Walking, throughout our history, has been the way to couple the short distances traversed daily at home with longer ones to other places. It is the most basic and natural way of measuring out the ground, and it is hardly surprising that our inherited measures begin with feet and yards (paces) and then jump to miles to make a day’s walk countable: long distances can also be measured in days. Our walking feet register the changing textures of the ground, and covering it step by step informs us of the effort and distance, as well as employing our senses of smell, sight and hearing in the manner for which they evolved. Rain and wind are felt directly, and the sun and stars provide a guide of direction to complement the unfolding of the landscape. We encounter along the way the plants and animals and other people with whom we share our world. Before modern transport, walking was the principal means of getting around, and people thought nothing of covering substantial distances on foot for purposes of daily life. In Lark Rise to Candleford, for example, Flora Thompson writes of children walking 3 miles to school,1 and, in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, one of his informants reports 4 miles, and a woman walked 20 miles to market once a week, and even 4 miles to a spring for water during periods of drought.2 That was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Walking was also a way of crossing countries and even continents. In As I Set Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee describes breaking out of the narrow routine of rural life in Slad at the age of 19, in 1934:
I was going to London, which lay a hundred miles to the east; and it seemed obvious that I should go on foot. But first, as I’d never seen the sea, I thought I’d walk to the coast and find it. This would add another hundred miles to my journey, going by way of Southampton. But I had all the summer and all the time to spend.3
Lee could have taken a bus and then a train, but that would have been expensive, and, at that time of few cars and no motorways, it was still possible to trudge from village to village, finding nourishment and conversation along the way. The land, still farmed by hand, was full of workers who walked about, and so there were tracks or footpaths everywhere. In contrast, walking across the country today is beset with obstacles, the landscape dominated by roads crammed with speeding traffic and no sidepath to retreat to, and pedestrians are banned altogether from motorways and railway lines, with few points at which to cross. Repeating Lee’s walk would need careful planning to avoid such obstructions and to enjoy the few rural bridleways that still exist, open for leisure, without constituting a reliable network.
In 1974, the film director Werner Herzog decided to walk from Munich to Paris, because his heroine, the film critic and expert on Expressionist film, Lotte Eisner, lay dangerously ill. He undertook this journey as an act of personal pilgrimage that he believed would save her life. He kept a diary, later published as Vom Gehen im Eis, describing his experiences along the way, interrupted by strange encounters, and ironically remarking, ‘Only if it was a film would I take it all as true’.4 The author of Aguirre the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and several documentaries about determined and eccentric people has always been interested in the wild and in human beings struggling against nature, but his walk across modern Europe revealed not just a battle against the winter elements. It was a section taken through a discordant and ruptured landscape, a secret landscape no longer intended to be seen by anyone. This has some parallels with the work of the architect–filmmaker Patrick Keiller (see pp. 244–50), whose Robinson in Space, a modern homage to Daniel Defoe, traverses the British landscape to assemble an unlikely juxtaposition of places and functions that remind us how much of an illusion is the cosy image of old-world Britain that we think we know.5
