3.3 Reflections on Walking Through My Senses

On Fair Isle, as my sensate response to moving air, to fluxes of the medium, I hear moving air, an act that is in part an act of touch. I feel the press of the air as it moves by me, exercising my sense of balance. The sheer force of moving air can make it more difficult, sometimes impossible, to move in a purposive way, paralleling my walking through water. In No.2: ‘no trace’, walking in the river, I am unable to reliably predict (in this instance, to see) where I am putting my feet, and this becomes a large part of the unsteadiness of my progress. I cannot see where I am placing my feet, the riverbed is uneven and not necessarily where I expect it to be. In the winds of Fair Isle, my unsteadiness is born of the rapid and unpredictable movement of the medium in which I am moving. It is more akin to the experience of being in the sea, far enough from shore to have only a tenuous toehold on the seabed and to then experience the force of incoming waves or outgoing currents. This multi-sensate experience is used by the Beaufort Scale (Met Office, 2010; Moore, 2015) which categorises wind not by its measured speed, but as a moving body of air, something heard and felt.1 Testament to the fact that whilst we walk on the earth-below-our-feet rather than the sky being something that is above our heads, what is above the earth-below-our-feet is the air, and we move on the earth and in the air.

‘trace no trace’ has the slow pace of a walking human. Offering an intermittent rhythm, this is louder inside the mine or when I am wading upriver but becomes quieter and even inaudible as I move downstream in the river or cross unmarked grassland to the backdrop of the wind. The sound of my walking suggests a sonic constancy—that the sound is the same and nothing is changing—but this is illusory. Though the sound feels superficially constant, to the close listener there is the emerging realization that all is not as it was, that this is a slowly evolving process of change. Inside the mine I walk from flood to dry tunnel. Past the adit there is the slow effortful wade through the entrance flood, movement through water that sonically links the two works. Past the flood and it is the sharp bounce and clack of the kicked stones that punctuates the rhythm along the tunnel. The bounce and splash of the sound is close, taut, and sounds constrained, a version of Pauline Oliveros’s Alice in Tunnelland (2005b, p. 104), and reminiscent of some of the constrained sections of katrinem’s go your gait walks (Emler, 2018).

Above the mine, on the fellside, there are again close sounds, the sounds of my embodiment—my movement in the wind, my laboured breathing, the brush of the tussock grass against my trousers. My breathing quietens once the steep climb is done and, unconstrained, the sounds drift and sigh away. There are also distant sounds—the alarm call of curlew, the insistent piping of golden plover, the chuckling of red grouse, the far-off grumble of a motorbike—quieted by distance, they are blown in and out of hearing by the gusting of the wind. The Long Cleugh Burn sounds brightly but briefly, only as I step across it, the shortest of watery sonic punctuation marks.

In N^o. 2: ‘no trace’, when I am moving in the river it is moving water, rather than moving air, that is the dominant sound, with my movement shaped by the water, the riverbed, and my direction of travel. Such is the sonic presence of the moving water that there is little distant sound discernible. The apparent constancy of the sounds of the water belies my steady passage along the river. Against these backdrops the renga verses blend into the sounds of the walks, pick up some of the sonic moments and offer an additional rhythm, a poetic punctuation, small droplets of moment along the walks.2

In No. 1: ‘trace’ moving inside Smallcleugh was an explicitly conscious and effortful act. A mix of wading, walking, stepping on and around wagon rails, stooping and one sustained 100-yard crawl; moving was neither simple nor easy, and in several places was frankly painful. As I moved along the tunnel, time-space became distorted. Progress was slow, space was defined by the reach of a torch beam and only existed for the surfaces the beam rested on. Side tunnels passed unseen, gallery ceilings unobserved whilst I concentrated on ‘looking where I was going’. On the first occasion I was there (as one of a group of 12) my hearing was a better indicator of others' presence than my vision was, rendering space something more sounded than seen. In the context of the scramble through a roof fall or the painful crawl along a link-passage, time became defined by space, the time taken to walk from one notable feature to the next, the duration of the crawl along the distance of the cross-cut—‘a peculiarly haptic, non-occulocentric form of engagement’, as Louise Wilson terms it in her atmospheric description of moving around inside Smallcleugh (Wilson, 2021).

