Category Archives: landscape

schiehallion

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On Saturday, we climbed Schiehallion – another munro. Rising out of the surrounding landscape like a great, squat cone, Schiehallion resembles a child’s drawing – it looks exactly like what a mountain should look like. Easily accessible from the shores of Loch Tay, it is extremely popular with walkers, whose pounding feet, over the past thirty years, have created some serious erosion. Since 1999, the mountain has been in the hands of the wonderful John Muir Trust – who have realigned the path sustainably, allowing the eroded scar to heal. This path is clear and very well-maintained all the way up to the boulder fields that surround the summit, and I would recommend Schiehallion to anyone as an ‘easy’ or a first munro. Schiehallion is famous for many reasons – it is the place where Neville Maskelyne calculated the weight of the earth, and Charles Hutton invented contour lines. On a fine day, it is also a lovely-looking mountain, whose gaelic name translates as ‘Fairy Hill of the Caledonians’. I wish I had some photographs that suggested how shapely and pleasing Schiehallion is, but on Saturday the cloud was low and the weather was foul. This is about as much as you are going to see, unfortunately.

On the lower slopes, blaeberries were beginning to appear, and, among the heather, we saw many pretty violets.

A little further up, we hit the cloud.

Bruce kept checking to see that the gang were all together.

The wind picked up, the cloud grew thicker . . .

. . .and by the time we hit the upper summit slopes, visibility was very poor.

Picking my way over those slippery lumps of quartzite was not easy and, just after taking this photo, the storm that had been threatening all morning decided to break. The wind howled and whirled, and the rain lashed down. It was pretty wild. We had to hurry up, push on, and get back down off the mountain. Here I come!

You can probably see how my left arm is refusing to do much by this point, and that the plantarflexion of my left foot is poor. Also, having foolishly forgotten my merino tights, I am wearing a pair of stripey pyjamas under my shorts, and I fear that this may add to the day-release-from-the-puzzle-factory effect of this clip (my choice of legwear was the focus of amused remarks from fellow walkers). But, 1) I am successfully descending 2) I am not tired and 3) I am very happy.

On the way down, the weather cleared up a little, and there was time to pause and photograph the interesting lichen I’d been spotting.


Specialists may correct me, but, from my books, I’d say this was porpidia macrocarpa, and that the wonderful lines and colours – which to me suggest maps, or the script of an ancient hand – is the effect of the lichen extracting iron from the rock. On Schiehallion’s upper slopes, the presence of iron makes the quartzite very pink – so much so that some of the boulders seemed to me to resemble giant slabs of ham . . .

Perhaps I was just getting hungry. . . but hold on a minute, could the powers of the Fairy Hill of the Caledonians possibly transform that quartzite side of ham into . . .

. . . a magical pork pie?

We had a magic day out on Schiehallion, anyway.

Tandle Hill

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We spent this weekend in Rochdale, where my parents live, and where I grew up. I wanted to walk to a special place – somewhere I’ve been meaning to introduce to Tom for a very long time. It is always lovely to have a walk with my Dad.

The Roch valley, crisscrossed with canals and railways, dotted with mills and factories, is the landscape of my childhood. Shaped by the industrial revolution, and decimated by Thatcher, the mills and factories are now mostly demolished, though some have found new life as distribution centres. Behind my parents’ home runs the Rochdale canal.

I used to play around these towpaths when I was a kid. Not all of the paths were accessible then, as parts of the old waterway had been in-filled and diverted. There were stagnant pools, and shopping trolleys. But there were also foxes and wildflowers. On one legendary occasion, a brave pal went swimming in the canal behind our house, and came out covered in leeches. About a decade ago, the canal was extensively restored, and is once again fully-navigable, by boat or by foot. There are new loch-gates and walkways. . .

It was wonderful to see the canal looking in such good nick, but this wasn’t the point of the journey.

I wanted to climb up from the valley to the beech woods behind Tandle Hill. These woods, planted in the early Nineteenth Century, and now managed by Oldham Council, are where I first discovered my love of walking. They were a beautiful space in which to potter about, and were far enough from home to feel like a real adventure. As one got older, one’s circle widened: you could walk right through the woods, and follow the lanes all the way across to Royton. You could take a tent and camp up there (although you weren’t supposed to).

I remember feeling, as a teenager, that these woods had a cathedral-like majesty, with their grand columns of mature beech forming leaf-lined aisles. They still look like that to me today.

They are at their best in the Autumn, of course, when the hollow behind the hill becomes a shadowy symphony of bronze and gold. But I like it here at any season. My Dad (who keeps a wonderful garden) waxed lyrical about leaf mould. And there was plenty for Bruce to do.

I had always loved Tandle Hill. Then I went away to university and got interested in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. I didn’t know, until then, that Tandle Hill was where the radical weavers of Middleton and Rochdale famously assembled.


(view from Tandle Hill, North, toward Rochdale)

In the words of Samuel Bamford:

“When dusk came, and we could no longer see to work, we jumped from our looms and rushed to the sweet cool air of the fields, or the waste lands, or the green lane sides. We mustered, we fell into rank, we faced, marched, halted, faced about, countermarched, halted again, dressed, and wheeled in quick succession and without confusion; or, in the grey of a fine Sunday morn, we would saunter through the mists, fragrant with the night odour of flowers and new hay, and, ascending Tandle Hill, salute the broad sun, as he climbed from behind the high moors of Saddleworth”*

Looking out from Tandle Hill, Bamford saw the promise of political reform on the Southern horizon


(view South, toward Manchester)

“And, lo! what a world is before me spread,
From the fringed dell to the mountain head!
From the spangled turf, whereon I stand,
To the bend of heaven and the verge of land!
Like an ocean cradle deep it lies;
To the right, to the left, dark hills arise,
And Blackstone-Edge, in his sunless pride,
Doth York from Lancaster divide;
Whilst, on to the south if away we bear,
Oh! what shall bar our progress there?
Nought, save the blending of earth and sky,
Dim, and afar as eternity!”**

Three months after writing these verses, Bamford, and six thousand other working men and women from Middleton and Rochdale, marched South to Manchester, and Peterloo

We had a great walk: just under six miles, 200 metres of ascent, and an awful lot of memories for me. It was chilly and uneven underfoot, but my leg held out reasonably well.

