Stories about Walking
Fictional treatments of long-distance travel on foot: Harold Fry and 'You Are Here' [1400 words 6 mins
Climbing and mountaineering have a richer literature than any other sport – true-life (or fairly true life) accounts from Leslie Stephen's 'Playground of Europe' in 1871 through to the fairly recent film 'Free Solo' about Alex Honnold on El Capitan.
Long distance walking has rather less drama, and almost no death at all. But seeing as life is universally described as a ‘journey’ – this means any actual journey is a ready-made metaphor for Life Itself. And so we have Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cevennes with his bolshie donkey, Matsuo Basho hiking long-distance through Japan, John Muir trekking across America, Cheryl Strayed ticking off most of the Pacific Crest Trail.
But stroll on through the library to the shelves labelled ‘fiction’, and climbing and hiking are hardly there at all. When compiling a list of mountaineering fiction for the UK Climbing website I managed to find a few: seven in fact – though one of them was actually a play (Auden and Isherwood's 'The Ascent of F6'). But when it comes to hiking and hillwalking, country rambles and the long-distance trails: nothing there at all. Maybe 19 million Brits do like to lace up our boots and head out into the muddy lanes and rainswept hilltops. But what we pick up when we’re back by the fireside is a story about boy wizards, or cosy murders, sponge-cake recipes or the sex lives of sadistically inclined billionaires.
Okay, you could suggest that Volume 1 of Lord of the Rings is, essentially, a long-distance walk from The Shire to wherever that bit of the story ends up at, Rivendell if my memory's correct, with a nice mountain range getting in the way. What I'll say to that is, if you're being chased by evil ghouls and protected by a magician, it's not really a walking story but one about ghouls and Gandalf.
What also doesn't count is if somebody's chasing you with guns… Otherwise I could have included the obscure 1960s thriller 'Green River High', with its exciting hike around the Yorkshire Three Peaks.
What, you want to hear about it anyway? Well, there's a wise old bird who's tougher than she looks, and the over-confident younger bloke who thinks the old bird can maybe keep up with him if he keeps the speed down on the uphill bits… The wise old bird outwalks him, of course, and then there are the guys with the shotguns. Nasty! Luckily the shotgun guys are smokers, so don't have the stamina to catch up. After a long day, and descending Ingleborough as darkness falls, our protagonists have just groped around a rickety old fence when Wise Old Bird finally loses it. “I can't bear it any more! Not gong up Pen y Ghent all over again – no, no, come and shoot me now, put me out of my misery!”
Well if you know the Yorkshire Three Peaks you can work out the rest. But just in case you don't know the Y3P - after all, it's a mere 200,000 of us who get to iron-on the official badge to our rucksacks. What happens is: there's the sound of two shotgun guys scrambling across the rickety fence – of some Unsuitable Shoes sliding down wet grass – a brief shriek – and then silence. Followed, 6.8 seconds later, by the muffled, hollow thump of a shotgun setting itself off as it hits the floor of Gaping Gill, 98m below.
If I wanted to be broadminded, I could be persuaded that both the Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain with his Greene Knight are walk stories. So maybe the tradition does exist, just in abeyance ever since the 1380s.
Anyway, in March 2012 everything changed. That was when Harold Fry completed his unlikely pilgrimage from Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed, in the book by Rachel Joyce. Thus initiating a new tradition of cosy, sentimental stories about walks of several hundred miles. Which has subsequently only gone from Strength to – I could say from Strength to Strength but as well as being a cliché that would imply a circular walk, wouldn’t it? So let’s say from Strength to St Bees. Because 2023 saw Harold Fry converted into that major motion picture, followed this year by an all-new second novel tramping nervously out into the ‘Heartwarming Hiking’ genre.
Harold’s a late-middle-age married man in Kingsbridge, Devon, who gets word that a former colleague called Queenie is terminally ill in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He takes his letter of condolence to the post-box; but he’s missed the post, and anyway the letter’s a rather lame one. So he decides to take the letter to Berwick himself, it’ll be almost as quick as the Royal Mail these days.1
And of course, in his ‘yachting shoes’, he’s going to end up even lamer than his own letter.
