A piece by piece review of  the last 9 pieces of “Where my Feet Fall”  – an anthology of 20 essays about walking by leading writers compiled by  Duncan Minshull

Publisher: Harper Collins £18.99 . Hardback. (also available as an ebook and Audio book with the writers reading their own essays)

Published 31st March 2022. Do buy from an independent bookshop if you can.

Footpath from Ferry to Inverie- the only village on the peninsular

Having reached the limit for what I think of as an acceptable length for my previous post and having only got half way through the book, it seemed inadequate and a bit rude to to juts sign off with “and there’s another 9 essays that I’m not going to bother with”. And I didn’t want to deprive you of my insightful and witty observations.  Images this time are from my not altogether successful trip to the Knoydart peninsular in June 2016.I

In the midst of her grief over  deaths in her family, Joanna Kavenna got herself sacked from a job she knew she was failing at, packed a rucksack with bread and cheese and a sleeping bag and headed for Grasee in France to walk on the the Grande Randonnee No 4 for a week. She had a map, and a compass “which kept freaking out”. And, basically, she was freaking out with it. Terrorised by her imagination and one night by a flock of sheep she often misread the path signs  (I’ve been there – I remember once in a weeks walk in France with Bob we managed to walk at least a couple of miles in totally the wrong direction and that was with both our wits intact and detailed written directions) and got “lost” (the title of her piece).  Reading it you want to scoop her up and offer her all the creature comforts at your disposal. But towards the end of the walk in a crowded (it being a honeypot tourist attraction) and sweltering gorge she meets a man who was also grieving.  A touching tale.

Track from Inverie to the Inverie River

In Paris, Agnes Poirier time travels by visiting its cemeteries which she finds “the perfect balance between solitude and intimacy” in an otherwise claustrophobic city.  My last trip abroad was to Lisbon and I took a tram to the end of the line to the city’s main cemetery and spent a deeply pleasing hour just wandering around. Her cemetery – Picpus- contains the remains of 1,306 people guillotined between 14th June and 27th July 1794; ancestors of the dead can still ask to be buried there. Powerful places, cemeteries. Changing tack, Poirier thinks the streets of Paris are “built for poetry and politics” . As a youngster she skipped school one day and went on her first demonstration and had a great time. “To walk in the middle of the street with that heady feeling that you own and rule the country with your feet”. She’s been on many more demos since . “What is a Paris Protest other than a walk in prose” she asks. A huge inconvenience to the Parisians you might reply. Maybe its a French thing – think of all those farmers protesting changes to the CAP or the gilets jaunes. They just love to stop the traffic those French.

Inverie River and, I think, view to Meall Buidhe

In 2013 Sinead Gleeson, a writer I had not heard of, travels to New York to seek out the haunts of an early C20th Irish writer called Maeve Brennan , a writer I had also not heard of. She goes to lots of places and tells us more about her heroine, a walk she describes as an “act of veneration”. Its not so daft. I went to Switzerland once just to find the house that Herman Hesse lived in and to visit his grave.  On reflecting on her journey, Gleeson realises that this was the time that she started to write and her pilgrimage was about trying to step in the literary world. On reflecting on mine, it seems like the fulfilment of an adolescent obsession – I had read all of Hesse’s works and published essays. The essay is not really about walking but it gives a great sense of New York and about Brennan’s writing.

Bothy on path to Sgurr Sgeithe

Several writers in this book refer to flanerie – a new word to me. I had to look it up. It means ‘aimless idle behaviour’. Kathleen Rooney – a professor at De Paul university in Chicago, describes herself as a flaneuse. Read her wikipedia entry – she sounds great fun. Sauntering might be another word for this style of walking and Duncan Minshull, the assembler of these essays, clearly identifies with this approach to walking. Indeed his last book  “Sauntering” also assembled various writers and was on this very topic. This approach is quite a confrontation with those of us that plan a route in detail and for whom a walk most definitely involves going from A to B (unless its a circular walk, of course, in which case we go from A to….A. ). Rooney has a friend, Eric,  who “is one of the best people in the galaxy to take drifting walks with”. He is also a gambler. Some miles out of the city is a casino called Lucky Horsehoe (the title of this piece). The kind owners provide a free bus service from the City to the casino and back again. Eric came up with the idea that they’d take the bus out but they would walk back. Maybe I haven’t got the hang of this flanerie lark but to my mind that’s an A to B however slowly you take it. It’s certainly not drifting. Anyway on their walk back to the city boundary Rooney introduces the concept of psychogeography which is interesting and offers some examples of how she and her companion felt about their pretty inhospitable walk. But frankly it sounds like they only walked for an hour or so before they seem to give up and catch a bus which I thought was a bit lame.

I think that this is the view to Sgurr Sgeithe. If it is I promise you it was twice as steep as it looks. I could see no path and gave up and went back.