*Bamford, Passages in the life of a radical (1843)
**Bamford, “View from Tandle Hill, May, 1819″ (in Homely Rhymes, 1864 edn)

P.S indeed, yes, that is the most amazing scarf! I intend to tell you about it later.

Tantallon

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The landscape of East Lothian is littered with the ruins of medieval castles. Just a stone’s throw from each other are Crichton, Dirleton, and Hailes (which I note from my archives we visited a while ago at exactly this time of year). But the most impressive is surely Tantallon, which, as we came out from North Berwick yesterday, made a fine location for a walk. It is obviously not a hill, but has challenges of its own. Shall we go inside?

Once the stronghold of the “Red” Douglases, the castle saw its way through many sieges, before Cromwell had a go at it in 1651. The damage was irreparable, but no artillery could destroy the drama of the place.

Positioned high on the headland above the Firth of Forth, Tantallon was protected on one side by masonry built 12 feet thick, and on the others, by the sheer force of the landscape. No one was going to scale those cliffs to breach its walls.

I love the wind-blasted, salt-weathered sandstone.

Within the castle walls, things are darker, cooler; the sound of the waves a little quieter. You can go exploring . . .

. . . and climb some vertigo-inducing stairs . . .

. . .to the top of the curtain wall. . .

. . . where you can enjoy the best view of the Bass Rock there is.

Medieval castles are clearly not built for those with mobility issues, but, I am happy to say, cause minimal problem for scampering dogs who must learn to be good on their lead. Still, I made it up and down those crazy stairways without sticks or a fuss or anything. (Mum – all I can say is remember the clock tower at Dinan – you get the picture).

I often get a thing about a landscape, and I have one for this part of East Lothian that I find quite hard to put my finger on. It is rolling and domesticated, with its hawthorn hedgerows (you only see these in lowland Scotland, of course), its villages and towns, its fertile farmland. But there is something stark and exposed about it too – ruined castles, blasted trees, stubble fields, lone standing stones, volcanic plugs, beating waves – something discomfiting. The landscape is quiet, but with an underlying turmoil, and the sense that the dead do not sleep easy here. But perhaps this is obvious, given its history. I once wrote a poem for Tom about it, but that is another story.

Ok, so enough of this waffling on about castles and suchlike, what about that hat?

You may remember that I wrote about contrast and shade a little while ago, and this hat is an example of how I’ve been testing out some basic ideas. It uses a simple peerie pattern to showcase six colours, in pairs. My main principle when selecting colours (apart from whether I liked them or not) was that there had to be contrast within each pair, and contrast between each pair. There is nothing fancy going on here: the peeries use the pairs in turn, and within each pair, the colours alternate as foreground and background. The diagonal lines of the x’s give the eye a sense of the pattern’s continuity between each peerie stripe, and the crown decreases are integrated into the pattern, though the right slanting k2togs ruined my diagonals in some places – I didn’t notice this till the blocking, and realise it can be remedied by using a skpsso instead. Must give this a try.

This was totally addictive knitting – the pattern is so simple and intuitive that after just one peerie, I didn’t need to look at a chart, and it came together very quickly. The brim uses the same method of a knitted-in lining and i-cord edging as this, making the whole thing very cosy. The funny thing is that it was meant to be a tam – and indeed could still be blocked out as one if I used some pins or a plate – but when I had finished, I became sort of attached to the slightly slouchy beanie shape, and found myself unwilling to tam-ify it. I am thinking that, once I have adjusted the crown decreases, and tested its tam-i-ness, that I might write up the pattern. It is seriously fun to knit, can be made as either tam or beanie, and might also look great using just 2 colours. I used a little bit of orkney angora for the brim lining, and, for the rest, the Alice Starmore Hebridean 2 ply in poppy, whin, selkie, pebble beach, solan goose and machair. I have called it Tantallon, of course, and ravelled it here. Anyway, I have caught the colour bug again, and am already embarked on a further design experiment – whose guiding principle is, like this hat that of keeping it pretty simple.

Last week wasn’t so bad, but had its difficulties, for reasons I may elaborate on tomorrow. I am hoping for a good one to come.

Corstorphine Hill

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Autumn seems to have arrived while we were away. The plums on Jesus’s tree have been turned into jam, the brambles in the local hedgerows are all but gone, and the rosebay willowherb has blown spectacularly to seed. It seemed the right sort of time to ascend Corstorphine, which has, perhaps, the most woodland character of all of Edinburgh’s hills. Corstorphine is really more of a ridge than a hill proper – a glacial fold to the West of the city. The lower slopes of the ridge house the zoo, and the sprawl of housing created as the city expanded over the last century. The upper slopes are home to the remains of a neolithic settlement, and a stone tower of much more recent construction, dedicated, as so many things about these parts, to Sir Walter Scott.

Scott is an appropriate figure to think of on Corstorphine Hill which, with shady nooks of beech and fir, giant slabs of bare dolerite, and brief, tantalising views, is just the sort of place that the folk of his generation might contrive for a picturesque ramble. And like many picturesque spots, Corstorphine can also seem to invite a certain mis-reading. While the woodland looks relatively wild, it is a managed landscape, and until relatively recently, a working one as well. What you see to the right might seem to be the ivy-covered ruins of ancient structures, but are actually stones rejected from the quarry which used to operate on the hillside.

There is an orienteering course set up around the hill, and you can see one of the controls to the left of this obligatory Bruce obedience photo. The last time I came walking on Corstorphine was several years ago after Tom insisted that I do something to improve my navigation skills. I have no sense of direction — that is to say, I suffer from the mistaken and often unshakeable belief that I am going the right way, without doing what one should when there is any doubt at all, viz, consult the map. Tom has become exasperated with this on more than one occasion — I think the final straw was when, in poor visibility on the top of a munro, I absolutely insisted that we follow some footprints I could see in front of me in the snow. After this, he was (understandably) concerned at the prospect of my getting lost on an independent expedition, and I recall that I, grudgingly, and not with a very good grace, managed to find my way about Corstorphine’s woods with a compass and controls.