The trace of the Smallcleugh route exists (and is mapped) along the mine’s tunnels, but walking was analogous to Ingold’s description of walking in the labyrinth of the underworld (2007b). The way appeared clearly defined and tightly controlled, in that I had to follow the tunnel along hewn lengths or clefts within the earth, but this was an illusion. I was walking in a world without surface, a world undefined by ground below and sky above, a world that was never visible in its entirety and one where I didn't have my taken-for-granted all-round vision and hearing. When I stopped, when I stood still, it was silent; there was no external noise. This deep in the mine the air did not move and when I turned off my headtorch it was dark. This was not the dark of a moonless night, a dark to which I would eventually accommodate, this was blackness, the blackness of a darkness that has no light. My ears are working but there is no sound, my eyes are working but there is no light. Only with a guide could I trace the route; unguided and unknowing, I could only walk the tunnels, lost to the outside world; only those who know the way could hope to retrace their steps to the surface.

By contrast, the overground route across the fell was, allowing for topography, visible in its entirety but, given that it crossed open moorland where there was no reason for it to exist, it was completely undefined. On the fellside an infinite number of traces of my route were possible, though I chose to move along one that followed the tunnel below. Thus, whilst I ‘knew where I was’, I was free to define my path as I chose. Here the trace was the mark of the act of my moving—trampled grass, an occasional mud boot-print—and this was brief and evanescent. Long’s Line Made by Walking (1967) lasted a few hours after he had gone; my trace was, in large part, briefer. Unlike in the still air of the mine, the moving air across the fellside placed me firmly in the fluxes of the medium of the weather world. This moving air carried sound—a motorbike on a distant road, the cry of a curlew across the fell—though as it was less forceful than the gales of Fair Isle, my balance was unperturbed. However, it was more than sufficient to rock the heather as it moved across the fell, and to chill me whilst I sat to eat my lunch above the site of the Ballroom. Even sat in the relative shelter of a hollow, I didn’t linger longer than eating lunch required.

Whilst Long assessed his landscape art works as minimal interventions (Long, 2007a) and his presence in the landscape almost undetectable (Long, 2007b, p. 71) for me, here, it is my route that is minimal, almost undetectable, uncertain, invisible in plain sight, and this contrasts strongly with the channelling of the labyrinth below the earth. With none of the constraints of the underground route, with only two obvious surface features appearing on the route—the entrance tunnel and a ruined sheepfold—I was judging my position against small fellside streams and distant landmarks. There was again the need to ‘watch my step’—knee-high rough grass and heather, an overall ascent of about 400 feet over four-fifths of a mile and a steep down/up valley traverse along the way. My walking did retain attributes of judging distance and time; again, this contrasted with the underground walk in that I could better judge where I was in time-space. On my walk out I could see the general area of my intended destination, though my judgement of being on the fell above the Ballroom destination would only be possible as I approached the place I judged to be the location, through the physical act of walking there. My walking having created my trace, created my destination.

To get there, and back, I had to make a steep down-and-up traverse of a stream valley. Left to my own devices, I would not have chosen to walk the route dictated by the underground tunnels. Particularly on the way back, and unlike when I was in the tunnels of the mine below, I could judge where I was and I could make some estimate of how long the walk might take to walk the return, but this too was susceptible to the realities of the land. The steep, tangential, valley-traverse was hidden until I was almost upon it, and making the traverse was a slow process. Stepping more slowly, looking to place my feet on loose soil on a steep slope, balancing using a walking pole, slower than rough walking the fell either side of the valley. This was an unanticipated stretching of time-space, and a similar phenomenon occurs as I walk the river. My downstream and upstream walk in the river takes me about 100 minutes; when I walk the same distance on the bank it takes me 25 minutes. Shifting from the bank into the river slowed my time—along my same number of steps, time extends.

