The Icknield Way

As you know last week I had a whale of a time listening to Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways which I just thought was wonderful and up there with the best travel writers I've read. Macfarlane began his journey in part as an homage to the Welsh writer Edward Thomas who was killed in World War 1 and who was one of the first old way walker/explorer/writers in England. Macfarlane took with him The Icknield Way where Thomas wrote about his journey on "the oldest road in England" that runs from East to West (or West to East) over the chalk downs from Cambridgeshire to Hampshire. It's a happy coincidence that Macfarlane began his book (where he began following Edward Thomas's route) just a little to the south east of the village of Sawston which is where my novel Falling Glass ends. Like I say this is only a coincidence but a strange one as Sawston is a beautiful, but nondescript, out of the way sort of place.
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Just as one book leads to another so reading Macfarlane has led me to Thomas's Icknield Way that my local library did not have but which has been scanned and put online by an archivist from the University of California. Helpfully the archivist provided an embed code so I was able to blog the entire book below. I appreciate that only 1% of the people who chance on this blogpost will be interested enough to read the below book, but that's ok, you're the 1% I do everything for anyway. The best way to read it is to click the full screen button and then the two page option (the two rectangles). The dedication at the beginning is off puttingly dry but, trust me, the rest of the book is charming. If you're interested in British travel writing in the Golden Age (and if you're not you should be) then you'll enjoy this. Other authors worth checking out from this era are: Robert Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Fleming, Freya Stark, Rebecca West and the travel books of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Anyway thanks to the University of California, here's Thomas's lovely, eccentric, borderline mystical, Icknield Way:

The Old Ways

Most of the products of our doomed culture seem specifically designed to get on my nerves, almost as if their authors have looked inside my head and thought to themselves: now what can we do here that will irritate Adrian the most. Of course this is a paranoid, solipsistic way of thinking and probably as silly as the implied idea that in the past things were better. Much rarer are the cultural products that come my way that seem to be written just for me. Last year I saw a couple of films Fish Tank and Wendy & Lucy that were that way; a couple of books: The Fortress of Solitude and The Art of Fielding and one play: Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. This year so far no films have wormed their way inside my solipsistic mind but a recent audiobook has. The book is The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, which could have been written solely to give me pleasure. It's a travel book about Macfarlane's adventures walking on the 'old routes' of Britain, Europe and further afield. Along the way he ruminates about other famous walkers and their journeys on foot: Rousseau, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wittgenstein, WH Davies, Edward Thomas, George Borrow, John Muir etc. who are writers that I also love (Patrick Fermor's A Time of Gifts may be my favourite book of all time). Macfarlane is something of a naturalist and he observes flora, fauna and landscape with a keen eye. And it's a philosophical book too. Macfarlane is at one with the German Romantics who felt that one's surroundings could influence one's spirit and who recommended travelling to the wild places as a way of coming to understand oneself. The outward journey leads to the inner one: nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg as Novalis says.

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Listening to The Old Ways as an audiobook while walking through the city or the countryside or along the beach was such a pleasure for me that I had to ration the book out to thirty minute increments a day lest I finish it too soon. Most of my heroes, it seems, are big walkers: Iain Sinclair walked the route of the M25, Werner Herzog walked from Bavaria to Paris, JA Baker tramped over the Essex marshes looking for peregrines, George Orwell tramped over England and France looking for authenticity and the incomparable Paddy Fermor walked from The Hook of Holland to Constantinople looking for adventure. There's nothing quite like walking to connect you with the place you live in or a new place. If you're not a big walker or need a little inspiration along the long lonely path may I suggest that you get yourself an Audible account, and as your first free audiobook get The Old Ways which I really cannot recommend highly enough.