Today the challenges of Corstorphine were of a rather different kind. I was very grateful for the walking poles — there are lots of steep inclines, and several places in the woods where one has to pick one’s way over slippery rocks and tree roots.
I doubt I’d have been able to manage such manoeuvres even a couple of weeks ago. I think that the swimming has improved stroke-leg’s strength and control considerably. At some point, I shall video myself walking — I’ve not had the gumption to do this so far, as I feel so damn wonky and ungainly — but, as with the swimming, I imagine it may help if I can actually see any small improvements in my gait.

In the dark of the woods, the turning beech leaves seemed almost luminous. . .

. . . and you emerge from the shade to bright glimpses of the city beyond.


The interesting cone that you can see on the horizon to the right of this photo is North Berwick Law — the first hill I intend to ascend after completing Edinburgh’s seven. Anyway, we all had a fine ramble about Corstorphine on a lovely early-Autumn day, and Bruce, as you can imagine, absolutely loves the woods.

Five down, two to go . . .

duathlon

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Hello, everyone! You may remember, when Tom injured his hand rather badly a couple of years ago, that we went on holiday to Madeira – the prime destination of British convalescents for at least a century and a half. Tom’s Dad has dibs on an apartment over there, which, in its lovely coastal location, always makes for a convenient and extremely pleasant break in the funshine. I am fond of most things Portuguese (design and cuisine especially) and there are so many things to recommend Madeira – you may recall that I wrote about the island’s beautiful hand embroidery the last time we were there. On this occasion, the focus was on firmly on recuperation, and I spent the majority of my time walking and attempting to swim. You will note in the photograph above that I am sporting actual shoes – an interesting and welcome development, as my feet have, since Februrary, been clad in giant clod-hopping boots. My left ankle is still quite wonky, of course, but it is now capable of managing in a pair of flats occasionally, which I am pleased about – I like to wear dresses, and a walking boot / dress combo is not really the best look.

Every evening, when the weather had cooled a little, we went walking along Funchal’s coastal promenade. Facing South and West, the promenade showcases a marvelous mosaic path (pictured above), Madeiran flora, and the wide expanse of the Atlantic.

The promenade is steep in places . . .

. . . we met friends along the way . . .


(one of many feral cat buddies)

. . . and admired several glorious sunsets.

I managed about 2 miles every evening, after which I would reward myself with an ice-cream from the circus of value. . .


Yes, I know it’s just a vending machine, but I found the basic idea of a street-side automatic ice-cream dispenser quite exciting. This is not something one sees in Scotland.

During the day, when the weather was hot, I spent the whole time either in the pool, or resting from my efforts. Despite the fact that I was a good, strong swimmer before the stroke, I can tell you that learning to swim again was not easy at all. But it is like everything, I suppose. . . the brain has to figure it all out again from scratch, and this is both difficult and tiring.

When I first got in the pool, my left leg could hardly move at all – it seemed confused by the resistance in the water and wouldn’t follow what the right leg was doing. I began by trying to just walk in the water – my foot balled itself up into an immovable club-like object, and the hip refused to relax and swing – but I managed it eventually. Then I got Tom to support my weight while I tried to teach the leg to kick. This took a long time – it didn’t seem to like moving upwards in the water, and the ankle and foot remained stiff, refusing to relax and work like flippers. All of this was familiar from my experience of learning to walk again; the left leg seemed to prefer doing exactly what the right one was doing; attempts at independent effort in the limb would make it want to just shut down; and movements in other parts of my body would seem to help the left leg move in a similar way (for example, bending my right arm at the elbow would help the left leg bend at the knee). This neuroplasticity stuff really is fascinating – the stroke wiped out my left leg from my brain, and now some other bits of my motor cortex are clearly operating it. Indeed, I wonder whether my left leg and right arm are now permanently wired together – certainly it is curious that I can make the leg do things by moving the arm about.

Though I found it difficult to move about at first, the buoyancy of the water helped in other ways. For example, I found after a while that I could jump about from one leg to the other, and even hop up and down on the left foot – an activity impossible to contemplate on dry land. The jumping and hopping and kicking and walking seemed to have beneficial effect, and in a couple of days I was swimming – unsteadily and wonkily, but swimming nonetheless – across the pool. By having several sessions in the pool a day, and doing a lot of sleeping and resting in between times to allow the brain to make sense of what it had learnt, by the end of a week, I had managed to do this:

If you had seen my first lopsided attempts, you would understand what a massive achievement this is for me. And though my movements may look relatively smooth, I have to say that none of this feels easy. Previously when I swam, I found breast-stroke quite relaxing, but this is certainly not the case now – every movement with the left arm and leg involves a lot of concentrated effort. I am sure, like walking, or knitting, or anything else, that this will improve over time. And it is also worth pointing out that, so far, I’ve been unable to master my favourite stroke, the crawl: the bilateral kicking and reaching seem too much for the left leg and arm to master. I saw an interesting programme before we went away which featured Paralympian swimmer, Liz Johnson. Johnson has cerebal palsy – which has left her with serious damage to the right side of her brain and, like me, impaired mobility on the left side of her body. She similarly finds the in-tandem action of breast-stroke much easier than the bilateral movements of the crawl. I found the short film of her swimming around London extremely moving and inspiring (can’t seem to find it online, unfortunately).

The swimming certainly seems to have had a beneficial effect. There are some small, particular movements that so far, despite my efforts, have eluded my leg and foot. For example, bending my ankle toward me while holding my leg extended has proved extremely difficult: the tendons along the top of my foot (are they called extensors?) don’t seem to be able to manage this, and the foot just flops out to the side. But after a week’s swimming, I was finally able to bend my foot upwards toward me at a neat right angle. Hurrah! I know it may not sound much, but these tendons on the top of the foot seem to affect all sorts of things about my gait and mobility, so this is a big step forward. And really, just about everything about my leg seems that little bit stronger. Needless to say, I intend to add swimming to my exercise repetoire now I am back home.