My walking in the river was primarily a haptic act, walking as touching. The senses that predominantly guide my movement along the bank of the river—vision, sound, balance—were blunted; my use of two walking poles turns me into a quadruped, and it is only this that allowed me to move with any confidence at all. Whilst I ‘watched my step’ and ‘looked where I was going’ the reality in the river was that I could only see and hear the river’s surface. What shaped my movement was hidden from my sight and hearing, about half a metre below the water’s surface, on the bottom of the river and apparent only to the touch of my feet or the probing of my walking poles. The boulder-strewn riverbed was uneven, sunken branches snagged at my boots, my balance was uncertain, walking was slow, and without any discernible rhythm. The assumption that I could place my foot in the direction I was going did not hold true; unseen rocks twisted my feet in or out, compromising my ability to bear weight and to balance.3

I walked downstream and then returned upstream to my starting point at the bridge. Walking upstream the external appearance of the river is changed as the different fall of the light and my reversed direction of view means that I see ‘differently’, but more obvious is the difference in the sound of my walking. Coming downstream, moving with the river, my stride was often at the pace of the river’s flow and created little added disturbance. However, returning upstream, against the flow, against the push of the river, each step creates its own wave, of water and of sound. This is a similar phenomenon to that which Hogg describes when moving a violin against or with the current of a river (2017, p. 6). Though in both directions I was moving in plain sight, it was only as I moved upstream that I was audible. As within the lead mine, sound offered a distinctive marker of my movement. Here are parallels between the act of the walker and the act of the musician. Writing of his experiments in using flowing rivers and wind to sound instruments, Hogg suggests ‘Phenomenological and participative, we don’t experience the … river in a ‘pure’ or ‘abstracted’ form, instead, we hear a consciousness exploring them, sounding them for information about the energy flowing through the system, bringing to conscious attention the energies that construct and transform the landscape on a much longer term temporal scale’ (Hogg, 2017, p. 7). In my walking, the sound reflects the interplay between my body, the water, and the air, and brings to conscious attention my human-scale bodily presence moving with and against the energies of the river.

These walks have examined my act of walking, how I move in the world and have allowed an examination of the role of my senses in guiding my progress through the world, illuminating my embodied, multi-sensate nature through examining what it means to blunt, overwhelm, or even functionally remove, some of my senses. They have also suggested that my movement, human movement, can be marked on the earth on which we walk, that movement is shaped by the air through which we move, the topography of the surfaces on which we move, and that movement and its associated organisation of sensory perceptions, can shape the nature of time.

The two sets of walks of ‘trace no trace’ involved a process of walking a route more than once. In No. 1: ‘trace’ my walk is replicated, as the two walks drawn on a map appear the same, but they are separated by up to 300 vertical feet. One walk is along the horizontal tunnels of a lead mine and the other is along the anything-but-horizontal overlying moorland. One has a clearly marked way, while the other is trackless; one is slow and cautious (along dark tunnels), whilst the other is slow and effortful as I rough walk across heather moorland. In replication I have moved along the same mapped line, but I am walking in a different geographical place. In No. 2: ‘no trace’ I walk down-stream then up-stream, in a river; I do this twice and whilst the route is the same, in that it is the same riverbed that I walk along, the river itself is completely different. This is my embodiment of Heraclitus’s assertion that ‘you can never step in the same river twice’ (Graham, 2015). The river flows and the water through which I wade in winter is completely different to the water through which I wade in spring. This is true at a macro level as in winter the river was stable and not too deep but in spring it was barely walkable, with water levels high after a melt of late-fallen snow. It is also true at a molecular level. The water molecules that constitute the river are completely different each time I step into it—as are the molecules that constitute my body.

Walking a route more than once offered interesting ways for me to think about my walking and in Chapter 4 I develop what I come to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. I began these walks in order to consider time, looking to re-configure time. However, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence.

On to Chapter 4. Walking Time: Replicated Walking 

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