I’ve been giving a question some thought: Can a walk (be it themed and purposeful or just ad hoc recreational) not only create a pop-up museum, in consequence, when back at home (individually and/or collectively), but also create a mobile pop-up museum itself whilst in the very act of walking?
Sometimes, of course, this happens automatically, serendipitously and solipsistically, when you’re out and about: that Penny Lane feeling: “And though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway”, and that Truman Show illusion you get sometimes when staring at the world.
In short, when you’re Feeling Groovy, life seems to be a sort of pop-up museum … “Hello lamp-post, what you knowin’, I’ve come to watch your flowers growin’…” And you can get that flight of individual imagination whilst out walking in a group, too, of course, as well as on a solitary ramble …
I tend to drift in and out of company while out on a group-walk; in the main, I like to let my thoughts roam free and unconstrained, making unusual connections and correspondences; but, obviously, and on the other hand, we learn a lot from conversation too: ‘Every day’s a school day’ – surely, it’s only the arrogant fool who believe they know absolutely everything …
William Hazlitt, however, wrote a wonderful essay on the joys of solitary rambling back in the early 19th century. It’s food for thought.
Where do you stand on walking and talking?
On rambling and ranting?
On orating and hiking?
I’m more of a Hazlitt strider myself:
‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room, but out of doors, Nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone … I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time … “Let me have a companion of my way,” says Sterne, “were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” It is beautifully said: but, in my opinion, this continual comparing of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the mind, and hurts the sentiment … ‘
I know what Hazlitt means:
Wordsworthian pantheism,
Or William Blake flights of fancy,
Or psycho-geographical musing,
Or Zen-style footfall mindfulness,
Are often inhibited by the clang of voices,
And the din of conversation;
But on other occasions, it’s true
That the knowledge of a companion
Can act as a stimulus to a new understanding,
Or a novel re-creation of a landscape;
And, sometimes, of course, we need to catch up
On ‘news’ with friends or family –
It is all, I suppose, a matter of balance:
A dynamic harmony of opposites
Help make for an enriching walk in company –
Sometimes alone, and sometimes alive
To conviviality and congeniality,
And sometimes finding empathy,
Shared meanings and understanding
When exploring the land in shared silence –
Followed by a post-ramble sharing
Of individual and collective experience
In mutual discourse on how we read our walk,
A deconstruction and re-creation
Of how we made sense of it all;
For as William Hazlitt put it:
‘I am for the synthetical method on a journey in preference to the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns …’
Well said, William.
But it’s time now to return to pop-up museums. Let’s remind ourselves of what a pop-up museum is so that we can properly assess whether a walk fits the bill. What exactly is a pop-up museum? This is the definition we work with at Radical Stroud: a temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.
Well, a walk is certainly temporary; exhibits can include maps, photographs of the route from the past, documents, texts, artefacts carried in rucksacks etc.; the display obviously changes as the walk unfolds, and conversation adds to the mix; then talking with strangers and people you meet along the way widens the circle of participants; there might be information boards and plaques along the way, and we sometimes have a bit of performance on a walk – so it certainly can be ‘a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.’
We can all learn, of course, from the walking practices of different people and groups. When I accompanied Walking the Land, their practice often involved silent walking with occasional breaks for sketching, photography, writing, recording, video and so on. I often take photos not for social media but as an aide memoire for writing up later – I deliberately avoid making notes so as to strengthen my powers of recall. I write long hand at home first of all: I feel that my mind is more creative and lateral when not circumscribed by the linear A-Z keyboard of my computer.
When on seaside walks with my family, I collect driftwood, and pen lines about the day. Some we leave around the house or in the garden as surprise ‘theatres of memory’ while there is also the joy of seeing pieces in my daughters’ homes celebrating the birth of their children. Stroud railway station has an information board that echoes those acts of creation: NATURE WEAVING
When you next go out on a walk make a collection of natural items that you find interesting. These could be twigs, bark and leaves and fallen feathers. If you have some additional items such as wool at home use these too.
When you are at home make yourself an easy weaving board out of thick cardboard and carefully cut some matching slots at the top and the bottom of the card (about A5 size).
Next, take a long length of wool or string and wrap it around the slots … Once you have completed wrapping the wool around the cardboard start adding your finds from your walk and any additional materials you may have at home.
Attach the items by putting them under and over alternate threads on the board … do the same with pieces of wool or anything else you would like to add.