Anyway, such was my holiday duathlon of daytime swimming and evening walking. Tom reckoned when I factored in the other activities in which I excelled – viz, knitting, eating pasteis and drinking tea – that I actually accomplished a curious daily modern pentathlon . . . more of the knitting shortly. . .

correspondence

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These are my pinboards at the Astley Ainsley Hospital, covered with the wonderful cards and messages you sent. Being in hospital is a difficult business. For me, the dissociating effect of being a patient in an institution was compounded by the fact that I was inhabiting a body which did not seem to be mine at all. But when I was feeling low; when I returned to the ward from a tough physio session or became frustrated with fatigue, there displayed in front of me, were all these messages of support, beautiful cards, and words of encouragement. Hospitals are colourless, featureless places – but my corner of the ward was brightened up with pictures of yarn and textiles, owls and sheep, landscapes and gardens. Your words and images were not just cheering, but have genuinely helped me through the most difficult time in my life thus far.

During the very early phase of my recovery, the care of family and friends was at least as important to me as the medical care that I received. Mel kept turning up with craft supplies, and when I described the particular difficulties that I was experiencing with my hand, devised impromptu tools to help me. She patiently used her hands to demonstrate what I needed to be doing with mine. I attribute my improvements in dexterity, and the fact that I was able to learn to knit and plait again to her.

(Frame, canvas, yarn, pins, plait. From Melanie.)

From further afield, Felix and Liz and Meiko and Harriet reminded me of their friendship with tokens that were both meaningful and heartening. Felix sent me many amazing things, but perhaps the most moving was a cd containing audio recordings of our walks in 2009. I lay in bed unable to move my left side, dreaming of walking, and listening to the sounds of the actual walks I had shared with a friend. It was a deeply emotional experience. Felix wrote a letter to accompany her recordings:

“I have found our walk at Dymchurch. There is a lot of wind & it isn’t a ‘pristine’ recording, but it has the sea & it makes me remember the slightly desolate quality of that beach. It was for me a very happy afternoon. . . I loved sharing quiet with you & walking so peacefully by the sea — you taking your photos & me obsessing on my sounds & the crunchy sand that eventually inspired these socks.”

(photograph of Felix on the beach at Dymchurch)

I am particularly fond of correspondence. Handling and reading eighteenth-century manuscripts is one of the great pleasures of my academic work. Apart from when I am out on the hills with Tom, I am probably at my happiest in an archive among the private and the public worlds that are brought to life in eighteenth-century letters. I love – in a way that is almost certainly fetishistic- the thing-ness of correspondence: the particular way that particular women wrote their letters, the paper they chose, the way they folded up their words into neat self-closing envelopes, the wax seals, the signs of postage or delivery by hand. I also love the stuff that letters contained: seeds and shells sent from one woman to another half-way across the world; a clipping from a magazine; a hand drawn pattern for a collar or embroidered bloom. It is no coincidence to me that my long standing interests in textiles and materiality assumed the level of obsessions after I began spending time with the manuscript collections of the women of eighteenth-century Philadelphia.


(front and back of late eighteenth-century pocket book. Silk embroidery on silk)

I have read many sets of eighteenth-century correspondence between friends who never met. It has always intrigued me how powerful these connections were; how they were established and maintained often over many decades across distances of many thousands of miles. But eighteenth-century friends were brought together in a manner that is really not all that different from the contemporary blogosphere: through shared tastes or interests; through the exchange of skills or information; through debate; through simply speaking to one another. I often find myself thinking about the similarities of eighteenth century paper and contemporary digital networks, but this is perhaps a topic for another time. In any case, the particular way I feel about the materiality of eighteenth century letters made your correspondence especially important and meaningful to me.

(letter from Helena with photographs of a walk at Tynemouth).

Each lunchtime, after a hard morning’s physiotherapy, Morag would turn up at my bedside with an armful of envelopes. Opening your letters and cards, reading and absorbing their contents, and then arranging them around my pinboards, was the singular pleasure and highlight of my hospital day. I was of course sustained by the comments and messages you were leaving here, but there is something particularly satisfying about looking at a stamp or postmark, seeing an address written in someone else’s hand, opening an envelope, and then enjoying a distant friend’s personal choice of words or images. While he lay in bed, Proust famously enjoyed reading the names of stations in the train timetable, and I can understand the particular pleasure of the imaginary journeys he must have taken, the hypnotic effect of the names of unknown towns. A card from Madeleine came with a clear, well-stamped postmark from “White River Junction,” which I found incredibly pleasing. I loved the individually evocative qualities of postcards from Stockholm or Brussels, Zeeland or Albuquerque. You wrote to me about your experiences of the places that you knew I loved (the island of Harris; the English Lakes) or about the spaces and landscapes that were dear to you. You told me of walks you had taken and enjoyed, accompanying your words with pictures of the mountains and trails that your feet and bodies moved along.

(photograph from Valerie of snow-covered trails near Kelowa, British Columbia. Sent with “seeds of encouragement” from the Black Spruce Tree).

Many of you sent me images of plants, vegetables and flowers, or pictures of your own gardens. I loved to read your stories of growth and renewal in landscapes that often seemed impossibly exotic. From Australia, Lydia wrote a marvelous letter about a garden reclaimed from the surrounding desert, with tales of the kangaroos and pigs that were it’s (sometimes unwelcome) night-time visitors.

(Lydia’s garden)

Through your letters and cards, you shared your own interests and obsessions, your identities and characters. When a small envelope turned up from Suzanne, it carried the sender’s personality – her particularly graphic materiality – with it. Everything about that package felt precious to me: a personally stamped postmark (a winged Pegasus) on the outside of the envelope;her neat and distinctive artist’s handwriting; a carefully wrapped and thoughtfully selected group of postcards from her own collection; two tiny hand folded paper cranes in patterned paper; and a hand-made paper-cut card that took my breath away.

(hand made card. from Suzanne).

This was a package fashioned entirely from paper — Suzanne’s envelope contained little of actual material value, but it’s hand-made and deeply personal materiality made its contents of inestimable worth to me. Given that so many of you are talented craftspeople, it was inevitable that some of you would send me hand-made things.

(wolf in sheep’s clothing. from Mary-Jo.)

