Will Self: Don’t drive to walk
Best-selling author Will Self argues that urban-fleeing walkers’ tunnel vision of the countryside is both damaging and self-defeating…
The modern rambling movement began with a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District, but in my view what’s needed now is a mass exodus. The last time I was on Kinder Scout workmen were hard at it, laying a stone-flagged staircase all the way up from Edale. Even when I gained the ridge, I saw that more stone-flagging lay ahead of me, as if wayward Romans had been building wonky roads. Actually, the Roman analogy isn’t that misplaced, because in the last 20 years legions of walkers have invaded the British hinterland intent on stealing beauty.
I say ‘intent’, but really, where’s the beauty to be found? It’s difficult to commune with nature when there are scores of other communards, just as it’s impossible to venture into the wild if it’s overpopulated by the civilised. Of course, I realise that if you get a little bit further off the beaten – or stone-flagged – track, you’ll soon find all the solitude you desire, but there remains something profoundly disturbing about the way our most celebrated areas of natural beauty are becoming replete with the same urban infrastructure we’re trying to get away from: car parks, gift shops, cafés – and now these metalled paths that mimic the motorways most visitors have driven along in order to get there.
I blame the English Romantics: their obsession with the picturesque spread with lightning speed. When Wordsworth was still living at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, trippers were already pitching up armed with wooden frames through which to descry the surrounding fells. Two hundred years on that frame has become completely internalised, so that we head en masse for such locations, where we goggle at prospects that have already been worn smooth by our regard.
Unfortunately, it’s a lose-lose situation: not only is our hunt for the unspoilt a spoliation, but the correlate of this is that we have little regard for the places where we actually live. Whether it’s fly-tipping or lousy architecture, littering or insensitive planning, the urban environment is endlessly traduced by not just commercial imperatives but our own studied lack of regard. Why bother? – we say to ourselves. After all, we’re effectively powerless when it comes to prettifying our immediate surroundings, so our best possible defence is to get out at the weekend for a good long walk somewhere lovely.
And as we drive along the motorways and arterial roads en route for our aesthetic route march, we give scant thought to the areas of outstanding
man-made ugliness that we’re passing through. But it’s precisely our tunnel vision that’s making the parts of Britain where the majority of people live a miserable concrete bollix, and that’s why we should stop driving to walk at all. The car is the sworn enemy of the walker in every shape and form: they stink, they’re noisy, they’re dangerous, and they – or rather their drivers – are responsible for the most egregious and insensitive modifications to the British landscape since its Iron Age deforestation. Driving to take a walk is a solecism on a par with shooting people in the cause of universal peace and harmony. My view is if you can’t take a train or a bus to do a walk, then don’t do it at all.
Besides, if you get out of the habit of driving to walk then you’re immediately thrown back into the purlieus of your own home. I almost always walk directly from my home – and this despite the fact I live in central London. True, it may take an entire day to reach open country, but by God I feel I’ve earned it when I see those green fields. Moreover, by consistently walking through the built environment I make my peace with it. In part, I conceded, this is because I’ve developed a kind of anti-Romanticism, whereby the ugly is experienced as beauty. In part it’s because I’ve learnt the byways and riversides, so that I can trek through town in the most bucolic possible way. But mostly it’s because I am entirely liberated from the awful sensation you get – especially when contemplating the ‘CAR PARK FULL’ sign at Grasmere or Edale – that the world is replete, and that, as Thomas De Quincey (another of the awful Romantics) put it: ‘the human being is in these parts a weed’. My message is: learn to appreciate the ruderals growing on the motorway embankment near to your house, and you needn’t feel weed-choked at all.
Will Self’s latest book, Psycho Too, is a collection of his walking pieces for the Independent published by Bloomsbury (£20, ISBN 9781408802281)
- This entry was posted on: Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
- Filed under: Blogs, Walk Spring 2010
- Tags: opinion, rural environment, urban walking, Will Self
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12 Responses to “Will Self: Don’t drive to walk”
At 10:40 am on March 2nd, 2010 John Smith wrote:
