THOSE WHO HAVE travelled with me before – along The Green Road into the Trees or through any of the South American books – know what to expect. But others might require a health warning on the packet.
This book is unashamedly personal. It is more interested in people than landscape, and in farmers than animals. Those wanting a pure bit of ‘nature writing’ should look elsewhere – and without great difficulty, as there has been a plethora of such books over the last few years.
Writers’ courses always tell you that you should make a ‘contract’ with the reader. While I won’t bother you with all my clauses, one is significant – that I will try to avoid bedazzling you with rare botanical names or birds you’ve never heard of.
There is always a sort of reader who needs to join up the dots: to know exactly how you get from A to B, where you spent the night, what you had for breakfast and the price of a coffee in Kirkby Stephen. They should not buy this book just to get from coast to coast. There are plenty of suitable guidebooks which will do that job for you. Indeed, I would go further – this book might actually get you lost.
It is perfectly possible to drive across the north of England very fast – say, on the A66 past Barnard Castle, as long as the Appleby Horse Fair isn’t taking place. Even on a bike it can be done in two days, as my friend Jeff Ford has done. But this is a more discursive journey that goes at mule pace, chats over gates to farmers and takes in byways as well as highways. I have tried to unpick the threads of what is really happening in the rapidly changing countryside, far from London and the metropolitan conversation.
Nothing beats walking for taking the temperature of a country. I was inspired to make this journey by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. As Stevenson wrote:
The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
There is a song I found useful to sing while travelling and the reader might like to hum it too if at any point they need accompaniment. For some reason, Jethro never seemed to appreciate it.
Oh I got plenty o’ nothing,
An’ nothing’s plenty fo’ me.
I got no car, got no mule,
I got no misery.
‘I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’, as sung
by Frank Sinatra