GLOBETROTTER
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDRÉS LOZANO/FOLIO ART
SOMETHING TO DECLARE:
Sometimes the old ways are the bestI was once ‘leading’ a walk somewhere in southern
England. I say ‘leading’; people were following, but
I wasn’t entirely sure where we were going. If there
was a sense of purpose, it was to be found in the ground itself;
the way it tipped and tended, the scoring and bunching of
footways at junctions. If there was a leader, it was the land. We
were on the South Downs Way, heading inland. We couldn’t
really have gone wrong, but somehow managed to give
ourselves a fair intimation of lostness. Being mapless helped.
When the trees ended and the ground rose to give us a sighting
of not one but two churches, someone (not me, I swear) started
spouting about how we were on a ley line and would be OK.
What we were treading was one of the ancient chalk
ways that run like pedestrian motorways across the landscape
and once bore pilgrims between the centres of Winchester and
Canterbury. Old ways indeed, and to walk them is to be
reminded that they themselves have their own narrative
journeys. As do we. Lately, I find myself nostalgic for the
simple pleasure of the unexpected, the courting of serendipity.
This, it seems, is as much under threat from the forces of
convenience and technological advance as is the old Green
Belt from house-building. We are in a time when algorithms
appear to carve inroads through the old provinces of
randomness and chance.
I got lost the other day – seriously if safely lost in a Home
Counties sort of way. Low planes approached Heathrow, but all
around me was the ploshy green waterworld of Wraysbury and
its reservoir. Don’t ask me how I got here, I couldn’t tell you,
beyond saying that I was looking for Magna Carta Island and
had somehow strayed into this strange, compact vastness.
Getting clear of it at last, I came across the most extraordinary
tree I have ever seen: a tree older than age and stouter than
Henry VIII; still in leaf, but with inner branches looking like
stone. I had run into the fabled Ankerwycke Yew, at least one
millennium old, some say two; certainly around
when King John was putting pen to parchment.
Long live the fruits of unintended truancy.ALAN FRANKS is the author of Going Over, a novella about
crossing northern England on foot. His play Looking At
Lucian opens at the Theatre Royal, Bath, on 3 August.co.jp/shiki-shima). Meanwhile, the Belmond Andean Explorer in Peru claims to be South America’s first luxury train service, offering passengers superlative
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