Some of these things – like Mary-Jo’s wolf in sheep’s clothing – just about killed me and the sheer number of handmade things arranged about my bedside became a talking point among my medical team and the staff on the ward. Despite the fact that I asked you not to send me stuff, I also received chocolates, delicious biscuits, packets of tea (hurrah!), fabric in bolts and fat quarters, amazing skeins of yarn, vintage buttons, tiny plaits, owls of many shapes and sizes, books, magazines, newspaper clippings, necklaces, brooches, and bracelets, handknitted shawls and socks. Under Patricia’s supervision, the nuns of Kersal Hill convent in Salford knitted me an entire nativity scene, complete with donkey, shepherds, wise men, and a tiny Jesus in a knitted crib. Ella sent me Scottish and Northumbrian gansey patterns; Jeanette posted a wee porcupine from New Mexico; Stacy provided me with the trashy crime novels which she knows I like to read. These things were so damned heartening – so full of love and hope – that it was hard for me to feel too low about my own grim situation. You were all thinking of me, all believing that I would be well again. You were bothered enough to put pen to paper, to make or send me things that meant something to you; to share with me your own experiences of sickness and of loss; telling me how you had got through your own difficult times. I drew, and still draw, tremendous strength from all of this.

(small pillow. Hand sewn and embroidered by Helen).

Though my correspondence is longer pinned to a hospital wall, I still want to look at it and enjoy it. I also want to be reminded of how important it was and is to me, and to express my collective thanks to all of you. To this end, I have begun a virtual archive of my post-stroke correspondence, to which I shall upload an image of everything you have sent me (with the exception, of course, of the things that I have eaten). The archive currently contains 92 entries, and I have barely begun uploading. You can search for things by keyword (for example, entering ‘octodog’ into the search form will yield a magazine clipping from Kate K that had me hooting with laughter for quite some time); explore the different classifications of objects by clicking on the words in the category cloud; search for items by the name of the sender or maker; or simply browse through the entire archive in turn by clicking on each image as it appears. I have also written a brief introduction to, and explanation of, the archive which you can read here. I hope you enjoy looking at these things just as I enjoyed receiving them. I also hope that the archive, gathered together as a whole, goes some way towards conveying the tremendous power and encouragement I have drawn from your collective friendship over the past few weeks. Thankyou.


(hand drawn and coloured card from kowajy)

to the windmill

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A few days after the stroke, the physio who came to work with me on Ward 31 discussed setting some goals. She suggested that it would help my focus and motivation if I gave myself mobility targets to aim for. I decided that, by mid April, my goal would be to walk the four miles along the Fylde coast that separate the pier at St Annes from the Lytham Windmill. At that point my left leg was completely dead, and I was getting about in a wheelchair, so it seemed quite an ambitious target. I’ve been thinking about this walk every day since then, and have been working hard on my leg and foot function with it in mind. It is a walk I know well: Tom’s family home is in St Annes, and it has become a sort of ritual with me to walk to Lytham each time we visit. Readers of this blog will have noticed the Fylde coastline popping up in my photographs at regular intervals over the past few years:

The walk I’d planned is a familiar one in a landscape I am very fond of. That bit of Lancashire faces South and West and in all seasons, the light along the coastline is amazing. I love the spooky endless sands; the sea birds; the empty dunes. And with its novelty cafes, its boating lakes, its miniature train and golf course, the walk also has a feel of the civic English seaside which I particularly enjoy . The length of promenade connecting Lytham and St Annes has been well-maintained since the late nineteenth century. There is some fine iron work, as well as some interesting architecture featuring the large pebbles which were once used to supplement the lack of locally available quarried stone.

Anyway, I had decided to attempt my walk on Saturday, joined by my Dad and Tom. I confess I felt incredibly anxious when we set off: I’d been working towards this for many weeks; four miles seemed a very long way; and my leg and I are not really very strong. I’d agreed that if I was feeling weird or exhausted I would stop and try not to feel that I’d let myself down. Tom had parked the car about two miles in near Fairhaven Lake, and was ready to run up to retrieve it. Here we are after leaving the St Annes promenade, passing the trees which you may remember from this post. I began to tire near the lake, but revived myself with a rest and the 35 grams of sugar that I discovered one can of coke contains.

Then it was back to the promenade for another two miles. Under normal circumstances, this walk would be an easy and a pleasant one for me. I would ramble up and down the promenade or along the beach, enjoying the familiar landmarks, pausing often for photographs, people or bird watching, and general taking-in-of-the-view. But on Saturday the walk was the antithesis of leisurely. By this point, I was only thinking about whether or not my muscles and my brain were going to be able to carry me to Lytham.

I have climbed in Glencoe, North Harris, and the Cuillin. I’ve walked hundreds of miles up and down the country, across bog and rock and bracken, braving tricky terrain in terrible weather. I’ve done a fair few difficult walks and climbs, but I would say that those last couple of miles between Fairhaven Lake and Lytham were the hardest that I have ever covered on foot. It was very good to round the corner after Granny’s Bay, and to finally see the windmill in the distance


(you can just see the windmill here to my Dad’s left across the green)

This windmill is a symbolic site for me for many reasons, and is a place associated with many good memories. On Saturday I added to its store of happy personal associations. I hope you will allow me a moment of hubris to say that I’m as proud of making it all the way to that windmill as of anything I’ve ever done.

The last nine weeks have not been easy. I have often felt removed from my life and detached from myself. I am someone who is used to being very busy, and now I have neither a working day, or any leisure time. My hours are filled up with grueling exercise, necessary rest, and the tricky activities associated with just getting through the day. The stroke in itself gave me a lot to deal with, and I’ve also found out about some heart problems and an autoimmune condition I had no idea I had. The long term implications of these things are uncertain: I have felt fearful, and found some things very hard to deal with, but Tom is always there to help me stay focused on the only really pressing business, which is getting well. This singularity of focus; the pay-off I see in small improvements; and the enormous pleasure I feel in getting small things done at all has meant that I’ve stayed largely positive and motivated. I know what depression looks like, and it is interesting to me that I haven’t seen a flicker of it over the past few weeks, even when things have been at their most weird and difficult. Through compromised mobility, I’ve begun to think about my own body, it’s behaviour, and it’s capabilities, very differently. I never thought I would find sickness or injury intriguing, but I have done, and continue to do so. It has been a horrible, insane upheaval, but I have not been alone: I have been moved and encouraged by so many people’s love, friendship and support, particularly that which you have shown through your comments and your correspondence. In fact, over the past few weeks, I have been heartened and reassured by many, many more things than I have been troubled by. I didn’t know I possessed the resolve or resources to get through all this, but I do. I would rather not have been weighed in the balance in this manner, of course, but I am very determined not to be found wanting.