Charlotte Rooney is a colleague who is also worth following when out on a walk:
“I have always been a bit of a magpie when out and about, unable to resist picking up anything that catches my eye – leaves, feathers, sticks, stones, bits of rusty metal. Sometimes these things form the basis of simple creations or photos or ‘organisings’ that I make when I get home.
It’s hard to deconstruct what feels like such an instinctive, organic act – I hesitate even to call it a practice, it’s just what I do. If pushed, I would say that there’s something in the act of walking – as many artists and writers will attest to – that allows for untethered thought, a state of mind that enables loose connections to be made, for the subconscious to churn away doing its thing. Maybe this informs what I collect. Certainly, if I am walking with a theme or intent in mind, it shapes what catches my eye, what commands my attention, though just as often the connections are only apparent when I get home, sift through my haul, let my hands and mind wander over the objects I unearth from pockets and bag.
In this way, at the end of a walk I’ve often assembled a miniature, ephemeral, temporary cabinet of curiosities – items that are assembled randomly for the love of the things themselves and their intrinsic, aesthetic beauty – but for all that, sometimes a coherent story can arise from the collection even if was not the collector’s intent.”
And now some words from another colleague: KATIE MCCUE:
‘A corner of a path turned, a brow of a hill reached, a sweeping vista revealed, a secret glade beckoning.
Whether experiencing the joys of a flaneur or being guided by those who now more than I will ever know, (of history, geology, politics or nature) … I see in my own way.
Now seeing is different to looking and my way of seeing is full of shape, colour, movement, light & dark whether macroscopic or microscopic.
Seeing is a feeling thing and an act of creation in itself, it’s an inspiration that often fills me with a need to write or paint or draw.
A guided walk triggers my imagination to people the landscape with folk from the past. I see the men and women of pre-history before our valleys were formed by se and glaciers. I see the medieval farmers in ancient fields, I see the workers and weavers, I see laughing Victorian children paddling in streams, I see the tired eyes of children working in the mills.
These same images can come to mind when I wander as a flaneur with no particular plan in mind. However, it is these walks that truly make my soul sing & my eyes drink in the sight of an insect, the pattern of grasses in the wind, the way the light filters through trees when I stand so small beneath the canopy looking up.
I see in my own way. It feeds my creativity.’
That mention of creativity by Katie reminds me of the notion of writing your own heritage trails – old railway lines offer such scope for industrial archaeology, oral history/memory collection, Shelleyesque Ozymandian reflection, and also William Blake’s doors of perception.
I begin with industrial archaeology at the site of the old Dudbridge railway station in Stroud. These are my words for the nascent heritage trail on the branch line to Nailsworth:
Dudbridge Railway Station
I often walk the cycle track below Rodborough Hill,
The old Midland Railway spur from Dudbridge,
And I often cycle the track on to Nailsworth,
Musing on the springs and watercourses, the ancient holloways,
The Roman villa, medieval ridge and furrow, the woollen mills,
The occasional mill chimney, still rising high into the Stroudwater sky.
But, today, I stand at the blue brick retaining wall
At the old Dudbridge railway station,
Watching the cars career around the roundabout,
Drivers mostly oblivious of the history of Dudbridge;
But when I ignore the roar of the traffic,
And I find my mind’s historical eye,
I can see a medieval pilgrim crossing the bridge,
A packhorse with Cotswold wool a mile behind.
For here I stand by the confluence of two rivers.
But also, at the junction of two railway lines:
The interface of water power and steam power,
The inexorable march of the industrial revolution:
Foundries and forges and furnaces
And cranes and pulleys and chains and smoke:
A century-old pandemonium at Dudbridge,
Where once there was an orchard and there is still a Meadow Lane.
Carefully cross the road and study the information plaques
On the wall at Sainsburys; the clothier’s 1646 doorway too;
The inscription at REDLERS from 1910;
The information board at Kimmins Mill,
Then retrace your steps carefully back to the blue brick wall,
And recite these words from T.S. Eliot to yourself:
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Now for Ozymandias (and the industrial relics on the cycle track spur of the Nailsworth line running from Stroud through Rodborough to Dudbridge):
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
It’s a motif that runs through much of my rambling.
But it’s getting to the point where I need to conclude this opening chapter. This essay is turning (indeliberately) into a self-referential piece of writing: the piece is almost turning into a performative pop-up museum itself. Time to stop before I get carried away with myself. I’ll finish with a nod to William Blake which will add as a bridge to the next post on this subject.
‘To see a World in Grain of Sand,
And Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.’
It’s another motif.