I read Simon Armitage’s Walking Away: Further Travels with a Troubadour on England’s South West Coast Path while walking along Hadrian’s Wall. Okay, not while trudging along beside rivers and roads or climbing steep hills (the poor Roman soldiers who hauled stones and mortar up those heights), but on the flight to England, on trains, and in the evening before falling asleep. It’s a follow up to his earlier book, Walking Home, and Armitage (currently the UK poet laureate and professor of poetry at Leeds University) does something similar in Walking Away: he hikes along one of England’s National Trails, giving poetry readings in the evenings and living on what he collects from audiences in a sock (hopefully not one he’s been wearing) and being sheltered by willing strangers.
Note: as I write these words, the train is pulling into the station in Hebden Bridge, through which the Pennine Way, the trail Armitage walked during his earlier book, runs. Someday I’d like to walk that path, the first of England’s many national trails, but I’d have to get used to rain (it’s England, after all) and to climbing hills. The latter would be hard in flat Saskatchewan, but perhaps an hour every day on a Stairmaster, or a serious dedication to interval training, would be enough.
I enjoyed Walking Away. The descriptions of the landscape are often beautifully written, the characters Armitage meets are charmingly eccentric, and I identify with Armitage’s struggles on his walk. His boots fall apart, for instance, and while that’s never happened to me (yet), I did discover during the Hadrian’s Wall journey that my allegedly waterproof, breathable jacket isn’t either. Perhaps no high-tech fabric could stand up to a rainy day in Cumbria and Northumberland, or perhaps I brought the wrong coat. Anyway, Armitage’s physical struggles are relatable. Nobody cares about someone who finds a long walk easy—if anyone does—and being honest about the physical and mental challenges of the experience makes a book about a walk worth reading.
It’s not all a slog, of course, and Armitage’s prose (and the poems he wrote while walking) reveal the rewards of his journey:
Through the woods that follow we know we’re the first visitors of the day because of the damp cobwebs that break with an electric tingle across our faces. They are delicate cats’ cradles strung between oak trunks, some precious and golden where sunlight breaches the canopy and falls across the fine threads and intricate dew-jewelled designs, so tearing and slashing them with my big stick seems like a crude act of thuggery or desecration.
I picked that passage at random, but I like the way Armitage implicates himself in this small vandalism. Much of the book records larger ecological impacts, such as plastic trash strewn along beaches, carried across the ocean from far away. If only we could tread more lightly on the earth.
This was Armitage’s last long walk, unfortunately—his back wouldn’t allow for another. I fear a similar ending to my walking career someday. Each walk is a gift. I must remember that.