All landscapes contain stories, as yet undiscovered by us, placed there for safekeeping by those who came before. Sometimes they are buried beneath the stones and soil, other times they are clearly visible, like lighthouses, empty plastic bags caught on hedgerows and scrawled letters on bus-shelters. 

Italo Calvino puts this point far more eloquently in his book, Invisible Cities. A space, he says, ‘does not tell its past but it contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets… every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls…’ This has always seemed to me a beautifully poetic way to understand a chaotic world, as an accidental archive of ourselves.

Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways explores how we might traverse the topography of this archive as a means of translating the landscape and gaining, hopefully, a greater understanding of ourselves.

At first it is hard to understand this concept of a self-reflective walk as in any way connected to community. The two seem polar opposites of one another, and yet if you examine pilgrimages, even solitary ones, they are, at heart, a collective pursuit. Taking a route mapped out by the feet of thousands before you is a means of connection in itself.

For me, walking, in the way that Macfarlane explores it, is not a solitary occupation, but rather a connective one. 

I have spent the past two years researching the way that other people interact with the landscape, how significant spaces encourage them to remember, or forget, the events that occurred there. Indeed, my research into collective memory has pushed me to understand landscapes as the connective tissue that links us to something greater than ourselves. Macfarlane states that ‘we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move’. In return, I believe, we pour a little of our own selves back into the landscapes we pass through, and thus a layering begins, of new narratives intermingled with the old. These traces can be something material, clothes fibres, crumbs, hair, a stone moved, a branch trimmed back, or it might be something more intangible, an observation noted down or recounted over kitchen tables and strong tea. Our interactions with places change the way that others view them – this process in itself is cyclical and communal.

During my own research, I spent time in Derry, Northern Ireland, where my mother’s side of the family is from, and still resides. I listened to people tell me stories and I let myself be led through their city. Together we walked down past the city walls, along the length of the Lecky Road, to the Free Derry Wall, where we stopped and talked. Once, the wall marked the end of a terrace row; now it is a single, dislocated facade, ringed with a roaring B-road. 

Waiting there, I stood in the spot where, in January 1972, my granddad listened to a speech about freedom and justice, delivered from the back of a lorry. Behind me, on the far side of the road, were the blocks of flats where later he would hide in a lift-shaft when the first bullets were fired and the crowd scattered. The buildings are gone now, demolished, but their presence seemed palpable from the stories I had heard, flat and grey against the anaemic sky. 

My grandad has since passed away, and I will never be able to comprehend the full extent of what happened in this place, but walking through the landscape brought a sense of closeness to him as a person, and his stories. 

Macfarlane talks in a similar manner about retracing the old routes of his grandfather across the Cairngorms as a sort of ritualistic journey – of ‘commemoration’ and ‘recollection’. My mother’s father was no walker, the city he lived in was, at times, bleak and harsh, its landscape far from rolling hills and green downs, but the sentiment of our return journeys to these landscapes, as grandchildren, feels similar. Walking through Derry was an act of recollection, not of my own memories but of those of a community, a family, I am tied to. As Tim Ingold says, ‘onward movement is itself a return’.

Walking, then, is about community, but it is also about identity in so much that it can be a connection to a collective sense of self. This is perhaps more important than ever in an era of geographically dispersed family networks and urban metropolises. The ‘old ways’ need not be overgrown public highways or remote coastal cut-throughs; their narratives are not always easily decipherable or politically urgent but they exist beneath the skin of the landscape all the same – memories that scatter and calcify themselves in every inch of shrubbery and tarmac. If we pay attention, if we share stories and discovered routes between family and friends, it is easy to recover this repository of community – the link to those who came before us.