22 miles
I have to start the diary of day 4 with heartfelt gratitude to Ralph Blake for being a lovely person. Such a lovely person that his family and friends put a bench under a beautiful big tree to honour him after his death. Ralph’s Bench appeared like a miracle for me four miles from the end of a 22-mile hike. It could not have been more welcome. I could gently ease off my soaking wet boots, carefully waggle my damp and contorted feet, conduct a review of my aches and pains, noting all the new ones, and generally feel a bit sorry for myself.
On these kind of days you just become a walking machine. It’s the only way to get through the miles, especially after getting drenched repeatedly. Your legs go on automatic, so much so that it’s actually hard to stop them; they forget how to stand still.
Walking is grounding; you literally have your feet upon the earth. (Rather too much contact with the earth as my plaster-bedecked toes can bear witness). Yet walking an ancient pathway is also untethering. Every day you are repeating, mirroring, the footsteps of those who have gone before you, travelling over the same ground as ghosts, wondering if they suffered the same pains and doubts as you do now.
In Underland Robert MacFarlane investigates the hollows in the earth beneath our feet, and he introduced me to this beautiful idea of an otherworld, a mirror world under our feet and moving in concord with us.
“I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’. The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole.”
Robert Macfarlane, Underworld, 2020, p 38
In A Canterbury Tale, when village bigwig Thomas Colpeper gives a lecture on local history he entreats audience to lie down in the fields of Kent to feel the earth beneath them and watch the clouds above them. And if they are lucky they might hear the hooves of horses, the jangling of bridles, and the chatter of pilgrims from 600 years ago.
I didn’t hear echoes from history on the Pilgrims’ Way but the past was there to be seen, especially the beautiful old oast houses used for drying hops which have now been turned into homes, while vineyards have replaced the hop fields. This is a productive landscape, and a busy landscape; you’re never far from the sound of traffic or a cluster of houses.
Yet the Pilgrims’ Way is a tiny thread winding through these busy spaces, often connecting villages and roads via the in-between, overlooked spaces. The path frequently skirts the edges of fields, slips inside hedgerows, and squeezes, single file, in borrowed space between garden fences and roads.
To me the Pilgrims’ Way feels a little like an unseen world – a little dark, a little hidden, and secreted alongside the wide open spaces of farms, factories, motorways, and homes.
Similarly the underlands are places of concealment, which sometimes we’ve forgotten or often never really tried to get to know at all.
“The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful…. Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.”
Robert Macfarlane, Underworld, 2020, p 8
The Pilgrims’ Way is quietly ‘unproductive’ space; an otherness to the quotidian. Somewhere that’s alive but which is defiantly fallow.
What I’m doing this week is also non-productive. Though the journey will get me from London to Canterbury there are faster, easier ways to get between those two places! And though it’s thinking time, away from work, I don’t need to be walking for days to get that. And though it’s demanding physically, again there are plenty of ways to get exercise without mangling my poor feet to such an extent.
So walking the hidden world of the Pilgrims’ Way is to enter a time and state of lying fallow. Is that the true nature of pilgrimage?
Lucy Janes 