haze. It is not that disappointing; any views at all – from anywhere – offer at best a certain amount of limited novelty. This one, down to the river, over to the trees on the other side of the valley, would have been pretty enough, yet I know it would not have detained me for long. With hills and country such as this, there are other things. There are breathtakingly beautiful trees to be seen on this plateau. Oaks so nobbled that the trunks look as though they contain a multitude of faces. Box Hill, incidentally, is so called because of its profusion of box trees on its slopes and summit.

Thence to Emma Woodhouse’s picnic site. Back then, parties would have been taken up the hill by carriage via a zigzagging road. Much the same thing seems to be the case now. Indeed, these are the very roads used for the 2012 Olympic cycle races. On a day like this, when the mist drifts like the spray in a vast greenhouse, there is a magic to the glistening barks, and the squelchy dark mud underfoot. What is most impressive, though, is that this place – nestled between the M25, Gatwick Airport, and countless main roads – is so extraordinarily quiet. And in this, I see Leslie Stephen’s point about wriggling free from the octopus arms of London. Even in an ancient woodland like Epping in Essex, there is always, somewhere, the noise of traffic, or overhead aeroplanes. Here, you really do feel that you are somewhere slightly more remote than a London dormitory town.

The mist, however, prevents me from assessing the other thing I came here for; and that is how much the landscape below has changed over the years. The walker might, as an initial point of reference, turn to one of the earliest examples of British landscape painting, ‘A View To Box Hill’, by George Lambert, painted in 1733. This was one of the first works focusing on the land itself, and not some castle or tower or other similarly imposing man-made structure. In Lambert’s work, the focus is the hill, which is starkly delineated, but the air is thick with a honeyed light. In the foreground, there are labourers reaping corn. Today, that same field in the foreground is instead a vineyard. The other difference is that in the painting, there are very few trees on the hill. Either all these trees have grown since then; or Lambert simply left the trees out, for his own artistic reasons. Not that such paintings could ever be taken as accurate, but it does raise that perenially interesting question of how much tree cover we have lost over the centuries – and how much, quietly, we have gained.

For a more recent point of reference about the look and the feel of Home Counties countryside, we might turn to films and documentaries made in the 1930s and 1940s. There we see, in the countryside of Kent and Surrey, an agricultural landscape still composed of small fields and horse-drawn carts; working blacksmiths and dusty lanes – a world that simply isn’t there now. All it has taken is seventy years. There is the difficult-to-shake sense that the great ‘octopus arms’ of London now stretch all the way down to Brighton and the south coast. That apart from the odd Down or the occasional woodland trail, it is a region composed purely of uniform dormitory towns with joyless shopping precincts. One would never expect any hint of wilderness. One would scarcely even anticipate getting lost.

But wildness is not everything, and we return to the miniature artistry of Jane Austen. Just as she captured with funny and searing vividness the everyday vanities, anxieties and turbulence of small social groups, so the country that she moved in has a counterpointed sense of understated, though perfectly apparent beauty. On Box Hill and Leith Hill are to be found old beeches, oaks and yews. Rare species include silver-wash fritillary butterflies, bee orchids and orange butterflies. In the summer months, wild basil grows. Just several miles to the south, Leith Hill is one of the highest points in southern England; on clear days you might catch a glimpse of the south coast.

Leslie Stephen, who clearly had a great deal of affection for this part of the world, felt that through walking, he was maintaining a very grand literary tradition. In one essay, he cited the great walker-writers of history: Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Byron, among many others. He saw the act of walking as being, in its own way, as creative as ‘scribbling’. ‘The memories of walks,’ Stephen wrote,

Are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung … the labour of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which it relieved me. The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp.

He went on to discuss how past walker-writers have somehow blocked out the sheer physicality, the corporeal realism of walking. They

have inclined to ignore the true source of their impulse. Even when they speak of the beauties of nature, they would give us to understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical machinery of legs and stomachs.

Now, gazing up at the startlingly abrupt Box Hill, it is extremely easy to envisage Stephen, with his own ‘physical machinery of legs and stomachs’, leading his followers with cries of enthusiasm up those vertiginous paths. In the late Victorian era, Stephen’s emphasis on the physicality of walking found an answering echo elsewhere in the country. In Lancashire, one Dr James Johnston gathered a rambling group together dedicated to the works of American poet Walt Whitman. The poet’s work was filled with the exultation of nature, and the sense of man engaging fully with the wildness around him. The Lancashire walkers who devoured Whitman’s poetry even inaugurated a Bolton ‘Whitman Day’.⁵ There was the sense here of a Victorian middle-class association celebrating the virtue of vigour, but also to a degree intellectualising it. Not merely was it necessary for gentlemen to explore their physical limits, they had to do so while engaged in serious discussions to do with philosophy and religious belief. As A. H. Sidgwick wrote:

Leave the intimate character of your surroundings to penetrate slowly into your higher faculties, aided by the consciousness of physical effort, the subtle rhythm of your walk, the feel of the earth beneath your feet, and the thousand intangible influences of sense.

Lovely though the Surrey countryside is – a porcelain miniature, compared to Derbyshire’s ceramic vase – one cannot entirely abandon oneself to the thousand intangible influences of sense. It is interesting how many hardcore walkers still view Surrey as something not quite worth bothering with. As I emerge from the National Trust woodland and plod happily back to the railway station, I realise that I have had a good, vigorous two-hour walk among fabulously old, gnarled yews, and can still be back in London in time for lunch. I raise my hat to the aesthetic good sense of Sir Leslie Stephen and his companions.

In this branch of the walking movement, as well as all the others, there never seemed to be any question that rambling was a balm to the body and soul that all should be free to enjoy. Yet there was a corresponding darkness too. We see it especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for those were years when some walkers were more vulnerable than others, and some had little choice about the location of their rambles. The act of walking sometimes had its savage underside, rooted in poverty, despair and madness.