I fear I may be beginning to sound like some sorta motivational speaker, or (worse!) one of Tom’s marathon training manuals, so I shall now stop talking in this vein. Suffice to say, it meant an awful lot for me to make it to that windmill, and it was a moment full of joy when I finally got there. I was physically fine, you’ll be glad to hear, but more than ready for the deluxe ice cream which Tom ran across the green to bring me, olympic torch style. I shall spare you the grim pictures of him racing in brown the following day. . .

a local habitation and a name

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(A familiar walk between St Annes and Lytham).

I have written before about walking in familiar places. As I think about last year’s walking project, I realise just how important the familiar is to the particular pleasures I find in walking. Stomping the same ground is an important way of connecting with a landscape, allowing you to create a personal map of a particular space, and to lend that map your own meanings. And familiar walks map time as well as space: the landscape changes daily with the seasons, and each walk contains the memory of all previous walks along the same trajectory. Last year, I enjoyed walking in some truly spectacular unfamiliar places — the Clisham Ridge, the Black Cuillin — and these walks were thrilling precisely because their spaces were unknown to me and because (in the case of Skye particularly) I felt myself to be far too small and insignificant to impose meaning on a landscape that sublime (There’s a certain kind of excess to the landscape of Skye that I find incredibly compelling, and impossible to articulate).


(Am Bastair).

These unfamiliar walks were challenging, exhilarating, and tremendously awe inspiring. But I think that, on reflection, the most significant walks of 2009 were those where the only map I needed was the one in my head.


(The Pentlands: a chilly walk on familiar ground)

For example, I have walked the same 10 mile circuit of the Pentlands innumerable times. This is a walk I never tire of, always look forward to, and often dream about. If you asked me, I could draw or narrate the trajectory of this walk in precise detail. There is nothing exotic or wild about the Pentlands: they are a small range of small-ish hills a few miles away from where I live. Managed as a regional park, and combining a variety of working landscapes, the Pentlands are very much a public space, used by all the folk of Edinburgh for many different kinds of recreation. They incorporate a fine rollercoaster of tops and valleys, and, on a bright day, afford a prospect of the city and its environs that is pretty much unbeatable. I love the Pentlands because I am close to them, both geographically and emotionally. The way I feel about the familiar ground of these hills has a certain something in it that is proprietorial — but (to me) this impulse is neither acquisitive or selfish because it involves spaces whose pleasures are explicitly public ones.


(a familiar path in the Pentlands)

I think that my proprietorial feelings about the Pentlands are perhaps similar to those that I find suggested in Nigel Peake’s maps. Peake’s maps are idiosyncratic, personal documents of spatial experience. Looking at one of his maps is like being party to a landscape that is coming into being inside someone’s head: these are spaces to which his pen and his perspective have given a local habitation and a name.


(Nigel Peake, Maps, xviii and xix, one mile right and one mile left. © Peake, 2008.)

All maps, of course, are proprietorial — they all represent a claim, in one way or another, to a landscape. Peake’s maps are no different, and they articulate his own particular set of claims (as cyclist, artist, architect, itinerant, inhabitant). But while the abstract and purportedly objective nature of some forms of cartography can alienate the viewer (or walker), Peake’s maps draw us into a landscape by making it seem both intimate (knowable) and enigmatic (unknowable). Looking at one of Peake’s maps is like being let in on something: but then he isn’t giving the whole game away, either. And when any of us walk through our own familiar landscape, when we traverse our own familiar paths, all of us create emotive, mental maps a bit like Peake’s: maps full of meanings, signs and portents that are unreadable to anyone else but us. So I think I like Peake’s maps precisely because they are so personal, intimate, and subjective: because they allow us a glimpse of the innumerable private landscapes that inhabit all public spaces.


(Nigel Peake, Maps, v, Guide to Fields. © Peake, 2008)

Peake’s maps are also records of a time that is prior to the time of his drawing: his maps transform the past into the present by documenting not just space, but the memory of of space. In her own inimitable creative practice, Felix uses sound to explore and excavate this very territory of spatial experience and private memory, and I love the way that she writes about the landscapes and noises of her own familiar paths. And perhaps, to one extent or another, we all feel this impulse to document, map, memorialise, or creatively transform the spaces that are close to us. As I look back over a year of walking, I know that photographs fulfil this function for me — and I have been surprised to discover patterns in photographs of my walks that have remained pretty much unconscious until now. For example, all of my pictures of familiar places and walks seem to share a common focus on a tree or group of trees.

These particular trees are situated in a small copse between the dunes and the road that connects Lytham and St Annes. I walk the same 8 mile circuit every time we visit the Fylde coast, and I always look forward to seeing these trees. They are an unusual sight in a wind-blasted landscape of salt and starr grass, and their twisted forms seem stoic and defiant.

Now, I was aware of my fascination with this particular group of trees, but, as I looked through my photographs, I realised that there was another tree in the Pentlands that I felt similarly about, and which I also looked forward to seeing again and again. . .

. . . and there is a recently planted rowan in the Eildons that I look for every time we walk there. . .

