Walk with Me.

an invitation to join me (Clare Shaw), in words, as I walk the Coast-to-Coast path

On Sunday, months of hard, entirely unpaid work - planning, organising, and my least favourite, administrating – came to a head when approximately four hundred people in Kate Bush costume danced in unison to Wuthering Heights on the moors outside Haworth. The rain cleared; there was a light wind, a dramatically moody sky, and the moors wore all their browns and greens with the slightest touch of pink and purple.

My last Substack explained some of my reasons for co-organising Actually the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. Turns out, there were many more, and most of them were to do with community, and connection, and bright red joyful protest in a time of darkness. But the event, with its spectacle, its television cameras and joyful hordes, will take a while to digest, and I will write about it in more depth in my own good time.

In the meantime, it’s August – and I am about to begin a very necessary period of rest. I am about to relax with a 200-mile walk.

I may have been ten when I first read Wainwright’s guide to the Pennine Way, lying on a rug in my Auntie Hilda’s cottage, with the sound of the stream through the window. I’ve continued to read and dream of lost-distance walks: Laurie Lee on the Camino de Santiago, Cheryl Strayed on her Pacific Trail. The Coast-to-Coast might be a relatively modest entry into the world of long-distance walking, but it crosses all of England, and passes through the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North Moors.

For me, with my arthritic joints, my asthma and my aortic aneurysm (not to mention the chronic migraine and other conditions which don’t begin with A), it feels like a serious undertaking. I’ll be walking with my wonderful teen, Niamh, and my biggest fear is letting them down: twisting an ankle on the first day, or finding that my painful joints and wheezing lungs are not up to the job.

But for all that chronic conditions might have put pay to the climbing and running, I have never stopped walking. And I don’t intend to. I have splints and painkillers, I have ice packs and walking poles. I have ADHD, and some days, relentless restlessness to burn off, and the only peace I can find is in movement. And I have two hundred miles of ocean and moor, mountain and bog, field and stone wall, pub, lane, river and lake, to motivate me, and the person I love most in the world walking alongside me.

Over the next 16 days, with the help of my access assistant, the wonderful Olivia Tuck, I plan to post regularly from my walk. And on 5^th August, you can join me in Patterdale when, along with Caleb Parkin, Rishi Dastidar and Jessica Mookherjee, I’ll running an online eco poetry masterclass from 7pm, with all proceeds to Give Peat a Chance: for tickets and details, click here.

If you can’t wait until then, here’s a writing exercise, adapted from the “Paths” workshop I delivered during the Wild Writing Month many of us spent together. I’ll also post some additional writing exercises for our paying subscribers, with our usual thanks to them for supporting us and for making this Substack possible.

I hope you enjoy writing, and I look forwards to having your company on my Coast to Coast adventures!

Warm up

by listing all the paths you have walked – include real, remembered, present, past, imaginary, and metaphorical paths. Write for at least five minutes.

Then read:

The Path

by Edward Thomas

Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
The children wear it. They have flattened the bank
On top, and silvered it between the moss
With the current of their feet, year after year.
But the road is houseless, and leads not to school.
To see a child is rare there, and the eye
Has but the road, the wood that overhangs
And underyawns it, and the path that looks
As if it led on to some legendary
Or fancied place where men have wished to go
And stay; till, sudden, it ends where the wood ends.

Edward Thomas might be widely known as a war poet, but he is also a wonderfully accomplished writer of nature and place – just think of “Addlestrop”. “The Path” was written in 1915, and in “parapet” you can hear hints of war in the first sentence… Notice how that first sentence winds sinuously before delivering us, like a path, to our destination: “There is a path”. Then we shift into a child’s perspective, looking through the legs of the trees, just like children in a crowd will look through adults’ legs. And it's as if the woodland itself were alive – magical in its gold, and emerald and silver … but ultimately leading nowhere – except perhaps the end of childhood, or the end of memory, or the beginning of war.

Exercise:

Now, from your list, choose one of the paths you have walked, and write it. This works best if it’s a real path, and if you keep its physical reality at the heart of your writing – allowing yourself to stray into memory, feeling and thought, but always returning to that, its textures, sights, its sound and smells. Let the words lay themselves down in front of you like a path, and follow it to wherever it takes you.