A Walk Around Britain

December 2007

Our walk from Oxford to Glastonbury was made to get to a gig. We started in Oxford, as Will was heading there to visit his girl. It was early December, good crisp weather for walking.

The adventure was a rum affair, plagued by small injuries looked to maybe stop everyone. We made it to Glastonbury eventually, after some 2 weeks.

This is some of what happened:

On the second day of walking, we met a lady who remembered us from Pilsdon Manor 12 months earlier. She put us on her mobile phone, and we were soon chatting with the people we had met there. It was an odd blessing from an earlier journey, a small reminder that we were on track.

We busked in Abingdon, near Oxford, and the teenage girls in the shopping centre were amazed. “People don’t come here. We don’t get this stuff in our town.” The older generation were soon promenading past, in giggling gangs, half-stepping half-dancing to the tunes.

(more…)

This walk took us 9 months from home, from Canterbury to Lands End and back along to Somerset.

We had set off with a very limited knowledge of long-walking. We did know we could sing together, how far we could walk, nor how to use the kit we were carrying.

We learned a lot, and met many great people. We found that England is no single land, but many small lands that mingle and overlap, each distinct, but also dependent on its neighbour for a sense of relative identity.

There is much we would say of this journey; but we’ve already said a lot, and snippets of info are distributed around this website.

For a detailed sample of these adventures, please check The Book.

Walking out of Barnstaple, we were jolly from our the first busk in some time. The town drinkers had been inspired to start singing, and we spotted them knocking out Aerosmith songs to slightly shocked shoppers. They had good, if slightly rough edged voices. They held the tunes, with animated delivery. As we were walking out of town, they ran after us with their hatful of money, laughing, saying they’d got enough for a cider each. They tried to give us a cut of the money, for reminding them of this old trick, but we said “hold onto it”. We wonder if they took this further, and started learning, arranging and practising songs, or if it was an afternoon’s fun and no more?

(more…)

We arrived in Totnes after a long day walking across Dartmoor, from Morton Hampstead in the North. We had stayed for winter solstice in the Stewards Wood Community, just east of Morton. It was good hearty festivity, with a feast, songs, and a carved ash yule log. We’d been given a guest yurt to sleep in, complete with wood-burner, and we were intensely grateful for its glowing warmth.

(more…)

Of all the questions we are asked, the second is most difficult.

Why? Who knows ‘why’? If ‘why’ is already known, why go walking? The mysterious dysfunction of cause and effect is not a clear web to us, nor would we pretend otherwise. Sometimes we’d mutter about ‘self-initiation’, ‘going on adventure’, or ‘meeting our country’. More often, in response to this ‘why’, we’d offer our first walk as a contextual analogy, concealing a lack of explanation with the illusion of history.

In Spring 2004 we walked from Winchester to Canterbury, along the Pilgrim’s Way.

We wanted to investigate this ancient beaten track, to see what remained of the phenomenon of pilgrimage. We took about three weeks, slow going by most standards, an uncertain first investigation into the art of journeying. In truth, our initial pondering steps were amazingly naive. We had few relevant outdoor skills, no tents/tarps nor maps, and we had no idea what a long walk meant. Slowly we began to perceive the vast scope of our ignorance.

(more…)