The mist, however, prevents me from assessing the other thing I came here for; and that is how much the landscape below has changed over the years. The walker might, as an initial point of reference, turn to one of the earliest examples of British landscape painting, ‘A View To Box Hill’, by George Lambert, painted in 1733. This was one of the first works focusing on the land itself, and not some castle or tower or other similarly imposing man-made structure. In Lambert’s work, the focus is the hill, which is starkly delineated, but the air is thick with a honeyed light. In the foreground, there are labourers reaping corn. Today, that same field in the foreground is instead a vineyard. The other difference is that in the painting, there are very few trees on the hill. Either all these trees have grown since then; or Lambert simply left the trees out, for his own artistic reasons. Not that such paintings could ever be taken as accurate, but it does raise that perenially interesting question of how much tree cover we have lost over the centuries – and how much, quietly, we have gained.
For a more recent point of reference about the look and the feel of Home Counties countryside, we might turn to films and documentaries made in the 1930s and 1940s. There we see, in the countryside of Kent and Surrey, an agricultural landscape still composed of small fields and horse-drawn carts; working blacksmiths and dusty lanes – a world that simply isn’t there now. All it has taken is seventy years. There is the difficult-to-shake sense that the great ‘octopus arms’ of London now stretch all the way down to Brighton and the south coast. That apart from the odd Down or the occasional woodland trail, it is a region composed purely of uniform dormitory towns with joyless shopping precincts. One would never expect any hint of wilderness. One would scarcely even anticipate getting lost.
But wildness is not everything, and we return to the miniature artistry of Jane Austen. Just as she captured with funny and searing vividness the everyday vanities, anxieties and turbulence of small social groups, so the country that she moved in has a counterpointed sense of understated, though perfectly apparent beauty. On Box Hill and Leith Hill are to be found old beeches, oaks and yews. Rare species include silver-wash fritillary butterflies, bee orchids and orange butterflies. In the summer months, wild basil grows. Just several miles to the south, Leith Hill is one of the highest points in southern England; on clear days you might catch a glimpse of the south coast.
Leslie Stephen, who clearly had a great deal of affection for this part of the world, felt that through walking, he was maintaining a very grand literary tradition. In one essay, he cited the great walker-writers of history: Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Byron, among many others. He saw the act of walking as being, in its own way, as creative as ‘scribbling’. ‘The memories of walks,’ Stephen wrote,
Are all localised and dated; they are hitched on to particular times and places; they spontaneously form a kind of calendar or connecting thread upon which other memories may be strung … the labour of scribbling books happily leaves no distinct impression, and I would forget that it had ever been undergone; but the picture of some delightful ramble includes incidentally a reference to the nightmare of literary toil from which it relieved me. The author is but the accidental appendage of the tramp.
He went on to discuss how past walker-writers have somehow blocked out the sheer physicality, the corporeal realism of walking. They
have inclined to ignore the true source of their impulse. Even when they speak of the beauties of nature, they would give us to understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical machinery of legs and stomachs.
Now, gazing up at the startlingly abrupt Box Hill, it is extremely easy to envisage Stephen, with his own ‘physical machinery of legs and stomachs’, leading his followers with cries of enthusiasm up those vertiginous paths. In the late Victorian era, Stephen’s emphasis on the physicality of walking found an answering echo elsewhere in the country. In Lancashire, one Dr James Johnston gathered a rambling group together dedicated to the works of American poet Walt Whitman. The poet’s work was filled with the exultation of nature, and the sense of man engaging fully with the wildness around him. The Lancashire walkers who devoured Whitman’s poetry even inaugurated a Bolton ‘Whitman Day’.5 There was the sense here of a Victorian middle-class association celebrating the virtue of vigour, but also to a degree intellectualising it. Not merely was it necessary for gentlemen to explore their physical limits, they had to do so while engaged in serious discussions to do with philosophy and religious belief. As A. H. Sidgwick wrote:
Leave the intimate character of your surroundings to penetrate slowly into your higher faculties, aided by the consciousness of physical effort, the subtle rhythm of your walk, the feel of the earth beneath your feet, and the thousand intangible influences of sense.
Lovely though the Surrey countryside is – a porcelain miniature, compared to Derbyshire’s ceramic vase – one cannot entirely abandon oneself to the thousand intangible influences of sense. It is interesting how many hardcore walkers still view Surrey as something not quite worth bothering with. As I emerge from the National Trust woodland and plod happily back to the railway station, I realise that I have had a good, vigorous two-hour walk among fabulously old, gnarled yews, and can still be back in London in time for lunch. I raise my hat to the aesthetic good sense of Sir Leslie Stephen and his companions.
In this branch of the walking movement, as well as all the others, there never seemed to be any question that rambling was a balm to the body and soul that all should be free to enjoy. Yet there was a corresponding darkness too. We see it especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for those were years when some walkers were more vulnerable than others, and some had little choice about the location of their rambles. The act of walking sometimes had its savage underside, rooted in poverty, despair and madness.
CHAPTER 4
A Swift Detour: To Briefly Examine Walkers as Deviants, Outcasts and Fugitives – and as Doomed, Wandering Souls
The walker is not always welcome. A stranger arriving on foot in a small community has the power to alarm. In some corners of literature, particularly the Gothic, the solitary tramper is frequently presented as a figure of menace. Preacher Harry Powell in Davis Grubb’s novel Night of the Hunter is released from prison, intent upon hunting down a fortune hidden by an executed man. This money has been left with the man’s children John and Pearl, and the first these children know of Preacher Powell’s sinister arrival in their little town is the sound of his footsteps in the foggy night, walking up and down the street outside their house, casting a vast shadow on their bedroom wall as he sings a gospel hymn. The solitary walker sometimes has mythic qualities. Joseph Maturin’s popular 1830 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer features a figure who has sold his soul to the Devil in return for an extra 150 years of life and is now wandering the earth in search of someone to swap the bargain with. This, in turn, was an echo of the medieval Christian legend of the Wandering Jew. After insulting Jesus as he carried the Cross along the Via Dolorosa, he was doomed to walk all the continents until the time of the Second Coming. Again, we see the idea of walking as something uncanny, connected with rootlessness and a certain moral ambiguity.
As much as the Romantic poets and subsequent Victorian enthusiasts proselytised about the virtues of walking in real life, there was always another side to it; the sense that walking could also be transgressive. The sense, also, that a certain class of walkers somehow symbolically offended a certain social order, and could be viewed by some as threatening. That class of walker, inevitably, was either labouring, or entirely dispossessed. So, running in parallel with the soaring poetic fancies