Herzog started by picking his way across the land guided by a compass, though he was soon compelled to take detours. We all have to know where we are going, as it is dangerous to get lost, especially if lacking food and water. The modern world’s ubiquitous paths and signposts are recent, as is even the subdivision of the landscape into fields and woods. Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter-gatherers, without roads, fields or footpaths, apart from tracks trodden clear by frequent human or animal use. The Australian Aborigines provide an example of such an existence. They survived, before European intervention, in a relatively barren landscape at very low densities, and yet maintained contacts over vast distances through marriage customs that compelled distant alliances and mutual respect. They were able to navigate right across their continent by relying on a socially constructed interpretation of the landscape that was mapped in symbol and performance. It was learned at initiation by the ‘walkabout’, a season-long tour on foot, visiting distant groups.6 The Aborigines’ reading of the landscape identified hills or waterholes as having been formed by ‘Dreamtime’ heroes, giant animals from whom they thought themselves descended, and whom they revered in holy cults. Their mythology, passed down in song, dance and drama, efficiently tied knowledge of plants and animals to their reading of the landscape and landmarks. It was, therefore, both a practical knowledge, concerning hunting, rivals and predators, and a way to map a kind of terrain that would appear to us wild and chaotic. Their uncanny ability to read tracks, to sense direction and to recognise the personal footprints of every tribe member provoked in some European observers the claim that they had ‘a sixth sense’, but it is surely enough to recognise a highly developed, but now unfamiliar, skill. Over the hundreds of thousands of years that modern humans have existed, they have mostly been hunters and gatherers, evolving presumably with this kind of skill to understand and interact with the landscape.7
Knowing where we are is a skill we take so much for granted that it is only when it is lost through brain disorders, or when we travel to very unfamiliar places, or when we try to design robots to do it, that we see it as a problem. Yet many of us can fly off to a foreign city, walk the streets for an hour or two and find our way back to our hotel, even without a map. It is more difficult when the cityscape is repetitive, but we are able to pick out representative landmarks and to remember them as a hierarchy and in sequence. London cab drivers are trained to recall an extraordinarily large number of streets, and the brain area involved in such memories expands in consequence.8 A telling feature of spatial memory is that it is used by memory-feat competitors, who set in their minds an image of a remembered building or landscape, and then imagine placing the items to be remembered in its rooms or along its paths, so classifying them in a retrievable way.9 In a similar manner, Marcel Proust, when retrieving his childhood in his famous novel about memory, A la recherche du temps perdu, structured it around a pair of family walks. The title of the first section, Du côté de chez Swann, is usually translated Swann’s Way, but this hardly reveals that it was a walk, and furthermore one of two alternatives:
There were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also ‘Swann’s way’ because to get there one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann’s estate, and the ‘Guermantes way’ . . . Since my father used always to speak of the ‘Méséglise way’ as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the ‘Guermantes way’ as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belong only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me a precious thing exemplifying the special excellence of the whole, while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal river landscape, were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets that run past the walls of a theatre. But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind that not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes.10
Proust’s walks were contemplative walks, regularly taken, sometimes with other family members, sometimes alone, but returning generally within a few hours to their starting point. Accounts of such walks taken for recreation go back at least to classical times, and the idea that walking helps thought as a complement to philosophy was well established among the ancient Greeks, reflected in the very names of the Peripatetics and the Stoics, and even connected with the origins of theory in theoria, ‘a form of travel that was a cross between tourism and pilgrimage’.11 Heine claimed that Kant’s walks were so regular that people could set their watches by him, and Nietzsche castigated Flaubert for sitting at his desk, claiming that, ‘only peripatetic thoughts have any value’.12 Whether it is the exercise or rhythm of the walking that stimulates the brain, or whether the walk helps by charting a narrative parallel to the progress of thought, walking does seem to have had a widespread reputation as an accompaniment to thinking, good conversation and solving problems.
