Past the lone oak tree.
Over the stream.
Downhill through the wood until you come to a kissing gate.
I followed the directions like breadcrumbs. One after the other, through the woods, down to the road, between an unmarked footpath bordered by hedgerows. A song of prepositions and fairy-tale nouns.
Eyes peeled, ears open, I did as I was told: ignored the bridleway on the left and forked right instead, past the cottages at two o’clock. Made approximate guesses as to how far 750 metres might be. There was a strange thrill in tracing this thread, a very low-stakes detective hunt.
Because when you follow instructions, you have to notice things. There is an element of doubt as you decide whether what you see corresponds to the instructions you have been given. Is that definitely an oak tree I am passing in the field? By ‘the next left’, does it mean this gap through the trees or that one? And there is a neat satisfaction in having got it right, in knowing that both your and the guide’s subjective assessments of the landscape overlap, that you are one step closer to the end. Orienteering, a treasure hunt, map-reading — call it what you will, but ultimately it is a game of trusting your own judgement, an unfamiliar feeling when so many of us are used to taking our navigational cues from a dotted blue line on a screen.
A furrow of mud and stone, the path led up through the trees, the matted hedgerows of bramble and hazel thickening either side. I could feel the sound of the distant road slowly letting go of me, the air becoming so still as to hear the beating of a blue tit’s wings as it flitted from tree to tree.
A walk can have many causes — exercise, to clear one’s head, fresh air — but when you are forced to study your surroundings, it can be something more. Details and textures emerge: the knowledge that the black bird over there is not a crow, but a jackdaw, or that those fruits growing on the blackthorn are sloes — yes, sloes as in sloe gin! — or that a nettle sting needs only the soothing touch of a red-veined dock leaf growing nearby. The place becomes alive as you see in real life the things of which you had only heard. It is like learning a language and then seeing it abroad and even understanding it. A sudden symmetry, loose ends finding one another.
And come they surely did come, those pilgrims: they, too, must have wished they were an eagle so they could swoop over the valley and see with sharp eyes what lay in store
I emerged from the trees, passed through a gate and into a steep field. The slope spread out, dropping down in a pale, shimmering green to the town I had left earlier that morning, its roofs and spires cradled in the hand of the hills. On the other side of the valley, the land rose again — uneven at first, unsteady and hopeful as if learning to fly, before soaring up into a great black shoulder of a hill — the highest in the county — crowned with the dark tufts of fir trees. At the summit an observation tower stood in a clearing, a tiny rectangle in the distance. Someone was no doubt standing there, too, enjoying a complete reflection of what I was seeing, but perhaps having very similar thoughts.
Beside me, a bench etched with the words ‘Pilgrims come wind, come weather’ recalled a line from Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress. A deliberate inscription — I was standing on an ancient pilgrimage route, cutting across the hillside as a faint line through the grass. And come they surely did, those pilgrims: whether cold and sore or hot and broken, their feet rough with the dirt of perseverance, they, too, must have looked at the same landscape and stopped to appreciate its beauty. In the peace they might have mulled over the purpose of their journey. Doubted it, even. Wondered what it was all for, this life of devotion, and where it led, and wished they were an eagle so they could swoop over the valley and see with sharp eyes where the path was taking them and what lay in store.
Few of us can contemplate walking hundreds of miles to pray before the relics of a saint today, but I do not think much has changed. Walking has lost little, if any, of its inherently spiritual qualities. The peace and quiet, the time to think, the knowledge that you are crossing nature’s palm, truly immersed in the world. The sound of the wind, the shifting light, the footprints left behind in tracts of thawing mud.
Perhaps we are all pilgrims, and that only some of us wear walking boots. We are all following a path somewhere, in search of meaning and purpose. Only we have allowed our lives to become so cluttered with distractions that there are few opportunities to genuinely stop and think about where we might be going.
When I was eleven, my teachers arranged a sort of Oscars ceremony for our leaving disco at the end of primary school. I won the award for Most Likely to Be a Millionaire. As I got up to collect it in my flame shirt and jeans (it was 2004), I was excited even then that someone older and wiser had foreseen something for me. Suddenly I had a direction.
Two decades later, the plastic statuette is in a box somewhere and I am — shockingly — yet to make a million pounds. Because the teachers never told me how or for what I would be a millionaire, only that they thought I was more likely than my peers, which I can now see meant bugger all. And in the fogs of adolescence, technology, sex, university, work, I had let myself lose sight of the polestar. Most of my life has been a well-meaning but aimless wander in that direction, I suppose, filled with vague ambitions but no real idea of where I was going, tempted by this, that and the other.
Modern life is saturated with choice. It allows us to go virtually anywhere and tells us we can be or do anything we want. For various reasons I am less and less sure this is a good thing, partly because it overwhelms us. We have been told that we can take any path we choose through this world, that they are all open to us — but we freeze with fear upon realising the reality is far from thus. We cannot be or do everything we thought we could. We cannot follow every path through the forest. There is every chance we may pick a long and twisting path, full of fruit and flowers, only to end up where we started, or a short track that bypasses the challenging middle and leads us straight into the fields of Eden — only to be haunted by the ghost of what could have been. There is no way to know.
I followed the track down the hillside, past a dominion of vines, whose gnarled, bare trunks looked like hands reaching from the underworld. Another crossroads. One path led back uphill, another banked around a hedgerow and out of sight, the third went downhill through the vineyard. At that point I could have gone anywhere — including obeying the rule written out for me — but the choice, really, was mine.
The prospect of making a mistake and wasting time can be frightening. We hate the idea of error. But in life’s maze, it is a rare joy to be able to trust the words of someone who has trodden those very paths, who can reassure you this is the way. Even better if there is a million pounds at the end of it.