Walking the Pilgrims’ Way day 2: Dartford to Wrotham

17 miles

Walking has always been quite a big part of my life, and Graham and I would also walk quite a lot together. Mostly this took the form of walking into town to go to the pictures, a traipse which routinely took us about 35 minutes.

Not that long after we first got together he invited me to a New Year’s Day family gathering at his Aunt Agnes’ house on the south side of Glasgow. Apparently he traditionally walked to this event so that’s what we did as a couple. It took about two and a half hours through the icy and quiet streets, from the Victorian tenements of the West End, across the river Clyde, through the post-industrial, post slum clearance landscapes of the Gorbals, to the mid century suburbs of Toryglen. On the way Graham was excited to incorporate a wee detour to gaze upon “the first fully reinforced concrete building”, the 1904 Sentinel Engineering Works in Polmadie, built by Archibald Leitch who is better known for designing football stadiums. All of which made me think ‘yes, this is definitely the man for me’!

Walking as a response to shock and loss is explored in The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane where he discusses the retreat to the countryside, to nature and belonging, by men scarred physically and mentally by the First World War. He continues:

“Other people, traumatised into superstition by the war, took to the paths in search of ghosts – setting out on the tracks of the lost and left behind. Old paths became mediums in two senses: means of communion as well as means of motion. Interest built in the ghostliness of these ghost-lines. The convivial pilgrimages described by Chaucer became tinged with a morbid historicism: spectres stepped from the verge or hedge, offering brief address…. I’ve read them all, these old-way wanderers, and often I’ve encountered versions of the same beguiling idea: that walking such paths might lead you – in [ornithologist W. H] Hudson’s phrase – to ‘slip back out of this modern world’. Repeatedly, these wanderers spoke of the tingle of connection, of walking as seance, of voices heard along the way.”

It’s close to Celtic mythology of ‘thin places’ , an idea that resonates through pilgrimage literature. That there are some places – or states of being – where the boundaries between past and present, this world and the next, the physical and the ethereal, are thinner, and thus easier to step, or slip, through.

It’s a concept that I – somewhat unconsciously until recently – have lived with all my life, having grown up reading books like The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper in which places co-exist in many eras, and magic grows stronger on the old roads and during ancient festivals. Indeed anyone familiar with many of the classics of children’s literature will be intimately acquainted with the beguiling idea of slippage between time and place: Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Chronicles of Narnia, Elidor, The Children of Greene Knowe, Alice in Wonderland, Rosemary Sutcliff’s Arthurian legends, and later, The Golden Compass series by Philip Pullman.

Back in my physical world, Day Two on the Pilgrims’ Way took me from Dartford, along the gently bubbling Darent River, to some delightfully pretty villages: South Darenth, Farningham, Eynsford, Shoreham, Otford, Kemsing and Wrotham.

Each village has an ancient church, some of which date back to Saxon or Norman times. And old graveyards, where I was very taken with a style of gravestone I’ve never seen before with a large headstone, from which juts out a narrow, person-long rounded stone, occasionally butted by a smaller ‘headstone’ – or rather a ‘foot stone’ – at the far end.

Graham and I loved a graveyard. It was a rare holiday indeed when we didn’t visit a cemetery. I don’t find them sad places. There may be sad stories but there’s lots of love and life as well. In A Tomb With A View, Peter Ross explains that one of the central ideas of his book “is that the dead and the living are close kin.  We think of them, visit them, sometimes speak with them, and will, one day, join them.” (p xiv).

I’m not sure that, for me, graveyards are thin places. Quiet and contemplative, yes, but in a way they’re too companionable to let you feel you could slip unseen into another world. They are really places to remind us of the importance of the here and now.

“Better, though, to take one’s cue from the tone of these old stones, the words of love carved by careful hands – now bones themselves – into granite and marbles so long ago. ‘Rest in peace’ has become a cliche, but its egalitarian message retains real power, especially at a time when tolerance and compassion seem, across the world, under threat. This is what graveyards can teach us: to extend to the living the kindness and respect that we lavish on the dead.”
_{A Tomb with a View. The stories and Glories of Graveyards, Peter Ross, 2020, p 57}

Graham has no grave. In the modern way, he was cremated and we scattered the ashes. But there are, of course, physical reminders of him everywhere in the flat we shared and in that new ethereal realm, the internet, where his digital presence still lurks, undeleted.

Sometimes though there’s a jolting, shocking moment that feels like an uncanny message. When I went to re-watch A Canterbury Tale before this pilgrimage, I opened the DVD player only to find that there was a CD in it already, left by Graham. It was an album by Kris Drever called Where The World Is Thin. 

• See all of this day’s photos on Flickr
• Next post: Walking the Pilgrims’ Way day 3: Wrotham to Aylesford
• Preceding post: Walking the Pilgrims’ Way day 1: Southwark to Dartford