As for Richard, myself and Bramble, we spent the next ninety minutes picking our way back across the moor in the midst of a tempest so violent that even King Lear would have had difficulty shouting in it. The world blurred into grey, silver and black: all colours were washed away. My glasses were near impossible to see through. The marshy puddles on the path became mires. The large stones on that same path became slippery. The wind – screaming horizontally from the west – was so strong that the rain on bare skin actually hurt. Bramble quite often tried to find shelter behind my legs. It blew on, relentlessly. The hood of my waterproof was repeatedly blown back and soon filled with icy rainwater. A small area near my throat that was insufficiently covered admitted yet more icy water. Soon the front of my shirt was sopping beneath the coat. Even the pockets of my waterproof were inundated. A spare fiver I had in one pocket was reduced to a blue-white mush.
Throughout it all, Richard and I were yelping with laughter, and failing to hear each other’s enthusiastic shouts. Even as we came down from the hills, the wind, which was tearing at distant trees and shrieking through the heather, was freezingly ineluctable. Our faces, by the time we got back on to the road and along to the hotel, were puce with windburn.
The fact of it is that this is the sort of place, and even the sort of wild weather, that urban dwellers yearn for in their imaginations, as runners thirst for cold water. We think ourselves like Richard Hannay, children of nature who have simply been denied the countryside that we desire. But this is also a countryside that we can take refuge from. Even if the hotel is miles away, you still know that it is there. The knowledge of comfort enables us to sentimentalise desolation. Imagine if there was no such shelter to be found anywhere, within several days of walking. However much you may yearn for those hills and that peat, the landscape has no use whatsoever for us. You will never really be a welcome part of it.
The romance of an empty land is a pre-conditioned, learned thing; there is no particular reason why it should be inherently natural for us to seek out that which so many of our antecedents would have flinched from. In some generations past, the idea of drawing spiritual succour from the country would have been seen as eccentric. In the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson, for instance, was baffled by the contemporary passion for pastoral poetry. He wrote: ‘though nature itself, philosophically considered, be inexhaustible, yet its general effects on the eye and ear are uniform, and incapable of much variety of description.’
During that period, there were those who were more concerned with wrangling with nature’s effects, and contriving their own landscapes artificially, rather than leaving the land as it was. Before then, in the Middle Ages, observes Timothy Brownlow, ‘nature in the medieval world existed as a decorative backdrop or as a narrative or moral device. Indeed,’ he added, ‘the word “landscape” did not emerge until the late sixteenth century.’5 In Milton’s poetry, it is rendered as ‘lantskip’.
After the Restoration, there was still very little appetite for seeing wilderness as an attractive, unspoiled ideal; instead, many of the grander landowners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought harder than ever to bend nature to their own will. This period saw the rise in enthusiasm among the gentry for landscaped gardens. The earlier highly-mannered, geometrical style inspired by French gardening began to give way to a new sort of landscape, as championed by Capability Brown and Humphry Repton among others. This new sort of English garden was in the ‘picturesque’ style and had features such as follies, grottoes, or ornamental ruins, blended with artfully sloped lawns, carefully placed trees, running streams and waterfalls. In this milieu, even walking took on a measure of artifice. There were specially constructed ‘lovers walks’, along which wooing couples would be framed with fragrant pergolas. One such eighteenth-century effort in the Borders was praised highly in the Edinburgh Review.
This sort of artifice was not to last. By the late eighteenth century the emphasis would be placed on the virtue of the natural, and untouched. This was a direct result of the rise of the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on unschooled innocence. The movement was trailed in the mid-eighteenth century by essayist and philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau – himself an enthusiastic walker, and observer of nature. For a coming generation of poets and philosophers, walking would be central to their understanding of the world; the untamed wildness of nature had both a primal innocence and an awful majesty. The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote an influential treatise in 1756 concerning ‘the sublime’ and ‘the beautiful’:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it … No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime.
A little earlier, poet Thomas Gray was so thrilled by the ‘terrible’ spectacles he saw of the Alps on his Grand Tour with Sir Horace Walpole that he later toured the Lake District in 1769 and, in an extended account, ascribed to this region similar turbulent natural scenes. With the writers that followed – who were responding, however unconsciously, to the Industrial Revolution – there came the sense that nature had to be freed from mankind’s manipulations. They felt that in authentic landscapes were to be found atmospheres, a sense, a feeling, that would have an answering chime within every soul, like Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp.
Over 200 years later, the modern walker in a region such as Rannoch clearly has similar desires. Here, as the sun is setting its final fiery orange rays across these hills and tussochs, you see a perfect example of the sublime: the prospect that can at once unsettle you and yet leave you marvelling at its gaudy beauty. Such a sunset is not that far removed from J. M. W. Turner’s depiction of an erupting Vesuvius; the sky raging and glowing, the people below just dim, phantom-like silhouettes.
We can balance romanticism against the implacable rationality of eighteenth-century proto-geologist James Hutton, and his revolutionary observations of the cycles of nature. His understanding of the rocks and soil being washed into the sea, forming bedrock, forced volcanically to the surface and then being worn away over infinite years back into sediment. Even then we might feel an odd poetic link between local legends of the ageless faerie folk who ‘dwell in the hollow hills’ and Hutton’s awe at the eternity-old land. ‘The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,’ Hutton told the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, ‘is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’
The new learning was teaching men that the ground beneath their feet had been there long before Eden. Some of the walkers who were to take up the pursuit with such vigour in the Victorian age did so in part as a challenge to the church, and to the hold that it had on society. But even before them, the idea of walking as a genteel pursuit, a subtle pleasure that could reveal much about personal character, and which could even be enjoyed by refined women, was to be immortalised in English literature.
CHAPTER 3
Dorking to Box Hill: Introducing Jane Austen, and the Subsequent Rise of the Victorian Walking Club
My grandmother was a keen walker all of her life. But she had a freezing disdain for the landscape of south-east England: it was too flat, too undramatic, too safe, too cosy. What on earth would be the point of walking anywhere within easy reach of London? Only the Highlands would do, or perhaps parts of Northumberland at a pinch. It is a prejudice shared by veteran rambling campaigner John Bunting, who spent so many of his formative years being chased by gamekeepers in the Peak District. Would he ever fancy a walking tour, say, of the South Downs? ‘When I get a bit older,’ replies the ninety-three-year-old.
For a long time, I shared my grandmother’s dismissive attitude towards the southern Home Counties, which in my case was shaped by many very dull train journeys from London to Brighton. Is it insane to judge a landscape from a railway line? Apart from anything else, many better people than me have been drawn to walking in this gentle area. Throughout the nineteenth century, this part of Surrey not