Walk Notes
The introduction to a new, (mostly) regular series of observations made walking my local area.
Walk Note
Preamble
What this is not: Any kind of expert guide to nature. I can identify some animals, birds and plants through a jumble of knowledge passed along by relatives/friends, and from my own seeing and hearing and reading. I probably misidentify some things (small brown birds in particular) and probably should do more research. I don’t, however, have very good visual memory/recognition skills and so plants in particular are hard for me to link between say a picture in a book and real looking. Last year I tried using an app to point and identify and it was not very successful (five different pictures just to get it to recognise an oak tree as a test was not inspiring) and didn’t really fit with how I want to experience time outdoors.
What this is also not: A vehicle for learning about myself, or offering fundamental learning about the human condition. I’m really sceptical about the human projection of moral and spiritual value onto the world around them; I’m really uncomfortable with the anthropomorphic layering of feelings and motivations onto creatures and activities we can’t really understand. I’ll be trying to stick to observing and recording, and making it as clear as possible when I’m making unverifiable assumptions.
What it hopefully will be: A regular writing practice/reading opportunity. That is my indulgence. I’m aiming to write about one walk per week, as a combination of schedule/motivation.
What it hopefully also will be: Some sort of record of how the world shifts in response to my place and presence in it, or in ignorance of my presence while I happen to be standing there. I’m deliberately avoiding the use of the phrase ‘the natural world’ since I don’t think that is a helpful division – compartmentalising the human away from the natural seems to me to be one of the major problems we have.
The context: I live in a village in a valley in north east England. That village is made up of a few rows of old pit terraces but mostly estates built between the 1950s and now. Lots of people have dogs and spaniels and labradors are especially popular. It’s just a stream in the valley which goes on to become a very minor river. Part of the valley is designated as a local nature reserve. There’s a town on the ridge to the south. This is – as indicated by those former colliery rows – part of the coalfield that existed through (roughly) the 18th to the 20th century. Our village pit closed in the 1960s and was replaced by an industrial estate. One of the nearby railways lasted into the 1980s, just. When I was young, the stream was seen as dangerously polluted. There will be more specifics of the local rea as we go along because I’m planning to draw a little map to go with each walk/note. I do think the legacy of mining as an industrial past is really interesting, especially because so much of it was/is hidden under the surface and continues to exist/influence even after the visible signs are cleared away. However, I also think that too much of what is said and done and experienced of this area is framed by the past, so this is an effort to deal in the present (with the caveat that I am aware of how much ‘nature writing’ can appear wistful/reactionary about pasts real or imaginary).
My current circumstances, while complicated, allow me the possibility to walk in the local countryside a number of times a week. I am aware how privileged this makes me. Even more so after a recent visit to Grasmere in the Lake District where it cost 60 pence to use the village ‘public’ toilets. Scale that up for a family of four needing the toilet twice, maybe three times, during their day visits and see just one way in which access to ‘nature’ is very often a class issue.