WALKING, as both Rousseau and Thoreau recognised, is a form of meditation. More, it is a form of writing. Our favoured paths – often not the official ones – are a kind of script across the landscape, readable to others, so that even a planet shared with many other species finds room for a library of human movement. And beyond that again, a particular kind of solidarity. Walking in someone else’s shoes is a metaphor for the act of empathy that is at the heart of all imaginative writing, which is not quite such a sedentary occupation as those who only read or who are indifferent to books seem to believe.
The key to Linda Cracknell’s beautiful, effortful book is in its title and subtitle, for the journeys she takes – barefoot in Kenya, booted in Spain and Scotland, weighed down with both pack and narrative in Norway – are always in the footsteps of another. This isn’t just another poetic outdoors book meant to convey the feel of remote places to armchair climbers, but a meditation on memory and on the complex intertwining of place, person and the act of recording.
It needs to be described as effortful as well as beautiful because time and again, and whether as a lone walker or in the apparent safety of a group, Cracknell puts herself at risk. She has to be flown home following a tumble on scree in Norway which nearly pulps that engaging, open face. There is a message in this. The landscape bites back in the way that, for a writer, language bites back. The slogging three-point plod one has to make through snow with a pole or iceaxe is exactly how it feels when the words won’t come. The inadequacy of any verbal description can be felt in the gap between a heart-stopping morning or sunset and the chafe and stink of the walker who is experiencing it.
Part of Cracknell’s purpose is to revisit written landscapes linked to particular writers. Of four Scottish walks – the other three are from Newtonmore to Kirkmichael in the Cairngorms, along the paths of the Birks of Aberfeldy, and a drove road from Perthshire to Skye – the most interesting is her search for the locations around Abriachan, Loch Ness, where novelist Jessie Kesson lived, loved and learned to write.
There are elements of pilgrimage in two of the walks, from Melrose to Lindisfarne along St Cuthbert’s way and in la Catedral del Senderismo, the cathedral of walking that leads a different kind of pilgrim along the Mozarabic Trail in the hills north of Benidorm. It is less celebrated than Santiago de Compostela but just as steeped in history.
Walking can also be an act of protest and walking barefoot has a special resonance in Kenya where Cracknell and a small group of activists bare their soles (pun intended) to the red earth and establish a new connection. That’s where the solidarity comes in: there is almost no political gesture more simply powerful than a large group of women walking – to a mine-head, to shipyard gates, to the seat of government.
But it’s the lives of men that shape a significant second thread to the book. The first is the Norwegian father whose wartime escape through Nazi-held territory is re-enacted by a group of relatives and friends on Cracknell’s ill-fated walk from Isfjorden to the Swedish border; his shoes, cracked and worn, are a family totem. And there is is Cracknell’s own father, who died young and unremembered,but whose imprint on the world is a route to the Finsteraarhorn in the Bernese Oberland. In the Swiss air, she learns something of him, much about herself and a great deal, more subliminally, about the act of writing, its power, its slippages and its persistence. This is a remarkable book, which will take you much further than the sum of its mileages.
Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden In Memory by Linda Cracknell; Freight Books, £8.99
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