Abstract
This chapter focuses on place-inspired texts and walking performances by Robert Macfarlane, Linda Cracknell and Stuart McAdam as verbal and non-verbal reactions elicited by physical encounters with an environment that is ‘rewalked’ and trodden upon before it can be imagined.
The term ‘hodology’ or ‘odology’, meaning literally ‘the study of pathways’, was reintroduced by John Brinckerhoff Jackson in his 1984 monograph Discovering the Vernacular Landspace.
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Notes
- 1.
‘New BBC weather map causes storm’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4556025.stm. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 2.
‘Maps give us reality, a reality that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way. We are always mapping the invisible or the unattainable or the erasable, the future or the past, the whatever-is-not-here-present-to-our-senses-now and, through the gift that the map gives us, transmuting into everything it is not…into the real ’ (Wood 1993, pp. 4–5).
- 3.
The term ‘synthetic’ is borrowed from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s definition of ‘landscape’: ‘a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a manmade system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community—for the collective character of a landscape is one thing that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon. A landscape is thus a space created to speed up or slow down the process of nature’ (Jackson 1984, p. 8).
- 4.
Kwon further expands on Hal Foster’s ethnographic approach to art and to the artists’ ability to ‘reoccupy lost cultural spaces and propose historical counter-memories’ (Foster 1995, in Kwon 2002, p. 138).
- 5.
Sheilings , also spelt ‘shielings’, date back to the transhumance system of agriculture. The term denotes the seasonal upland dwellings of Highland shepherds. Sheilings were abandoned after the land was converted to sheep-runs in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
- 6.
See also Alistair Moffat, The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads (2017). On the concept of wayfaring, see Tim Ingold, specifically Lines. A Brief History (2007) and Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011). ‘The knowledge [people] acquire, I argue, is integrated not up the levels of a classification but along paths of movement, and people grow into it by following trails through a meshwork. I call this trail-following wayfaring, and conclude that it is through wayfaring and not transmission that knowledge is carried on’ (Ingold 2011, p. 143). ‘Wayfarers, however, are not failed or reluctant occupants but successful inhabitants. They may indeed be widely travelled, moving from place to place—often over considerable distances—and contributing through these movements to the ongoing formation of each of the places through which they pass. Wayfaring, in short, is neither placeless nor place-bound but place -making’ (Ingold 2007, p. 101).
- 7.
The BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Living Mountain’ (Thursday 31 July 2014) was a recording in situ of Macfarlane’s trip to and across the Cairngorms ‘in search of and inspired by’ Nan Shepherd . It is now available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03mfndd. Accessed 9 January 2019. The Living Mountain was also the subject of Macfarlane’s BBC 4 film documentary ‘The Living Mountain: A Cairngorms Journey’, broadcast on Thursday 22 September 2016. In the summer of 2018, Simone Kenyon announced a forthcoming site-specific performance inspired by The Living Mountain, with music by Hanna Tuulikki .
- 8.
The terms ‘chronotope’ and ‘spatial-temporal frame’ come from Bakhtin. They initially denoted ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ (Bakhtin 1975, p. 84). I will refer more specifically to the development of the concept into ‘micro-chronotopes’ and to Deleuze and Guattari’s mapping of the ‘rhizomatic multiplicities’ of relationships between territoriality , temporality and identity (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, p. 33).
- 9.
On the analogy between scripting and weaving, see Tim Ingold’s Lines: A Brief history, specifically the chapter titled ‘From threads to traces: knotting, weaving, brocade, text’ (Ingold 2007, pp. 61–71).
- 10.
See, also, Cracknell’s text titled ‘Walking in Circles’, part of a series of contributions to the Walkhighlands online magazine: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/news/walking-in-circles/0014325. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 11.
See De Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life: ‘Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. […] space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 117).
- 12.
http://www.moniackmhor.org.uk/events. Accessed 9 January 2019. Prior to this, in August 2015, Cracknell, along with poet Valerie Gillies and naturalist John Lister-Kaye, tutored a five-day residential course titled ‘Words and outdoor worlds; Place, Worlds and Words’. During this course, the authors and participants became practitioners of natural spaces. They explored the surroundings of Moniack Mor on foot, wrote poems and narrative texts, drew maps and were encouraged to rename the places they had just travelled through.
- 13.
See Mike Russell (1998) In Waiting: Travels in the Shadow of Edwin Muir (Castle Douglas: Neil Wilson Publishing).
- 14.
http://www.out-of-books.com. Accessed 9 January 2019. The book was published by Duration Press in 2017.
- 15.
http://www.deveron-arts.com/stuart-mcadam, https://vimeo.com/72671616. Accessed 9 January 2019. Stuart McAdam (2015) Lines Lost: Huntly–Portsoy. A guide to the former Banff, Portsoy and Strathisla Railway (Huntly: Deveron Arts).
- 16.
‘The industrial ruin, then, presents us with a defamiliarized space in which modes of passage are improvisatory, uninformed by conventions, continually disrupted and expressive. Instead of a self-contained bodily comportment, with fixed stride, steady gait and minimal gestures which limit interaction with the environment, objects and other people, the body is inadvertently coaxed into a more flamboyant and expressive style, awakening that lie beyond those to which it has become habituated. Both the material characteristics of the ruin and the absence of forms of surveillance and social pressures permit ways of walking that foster an extension of bodily experience and expression by contrast to the largely constrained disposition of the urban pedestrian’ (Edensor 2008, pp. 129–130).
- 17.
‘The modalities of pedestrian enunciation which a plane representation on a map brings out could be analyzed. They include the kinds of relationship this enunciation entertains with particular paths (or “statements”) by according them a truth value (“alethic” modalities of the necessary, the impossible, the possible, or the contingent), an epistemological value (“epistemic” modalities of the certain, the excluded, the plausible, or the questionable) or finally an ethical or legal value (“deontic” modalities of the obligatory, the forbidden, the permitted, or the optional). Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks ”’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 99).
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Manfredi, C. (2019). Keeping the Paths Beaten: Robert Macfarlane, Linda Cracknell and Stuart McAdam’s Hodological Scotland. In: Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_2
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