Walking Home - Simon Armitage

A poet's account of walking the length of the Pennine Way in England while surviving on people's generosity and hat collections at poetry readings.  Some interesting information about the trail, the walk and the weather but a lot of the book was about the author himself and also quirky English ways seen from the inside.  Not as interesting as some of the other walking accounts I have read, such as "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot" by Macfarlane.

The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald

I have finally found an image to explain Sebald's fiction.  He is a flâneur but a flâneur in the worlds of culture and history.  A melancholy flâneur, with a penchant for savouring lost time.

This book is ostensibly an account of a walking holiday around a small section of the East Coast of England, south of Norwich.  Through his wanderings he connects with former inhabitants and recounts their lives, their artistic accomplishments and the usually sad state of their former homes and mansions.  He explores the rise and fall of towns as fishing dies out, as farming fades, recounting both their heydays and their decline.   Fallen aristocratic families eking out an existence in the dilapidated remains of once glorious homes; the story of Joseph Conrad, who once worked on ships in the area; Swinburne; other smaller artists, collectors, authors who live in the area.

He is like a traveller, and his books a record of the meeting of his mind with the ghosts of the past.

Four Fields - Tim Dee

An excellent example of a genre I really enjoy - reflections and explorations on encounters with a particular natural landscape.  Dee shows a great understanding of natural ecology and human history within the environment of fields - fens in England, grasslands in South Africa and the Midwest, exclusion zone around Chernobyl.

To Find
1. books/art by E A R Ennion (some in reference library TPL)

2. Sixty Years a Fenman, Arthur Randell (reference, TPL)

3. A.K. Astbury, The Black Fens (robarts)

4. The old stories : folk tales from East Anglia and the Fen country /

Kevin Crossley-Holland (Robarts)

5.  Tales from the fens / by W. H. Barrett Enid Porter. (request from Robarts/Downsview)

Bread and Ashes: A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia - Tony Anderson

A bit of a mix as a book.  Some good personal recollections of landscapes, people and places, mixed with a fair bit of anecdotal history from the ancient and recent past.  In describing his experiences and journeys, I find his personal point of view a bit too loud at times - too much judgement, too much commentary, not enough description or facts.  Particularly noticeable in the section on traveling in Eastern Turkey's former Georgian region.
He does present a clear picture of Georgian society and what it is like to travel in that context, if it hasn't changed in the past 10 years or so.

Most of the travels seem to have taken place in the 90s - I wonder how much it has changed since then?

The Broken Road - Patrick Leigh Fermor

- subtitled:  From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

The last of Fermor's journal of his walk from Holland to Istanbul.

For me, the least interesting of the three volumes.  Written when he was quite old, and never actually finished, it lacks the detail of the other volumes.  The Mount Athos section is interesting at first, but becomes repetitive.  There is almost nothing on Istanbul - seems he kept no journal when he was there.

Still worth reading over to say you've read them all, but not as enjoyable.

A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor

The first of the three books about Fermor's walk from Holland to Istanbul in the mid 30's, covering the walk through Holland and Germany.  It shows the same fascination with the intersection of Roman and Medieval history with the modern world.  I think in this book he has a bit more contact with everyday folk compared with the second volume where he seems to spend most of his time with the landed aristocracy that has come down in the world.  There is also more of an awareness of politics, social movements and recent history (WW 1) than in the subsequent book, which makes it more grounded and less fanciful.

I have recently also been reading Picketty's huge tome, Capital in the 21st Century, and interestingly, there is a certain intersection of the two books.  As he traces the history of capital, Piketty's charts show the huge drop in capital in Europe between the two wars, which wiped out many family fortunes and essentially destroyed what remained of the historical aristocracy.  This very class is the one with which he spends so much time, especially in the book dealing with Hungary and Romania.  You see this in the character's stories of their youth in Paris and London (pre WW 1, at the height of capital accumulation by the 10%/1%) and their current life at their country estate, much reduced but surrounded by decades, even centuries of accumulated trappings.

Between the Woods and the Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor

An account of a journey by foot undertaken by Fermor in 1935/1936.  The whole journey extends from Holland to Istanbul, but this book covers the section through Hungary and Romania.  It is well written, and fun to imagine travelling like this, but the most interesting part is the portrait he draws of a world that was on the edge of disappearing in 1936.   Eastern Europe was at least 50 years behind it seems at that time.  It was still a land of landed aristocratic families and village tenant farmers, something which had disappeared from France, England and Germany by then.  It is as if this corner of the world had remained untouched by the cataclysm of the First World War, and the social and traditional norms that had been swept away elsewhere hung on for a few last decades in the world Fermor is travelling through.  Of course, you have to realize also that he is of that world, and a young romantic, so his portrait is highly coloured.
But it is still an interesting oddity to read this book that would have been produced at the same time that the Surrealist, Dadaists and other modern art movements were raging elsewhere.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot - Robert MacFarlane

An absolutely brilliant book.  Wakes up the desire to explore the world from up close and inside the landscape.
An interesting contrast to Barry Lopez's writing on nature as wilderness.  Inevitably with MacFarlane, when he writes about Spain or England, it is both about nature and the layer upon layer of traces of human habitation that lie buried in these landscapes.  North America is just too new and too raw (and places far too high a value on the privacy of private property...)

Many references:

-  Icknied Way by Edward Thomas
-  Edward Thomas' poetry
- MacFarlane's other books
- George Borrow, Lavengro/Wild Wales 19th c
- Robert Louis Stevenson,  Songs of Travel
- John Muir
- Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter
- Sarn Helen (an old path in Wales)
- Tim Robinson - Stones of Aran
- Adam Nicolson - Sea Room:  An Island Life
- Nan Shepherd - The Grampian Quartet; The Living Mountain
- Raja Shehadeh - Palestinian Walks; A Rift in Time
- Christopher Tilley - The Phenomenology of Landscape
- Eric Ravilious - artist early 20th C
- Philip Gosse - Go to the Country
- Richard Holmes - Footsteps
- William Cobbet - Rural Rides