You can no more see England from a main arterial road than you can see her from the air. What you can see from the newly constructed roads is a garish rash of scarlet, the unhealed wound of a land laid waste.
Hikers travel on foot, but they see nothing of England, for two reasons. They travel too fast, and they walk, as starlings fly, in multitudes.
It is not enough to travel on foot. You must learn to saunter as Charles II, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson, and Edward Thomas sauntered, and you must learn to saunter alone.
You travel alone, not because you are unsociable, but because you are sociable. In a crowd you just nod in passing to the shepherd or road-mender. When you are alone you make friends with every passer-by. All England talks to you.
You travel alone, secondly, to meet yourself. All the rest of the year you are part of the machine. You work with the herd, take your pleasures with the herd. But alone in the quietude of the country you find yourself. You are at last finding out your own tastes, testing your own unforced reactions.
So make up your mind to be bound by no programme, to travel with complete irresponsibility, to start nowhere in particular, and the odds are that you will catch a glimpse of England that is vouchsafed only to the privileged few.
What you are looking for is as elusive as the faery music of the piper at the gates of dawn. What you see may be incommunicable to others, but it will provide you with a vision that may well alter the whole of your outlook on life.
Solitary, slow, and wayward are the keywords.
In England you cannot go wrong so long as you keep to the unknown.
You and I are likely to go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green, but our ancestors lie buried in the long barrows that strew the banks of Minchinhampton. Where they are traces of earliest man there is beauty.
So if you would find loveliness, tread the ancient tracks that top the Wiltshire downlands. The smooth green undulations will soothe your harassed mind as nothing else can.
It is impossible in the hurly-burly of the market-place to acquire or to keep any values at all. Only when we are striding the high hills alone can we take stock of ourselves, our desires, and our relation to this world and the next.
Abridged from ‘England’s Character’, SPB Mais 1936, pgs. 14-22.
You can read Pt. 1 of SPB Mais' Proto Situationist Manifesto, Advice for Derivers (circa 1930), here
5 comments:
But what about walking along an arterial road John? If you head north from Edgware along the A41(t) ("Edgware Way") and out further than the top of the South Herts tertiary escarpment you are presented with a succession of compelling views. First, up to the top of the ridge (along the "traditional" machining of the two-lane road) you have a sense to west of the sheer power and presence of Brockley Hill with its Roman memories, its springs running down under the road to feed the Edgwarebury Brook and eventually the Silk Stream and the Brent. Later, as the road turns WNW, the numbing roar of the M1 and the tributaries of the north bound Tyke Water (rising in Stanmore) cross your path. There are old farms here, edging onto Bushey, ditches Colne Bound and the old Spiders Web Motel.
Next we pass Otterspool to the right, over towards Radlett and the powerhouse that is Watford. The Colne rushes beneath heading for Staines. Here the A41 becomes Otterspool Way and then Elton Way as it runs out to junctions and faceless lives.
I love that walk, especially doing the first section in May with Hawthorns and red chestnuts planted by the Middlesex County Council in the 1930s all in flower.
have you come across the biography of Mais?
"An Unrepentant Englishman: The Life of S. P. B. Mais, Ambassador of the Countryside" by Maisie Robson
ISBN 1 872438 17 2 (2005) 198 x 127mm, pbk., £7.99
He was chums with Aryan mysticist, virulent antisemite and author of the bestselling 'Tarka the Otter', Henry Williamson.
I hope that their common ground was that they were both Devonians then. Funnily, I bought my copy of 'England's Character' in Tarka Books, Barnstaple.
Beautiful to find something written from a place that is gone to me now.My favourite thing to do as a child(still is),was to discover the next special hill,tree,but mainly the complete satisfaction of the rythmic feeling you get when you are out and about simply discovering the next awesome view.I still think back to those times as my most treasured,as every country I have settled in,every new road I have discovered,theres nothing like the early morning walk coming down from the woods,skerting the old village,knowing that the world is a buzzing around madly.Those brambles that used to hold me back are now my favourite memory and are the very reason I still find ways for it to be acceptable to wear my hiking boots everywhere.Thankyou John and Nick for sharig the luxury of what you see.I see them too and remember behind every cracked lens there is a beautiful picture,much love,Crayoz.
Beautiful to find something written from a place that is gone to me now.My favourite thing to do as a child(still is),was to discover the next special hill,tree,but mainly the complete satisfaction of the rythmic feeling you get when you are out and about simply discovering the next awesome view.I still think back to those times as my most treasured,as every country I have settled in,every new road I have discovered,theres nothing like the early morning walk coming down from the woods,skerting the old village,knowing that the world is a buzzing around madly.Those brambles that used to hold me back are now my favourite memory and are the very reason I still find ways for it to be acceptable to wear my hiking boots everywhere.Thankyou John and Nick for sharig the luxury of what you see.I see them too and remember behind every cracked lens there is a beautiful picture,much love,Crayoz.
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