In last year’s film, directed by Hettie Macdonald, Harold’s played by Jim Broadbent. “At its worst, the movie has the cloying air of a John Lewis ad, with a mongrel dog particularly irksome. Guardian angel mutts? Sweet Jesus, give me strength…. So much about the film is ridiculous but, thanks mostly to the three wonderful leads, the grief at its core is no joke.” So writes Charlotte O’Sullivan in the London Evening Standard – those other leads being Penelope Wilton and Linda Bassett.
Harold Fry’s more of a heart-wrencher than a heart-warmer, with those unsatisfactory shoes leading to some deeply searing footcare moments.2 But the basic framework, ultimate redemption secured by way of a really long walk, goes straight back to Sir Gawain in the late Middle Ages.
And now, barely ten years later, comes a second trekking-based page-turner.
The Sunday Times describes ‘You Are Here’ as “The Remains of the Day crossed with Michael Winterbottom's The Trip, only with more Gore-Tex”. And it’s currently striding along at No.8 in Amazon’s ‘clean and wholesome romance’ category. The Amazon vetters clearly having missed the serious peat-slop daubed all over Day Six.
And if anyone, inspired by the book, is tempted to walk the walk itself: don't worry about those gruesome country inns, or look forward to the ones with swimming pools and Jacuzzis – the accommodation points are entirely fictitious. But the walk itself is authentic, the landscape taken from life. I wasn’t convinced, myself, by the way inexperienced, unfit Marnie, after a full-body soaking from Ennerdale Water over to Borrowdale, then doubles up the stages from Rosthwaite to Patterdale while aided along the way by three (three!) pints of Lakeland real ale. But then, this is romantic comedy. Inept, townie-type person crippled by social anxiety but still capable of charming wisecracks, thrown together by circumstances with lonely, socially anxious but still moderately hot geography teacher who likes long-distance walking; and the two find love. If you can't bring yourself to believe in that, then reading 'You are Here' purely as a bit or route description – you'd be better off back with Wainwright and his uncomplicated sexual politics.3
Meanwhile, as we read ‘You are Here’, those of us who love long-distance walking will be touched and inspired: seduced once again by the charm of what is, after all, England’s premier long-distance path.
So long-distance walking still awaits its Tolstoyan epic, 4000 miles across Siberia. Its Bronte-esque tale of peat and forbidden passion along the length of the Pennine Way. Its Virginia Woolf style stream of consciousness, which you leap across while keeping your feet dry with the aid of a sturdy walking pole.
But when it comes to the early 21st century sentimental story – Chick Lit But For Beardie Blokes As Well. Long distance walking, in fiction, has at last wrung out its socks, given a wry smile, and strolled forward into the gentle green pastures of the Heartwarming Story.4
As it happens, I’ve walked to Berwick-upon-Tweed myself, though from not so far away as south Devon. Three times, in fact. First time was from Allenheads, which is the southernmost point of Northumberland; then again from Gretna, at the other end of the Anglo-Scots border; finally from Cockburnspath down the Berwickshire coast. All very worthwhile walks, just so long as you’ve got proper boots on.
Should I use the phrase ‘blistering intensity’? No, probably better not.
A Wainwright, author of the 7-volume ‘Pictorial Guide’ and deviser of the Coast-to-Coast walk, certainly loved the Lake District hills. He just didn't much like people, and had a pretty creepy attitude to the female ones. My own guidebook to his path is long out of print and out of date.
A shorter version of this review appears in the Winter issue of Outdoor Focus, the quarterly magazine of the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild. We were a week away from going to press with 700 words of white space at the end of the book review pages.
Loved your synopsis of Green River High, Ronald. Hurray for the Wise Old Bird. I am very in favour of books in which a Wise Old Bird is the protagonist.
I was trying to rack my brains about novels with long journeys on foot. Recently I read 'A Fringe of Leaves' by Patrick White which features a long walk by the protagonist back to civilisation. Before reading, I thought this would be the main part of the novel, but actually it was only a small segment near the end. Maybe also 'Voss' by White as well... I haven't read it.
The problem with either taking long walks or bagging tall peaks is the same- the epic comes to an eventual end. Then what? You forget the sore feet, all the numbing frost and discomforts, you remember the joys, the vistas, the intensity, while forgetting the drudgery. And you start planning the next one I suspect.