If philosophers ever solved problems on horseback, they have been remarkably silent about it, and the remark of Chinese politician Lu Jia that one can conquer a country on horseback but not rule it from a horse just confirms the contradiction between the active and the contemplative life.13 Concentrated thinking on horseback seems unlikely, as the landscape passes so much faster than on foot, and so much more attention has to be paid to keeping one’s balance and controlling the animal, let alone finding the way and looking for obstacles. Conversation also is more difficult. Being on or in a vehicle progressively removes sense impressions of walking at one’s own speed, cutting off the feedback of the haptic sense of movement and then isolating smell and sound and proximity, but it can at least open a changing view and allow a passenger ease and relaxation. So, vehicles do not necessarily negate the experience of travel: they may even accentuate the sense of progress and the presence of landmarks. Litters and sedan chairs have existed for millennia, and upper-class Chinese houses had special courts and halls for visitors to descend from them.14 Haussmann’s Paris boulevards, smashing through the medieval city fabric, improved policing and communications as intended, but they also made space for the horse-drawn carriage, and for a city thereafter best perceived from the carriage window at the carriage’s pace, a city that simultaneously became larger and more boring to traverse on foot.15 In Britain, the nineteenth-century country house, into which so much imperial wealth was sunk, had lodges to mark the edge of its territory, and the drive to the house was not kept short for ease of pedestrians, but lengthened to increase the impression of the estate seen from a horse-drawn carriage and to allow the unfolding of carefully contrived views. Despite the importance given to his walks, even Proust was not averse to a ride. Having noted the presence of church steeples in the course of his regular walks around Combray, he sees them in an entirely new way when caught out late and given an unexpected lift by the local doctor, in his pony and trap:
At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure which was unlike any other, on catching sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, bathed in the setting sun and constantly changing their position with the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road, and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared nonetheless to be standing by their side. In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, their shifting lines, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the core of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal. The steeples appeared so distant, and we seemed to be getting so little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the pleasure I had felt on seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to discover that reason seemed to me irksome; I wanted to store away in my mind those shifting, sunlit planes, and for the time being to think of them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples would have gone to join the medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds I had noticed and set apart because of the obscure pleasure they had given me which I had never fully explored.16
The text runs on, and Proust reflects further on the impression, adding a glimpse of the steeples, black against the sky, as he and the doctor begin their return journey. Then, he describes how he felt impelled to write of his experience and includes the resulting text on the next page. Sitting up on the driving seat of the trap, beside the doctor, he had a full and constant view forward, without having to keep an eye on the ground and without the interruptions of the bobbing of his head: furthermore, he was higher up for a better view, and the vehicle brought them forward at surprising and unaccustomed speed. That a full ‘Proustian moment’ could arise out of a view from a vehicle reveals the experience as by no means devalued in relation to walking, despite lack of contact with the ground and lack of control of movement. In fact, being conveyed rather than conveying oneself can free the self for a different kind of contemplation.
Railway trains linked cities and changed the scale of continents, and also the understanding of time. They allowed hitherto unseen views of the countryside, but they had to stay on their rails, dividing the landscape with a new kind of visual corridor. Even so, the experience could be pleasantly contemplative, even allowing enjoyment of the very detachment it brought. Philip Larkin wrote one of his most famous poems, ‘Whitsun weddings’, about a view from a railway carriage,17 and journeys by rail have often carried a degree of romantic excitement. It is not for nothing that the architect Hugo Häring, writing in the 1920s on the functions of windows, referred to a specialised viewing window for a house as a Pullmanwagenfenster.18 Even though trains have become faster, better insulated and air conditioned, restricting experience to the visual alone, and even though high-speed lines are routed less for view than for straightness and speed, the changing panorama remains impressive. In contrast, underground trains in cities, blind as moles, have reinvented the city as a series of locations that grow out from the places of emergence, so that it becomes a pleasant surprise to discover on foot the point of transition between one station’s territory and the next, reassembling in one’s mind the space of the city. Like ascent in a lift, though, the real distance travelled by tube is difficult to gauge.
The advent of the motor car brought a wonderful freedom to choose one’s own path through the city and enjoy it at speed in one’s own time, until too many others started to do the same. It also allowed free touring in the open country, enjoying villages and views, stopping and moving on at will. The term Gran Turismo, shortened to GT, was applied to elegant and powerful cars with which to fulfil this fantasy of mobility and exploration, in desperation recently extended by taking to 4 × 4s across moor and field.19 For normal roads have become clogged, ordinary driving a bore. Driving is even a risk, for a car requires constant attention to the road ahead and coordination of the controls, and it is dangerous to attempt a phone call, let alone to indulge in contemplation or a reverie.20 The view of the landscape has also deteriorated, for traffic jams prompted the invention of bypasses and ring roads, breaking up the ancient route from town to town. Instead, towns were altogether avoided, to let motorways link cities at headlong speed. They were a wonder for a few decades, but gradually the whole landscape has become knotted up with them, and the old road networks have been broken up and abolished. The direction one takes, heading west to go east or north to go south, is no longer related to the points of the compass, the sun or what we can see and recognise. Just in time, satellite navigation has arrived, so that we need no longer worry about how to get there or what kind of country we pass through on the way, but will it worry us not to know, in the old way, where we are?