In fact, as I looked through my archives, I found pictures of many other trees with one common feature: they all inhabit the places that are familiar, frequently visited, and very well-loved by Tom and I. Here is one at Kilchoman, on the Isle of Islay:

and here is another near the Bridge of Orchy:

Now, clearly I have a thing about windswept, isolated trees, but I think there’s something more to it than that. All of these trees are the inhabitants of the places that I love, and that I love to walk in. In their different seasonal forms, they bear witness to the changes that occur in these familiar landscapes over the course of the year — changes that I cannot see when absent. Each photograph of a tree fixes my memory of the landscape, and perhaps also stakes my future claim on it: I have to go back again, to see that tree again. This is what I mean when I say that the familiar walk is a proprietorial one: each tree is my claim, as a walker in the landscape, to a space I cannot possess, nor wish to own. But while I am a transient figure passing through a familiar place, the trees are its permanent residents. Perhaps it is the permanence of their connection that I am attempting to fix, or document in my photographs. Either way, these images reveal a take on my fond and familiar walking places that I hadn’t thought about or articulated to myself until now.

More of Nigel Peake’s work is available here as well as from the fantastic Analogue Books.

walking dress

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(Wool jacket, wool sweater, wool hat, wool skirt, goretex gloves, leather boots. Edinburgh, December 2009).

You may (or may not) remember that, during 2009, I set myself a project to walk every day, and to think about walking. I initially attempted to photograph and calculate the distance of my daily walks, but this part of the project quickly fell by the wayside: it is difficult to take any sort of decent photo in the dark or in the rain, and I rapidly became bored with the pedometer — in fact, I found that the things that interested me least about my walking were how fast I was going, or how far I’d been. Other aspects of the project proved very thought provoking, however, and I shall try to group some of these thoughts together here over the next few days.


(wool vest, wool base layer, linen shorts, wool tights, leather boots. Beinn An Dothaidh, April 2009).

One of the issues that has preoccupied me consistently over the course of the project has been appropriate walking garb. In terms of my daily commute, I soon realised that walking everywhere meant abandoning heeled shoes, and selecting outfits that were smart enough to teach in, but comfortable enough to work up a bit of steam in, when rushing to the station and back. But weekends meant a different kind of walking — in the mountains. Over the past twelve months, I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with different garments and different layers of garments, in order to find the most flexible, light, versatile, and comfortable combination to get about in while walking up hill and down dale. It will come as no surprise to you that I favour wool for just about everything but the necessary waterproof shell. I stick this shell (comprising gloves, light jacket, and — at the very last resort — pants) in my backpack, but when the weather is dry, I enjoy comfortable wool-clad walking in all weathers.


(wool headband, wool base layer, wool sweater, cotton shorts, wool tights, wool socks, leather boots. Eildons, October 2009).

You will note that my current walking shorts are cotton, but I do have a pattern to make myself some tweed shorts, and, when I’ve done so, I shall have an entirely woollen walking outfit. Now, you may attribute this to my inordinate love of all things sheepy, but my experience has told me that the warmth, wicking and layering properties of wool really are superior to those of any synthetic fabric. In wool, one does not stink, even after several days in the hills, and nor does one’s clothing produce enough electricity to light a fire when one simply moves about (Tom’s synthetic Ron Hill and Helly combo generates visible bright green sparks). My favourite walkers, like the legendary Alfred Wainwright, often also favoured wool. Wainwright’s son recalled that: “Dad always walked in his shoes and his suits . . . he had four suits, all tweed. His best one was for council meetings. His second best was for work. Third best for walking. Fourth best for gardening.”* Now, Wainwright had a tweedy sort of a mindset, and he was also a bloke. If, toward the end of his walking career, he had wanted to change his woolly walking uniform, he might have selected from the wide range of innovative clothing that was then beginning to be made accessible by the British pioneers of contemporary outdoor wear: men like Mike Parsons of Karrimor , Pete Hutchinson, or those two Newcastle guys who started Berghaus. Things are much more complicated for women, who, in both historical and contemporary terms, have not been served well by the outdoor industry. I have talked about this before, but I feel I must reiterate how consistently frustrated I am by the poor cut and design of women’s commercially manufactured outdoor clothing. It also bothers me that I cannot buy quality merino base layers without them being marked with some sign or other of what is assumed to be the feminine. Are their masculine equivalents decorated with footballs, tractors or other inanely gendered visual cues? No? Then why are all of icebreaker’s women’s merino tops daubed with fookin flowers? Why don’t these (otherwise admirable) manufacturers realise that it is perfectly possible to be feminine out of doors without being pink or ornamental? Size is also an issue. Because I’ve found that manufactured outdoor wear for women is always cut too large, and too poorly, I have resorted in the past to buying boys clothes.** In this respect, my choice of manufactured outdoor clothing is as limited as that of a Victorian woman climber, who would buy boys knickerbockers, to be worn in secret under her long skirts.


(wool vest, wool knickers, wool base layer, wool sweater, wool tights, wool socks, wool hat, wool cowl (thanks, Mel), wool gloves, goretex gloves, Rab pertex and down gillet, cotton shorts, wool skirt, leather boots. Crummock Water, Jan 1st, 2010)

Now, on the flat, or in a tent, it strikes me that a heavy skirt is not necessarily a bad thing. The thick woollen one I am wearing above, for example, is as windproof and cosy as a blanket. It is great for walking around Edinburgh in the current arctic windchill, and is also fantastic when one is emerging from one’s tent in sub-zero temperatures, like those we enjoyed on New Year’s eve. In such circumstances, a wool skirt can protect the legs with a warmth that cannot be beaten. But would I want to wear it out in the hills, or even carry it in my pack up a mountain? No I certainly would not.