In the first part of this review I flagged up A L Kennedy’s piece as worth buying the book for just for that. I’m pleased to say that Australian Josephine Rowe’s beautiful and deeply engaging essay is also justification enough for the purchase. Covid and its impact on our freedom to walk and to travel is a context for several pieces in the book. On the occasion of the birthday of her best friend Patrick (who lives in Canada) she sends him a greeting. They had intended to be meeting up in Japan to walk the Nakasendo Trail. But  “as each of our cities turns inward…, we smuggle one another out of lockdown by Face Time strolls through spaces urban and wild”. What a great idea. Patrick is also her ex-husband but she does not reveal why they parted but their warmth and closeness is palpable and beautifully illustrated.

My second camp near the ford at Torr an Tuire

Patrick’s mother was born in Newfoundland on a little island called Barren Island at the time but is now called Bar Haven. In 1966 its population was 243. Then the government compulsorily resettled its residents, floating some of their houses whole across to the mainland! Patrick has a map on his wall which shows an unnamed trail between two settlements. Ten years ago Patrick and Josephine went back to the island, taken by boat by his father, to see if the trail could still be walked and what was going on. In the intervening 50+ years it seems that some people had begun to establish seasonal holiday homes there. So this is the story of them making the walk told to each other, and us 10 years later. Which of course illustrates just how unreliable our memories are, even of events shared. “We carry notebooks and pens, not enough water or snacks… a bottle of beer…” . “No” Patrick tells her “”We didn’t do that….can’t see us drinking a warm beer”. I won’t spoil it for for by saying much about what happens, but this sums it up. Sums up a lot about sharing a life together really. “Each of us beating our way through bracken along paths unknown to the other, merging now and then in the telling, diverging, but always meeting in the pasture with the darkness bending down” . The end is heart-renching.

Loch an Dubh-Locain; Meall Buidhe or possibly Luinne Bheinn in the distance

In Karachi, Kamila Shamsie walks with friends and family a couple of miles from her childhood home to the sea. A little sketch of a city populated by, amongst a lot of people, many street dogs. The dogs don’t bother her but get culled regularly by the authorities. She declines a palm reading by a man with SHOW HAND written on cardboard in English and Urdu. Maybe he would have been grateful for the custom.

Above Loch an Dubh-Lochain; no footpath here.

When does prose become poem? Cynon Jones fishes with a net and pots off the west coast of Wales, a short walk from his home. His piece has lots of spaces between (sometimes two or three) sentences. Does that make it a poem? The coast encapsulates and reveals geological and anthropogenic time. He  catches some unwanted dogfish , he returns the live ones and takes home a dead one which goes off in his mothers fridge, makes his friend vomit and gets chucked out to stink outside. A grey mullet is caught – also unwanted. What is he fishing for? Terrorized, he disentangles it  and lets it go. I think he should stick to bird watching. “Leave the net” he says to himself, “it will make you walk”. I think he ‘d walk just as well along the shore and the fish would be relieved.

View to Stob na h-Innse Glaise from Mam Suidheig; I abandon my plan to reach Stob a Chearcaill

When reading Nicholas Shakespere‘s ramble I am reminded of a butterfly, flitting from flower to flower. Shakespere flits from place to place, from person to person. We are introduced to  Helga Hoskova-Weissova – a Holocaust survivor, in Prague, George Steiner in Cambridge with whom he walks in his garden, Dorothy Kahn in Tel Aviv. Kant, Coleridge, Kierkegaard – all of them with something to say about walking. The writer’s travel writing grandfather was a tremendous walker with many rules for walks which he didn’t follow. “In all walks one should imitate Lot’s wife once every five minutes and look back”. That’s good advice. His name was S.P. B Mais. Another of his rules: “Never cover more than a mile an hour”.  I get the point. To walk on one’s own was another and  his point is that then “you stand a chance of really being taken out of themselves, of hearing, of seeing, of smelling, of touching , of communing with themselves and being still….”. Yes, all true. The butterfly moves on. Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, Paddy Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Diogenes, G.M Trevelyan – all with something to say about walking. We’re only half way through his 13 pages and he moves to Tasmania, his other home where the stars are brighter and night time walking more rewarding than that in Wiltshire. And he flits around here with Aboriginal wisdom and culture until coming to rest on a beach with his son. Fascinating stuff.

Bathing my tired feet in Allt Coire Torr an Asgaill

The book ends with a dog walk. Well two daily walks actually from Patrick Gale who lives on the most westerly farm in England; his husband is the farmer (and sculptor). But for a writer a dog walk is only partially to benefit the dog. The walk is a  vital time to leave the domestic world and think about what he has written, to edit and adjust in his head and to anticipate what comes next. Please note, and Paul will like this, that not just any old dog will do. For Gale it must be a whippet or greyhounds. “They enjoy walks hugely but they are not forever nudging you to say ‘I’m enjoying my walk. Are you. Are you enjoying yours. Are you really”. I can so picture those busy demanding dogs. Gale comes from a walking family. “Between them our parents were as good as Observer’s books made flesh….” I immediately warm to this man. When back home he will “rub down the dog and feed the dogs now, put on the kettle, and re-enter the world”.

If you do buy or read this book – and I hope that you will as it offers a rich breadth of writing about this most engaging pastime, then I would love to know what you think of it. And my blog about it, of course. So please do comment here.