Within the city, traffic planning caused the divorce of commerce from communication, breaking the relationship that had been the very essence of the city, although, in large cities, pedestrianisation has revalidated progress on foot, while exacerbating problems of parking and servicing. The walked city is often now a special enclave of historic fabric, commerce and entertainment, but it has also been artificially reinvented in the form of the shopping mall, a substitute that lacks its uncommercial elements. Pedestrianisation preserves the walker’s rights, but it poses an urgent problem of how and where to rejoin the car, for roads and walkers do not mix, and, where cars arrive, they must be parked, which usually means a desert of tarmac and a lack of clear pedestrian routes, because people have to park in so many different places. Seldom have city parking silos been anything other than bleak storage racks, often portrayed as places of crime, and leaving the architect the problem of making a façade where there is nothing to reveal.
As in the train, exciting views can be perceived from aircraft, but people are increasingly less interested in looking out of the windows than at the movie screen now universally provided to ‘entertain’ them. It must be admitted too, that, although the large-scale topography can be breathtaking, making out what is happening on the ground from 35,000 feet while travelling at 500 miles an hour gives only the slimmest degree of contact. Transition into and out of vehicles has never been so protracted as with air travel. Railway stations were the nineteenth-century gates to big cities, but airports lie far outside, becoming the most universal, international kinds of place, and generating some of the largest buildings on earth. They are driven largely by the exigencies of getting you to the distant aircraft, while processing you through security checks and segregating you from unprocessed others, and there has been no easy option but to cover substantial distances on foot. Yet this is not usually a pleasant or an enlightening experience. It seems to lack Proustian moments, and its atmosphere is too urgent for contemplation. Jacques Tati, in his satirical film Playtime, chose it 40 years ago to represent the worst and most confusing aspects of modern life, and Marc Augé has singled it out as a key example of a ‘non-place’,21 and yet airports have become substitutes for the capitals they serve and are rapidly turning into cities in their own right. Let us hope they can yet develop some more convincing delights.
1 Thompson 1954, p. 184.
2 All these distances include both directions, there and back. Blythe 1972, pp. 36, 50.
3 Lee 1971, p. 12.
4 Herzog 2009 (original German edition 1978)
5 There is also a book: Keiller 1999.
6 Spencer and Gillen 1899. Chatwin 1986.
7 Opinions vary, as evidence is thin, but the consensus is that we had language at least 100,000 years ago, before we dispersed across the globe, that the brain had reached more or less its current size by 500,000 years ago, and that we used fire for processing food from about 800,000 years ago. On genes, languages and migrations, see Cavalli-Sforza 2001.
8 See: www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=london-taxi-memory (accessed 3 February 2013).
9 Draaisma 2004, Ch. 7.
10 Proust 1983, pp. 146–7.
11 O’Sullivan 2011, p. 98.
12 Ibid., p. 4.
13 Minister in the Han Dynasty, around 200 BCE; see: www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Han/personslujia.html (accessed 14 August 2014).
14 For description of an arrival by sedan, see Xueqin 1973, pp. 87, 88.
15 Girouard 1985.
16 Proust, pp. 196–7.
17 Larkin 1964.
18 Blundell Jones 1999, p. 79.
19 An early 2013 edition of the notorious BBC television programme Top Gear took the new Range Rover, price £72,000, to the Nedava Desert to test it against a military vehicle, the presenters admitting that the 5.5-litre engine was ‘a bit thirsty’, and they drove through a swamp apparently without first checking the depth. Meanwhile, in the Peak National Park in the UK, local residents are trying to stop off-roaders because of the disturbance they cause and the damage that their fun causes to the landscape.
20 In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt provides a whole chapter on driving psychology: ‘How our eyes and minds betray us on the road’, Vanderbilt 2008, pp. 74–101.
21 Augé 1995.