Charles Boutibonne, The Mountain Climbers, 1868

Certainly, it is impossible to imagine ascending any sort of hill in the heavy hitched skirts Burberry recommended as a “practical” women’s climbing wear in 1907, let alone the garb worn by the women depicted in Charles Boutibonne’s painting above. While the seated woman is reasonably comfortably dressed in a wool skirt that seems to be hitched, pinned, and divided, the figure standing to her right is clad in a light walking dress of impractical cream hue. This woman is also clearly wearing corsets, as well as a gauze-veiled hat that would be both useless and indeed dangerous in such rocky terrain. Laced in her stays, she gazes with what is perhaps a certain degree of envy at the nimble child (an acceptably infantilised male guide for this all-female party) in his easy-to-wear shirt and breeches. And its a good job the group seem to have abandoned their parasol, because it would be completely useless in that wind. Now, there are things I like about this painting: its drama, its movement, and the way it depicts nineteenth-century women in a wild landscape, looking robust and physically capable (albeit inappropriately dressed). But it is clear that this painting — just like the photographs that depict women climbers during this era — is a sort of staged fantasy. It is all too easy to read nineteenth-century photographs of women’s outdoor activity as direct representations of reality, when, in fact, these images are governed by conventions of genre, and rules of respectability, just like Boutibonne’s painting. That early photographs of skirted women climbers are carefully staged for the public eye is a point is repeatedly made by Mike Parsons and Mary B Rose, whose Invisible on Everest is one of the best-researched and most interesting of the many books I’ve recently read on the subject of women’s walking and climbing (those who are interested in further reading will find a short list at the end of this post). Rose and Parsons describe two worlds for the nineteenth-century woman climber: the public world of the valley, the chalet, staged photographs, and long skirts, and the invisible, private, and immensely enabling world that women experienced in the mountains: a world of enjoyable physical exertion, and clothing that was both comfortable and appropriate for the conditions. Rose and Parsons describe a “complex charade where [women] only appeared to follow dress codes whilst privately flouting them — along with many other conventions — as soon as they were out of the valley.”


(Freda Du Faur)

Freda Du Faur — the first woman to climb New Zealand’s Mount Cook — regarded it as imperative to look feminine as well as physically capable, and was never photographed without a skirt covering her knickerbockers and puttees, as she is seen here. The redoubtable Lizzie Le Blond, meanwhile — who routinely climbed in knickerbockers and stockings — also felt it necessary to don her skirts whenever she was in public view. According to an anecdote relayed by Rebecca Brown, after a strenuous day’s climbing in 1908, Le Blond returned to discover that her skirts (which she had carefully secreted under a cairn) had blown away. She crept back to the village in her knickerbockers, and sent her guide to her hotel to fetch another skirt while she hid herself from view. The guide apparently returned with an evening gown, in which outlandish garb she made her way back to civilisation.*** While many of these otherwise intrepid walking women clearly felt the need to conform to conservative ideals of female respectability where their appearance was concerned, Constance Barnicoat, whose climbing achievements included an ascent of Switzerland’s Grosser Schreckhorn in the winter of 1911, was unusual in her open advocation of climbing in boy’s clothes: “skirts, even the shortest, are almost impracticable. I promptly sent for proper boys boots . . . and generally rigged myself out as much like a boy as possible with sweater, knickers, and puttees to my knees. . . whatever arguments may be urged against a boy’s dress for a woman anywhere within range of civilisation, those arguments do not hold good in such wilds as we went through.”**** Despite what climbing women might have said or did in public, then, in the paradoxically hidden world of the great outdoors they were whipping off their heavy skirts and restricting stays, and shimmmying up mountains in shorts and stockings.


J.F Willumsen, En Bjergbestigerske (1904) (Thankyou, Lise, for the heads-up about this marvellous painting)

For low-level walks, however, I still think a good skirt can be a good thing. Dorothy Wordsworth’s skirts clearly received a lot of outdoor wear (from the amount of walking and mending her journals describe), and I often picture her moving about the landscape in her skirts and stockings, observing Cumbria’s characteristic tricks of the light, and gathering mosses and lichens, whenever I’m in the Lake District. I also love this early twentieth-century Danish depiction of a be-skirted walking woman, which I think suggests a genuine sense of feminine ease and strength in the outdoors. As for myself, I have decided to supplement the deficiencies of contemporary women’s outdoor wear by producing an entirely home-made walking outfit. As well as the forthcoming tweed shorts, I am now in the process of knitting myself a serviceable, warm and hard-wearing base layer (out of some Jamieson and Smith Shetland lace weight). And after that, I intend to take on the interesting task of producing my own pair of knitted longies from scratch (rather than the two pairs of wool tights I’m wearing here)


(wool head band, wool base layer, wool sweater, wool gloves, cotton shorts, two pairs of wool tights. Pentlands, November 2009).

*Hunter Davies, Wainwright: the Biography (1995), 123
**The women’s outdoor garments designed by Sheffield-based Rab Carrington are a happy exception to this rule.
***Rebecca Brown, Women on High: Pioneers of Mountaineering (2002), 50
****Barnicoat, “Where no Woman Ever Went Before” Wide World Magazine (March 1904), 566.

See also:
Arlene Blum, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (1998 ed)
Jill Marie Maclachlan, Peak Performances: Cultural and Autobiographical Constructions of the Victorian Female Mountaineer PhD Thesis, (UBC, 2004)
David Mazel, ed, Mountaineering Women: Stories of Early Climbers (1994)
Mike Parsons and Mary B Rose, Invisible on Everest: Innovation and the Gear Makers (2003) (Thankyou, John, for the recommendation of this title).
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2006 ed)

Recommendations of books any of you have enjoyed about women’s walking, climbing or general outdoor activities would be very welcome indeed.

a mind of winter

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I’ve been to Newcastle and back today. I rose at 5, and walked to the station through yet another blizzard. Abandoned Christmas trees whirled around the empty Edinburgh streets like wintery tumbleweeds. On the train, the sun rose revealing masses of falling snow, white and grey across the border. At Newcastle, the station platform was knee-deep. The city was virtually empty of traffic and very still. Lone pedestrians wobbled around the streets like confused zombie skittles. My walk to work was much slower than usual — at times it was strangely like walking through sand — but it was accompanied by a curious silence which I rather enjoyed. I left early, was lucky on the return journey, and caught a train that had been hideously delayed further south. Out of the windows I saw kids sledging; snow covered allotments; brown jacob sheep stark against a white horizon. The snowy fields flickered from blue to gold in the last of the sunlight. Back in Edinburgh, some of the snow had turned to a sort of grey powder, and some to a sort of black mush, but for the last mile and a half of my familiar path home it was still white and deep and crunchy. The day ended as it had begun — walking through the snow’s tremendous quiet. Amidst the trudging, and the two long train journeys, and the assumed hassle, and everyone else’s manifest irritation with the weather, its been an oddly serene sort of day. I kept thinking of Wallace Stevens’ mind of winter. Perhaps, like his watcher/ listener, I’ve been cold a long time.

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
(1923)