WALKING THE GREAT NORTH LINE
From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to discover the mysteries of our ancient past
ROBERT TWIGGER
320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20.
The route Robert Twigger takes in this rambling adventure may seem unconventional, but it is guided by a neat idea. One day, having noticed that a straight line from Hengistbury Head in Dorset to Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast passes through no fewer than forty-two sites stretching back to prehistory – including Old Sarum, Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor – he sets out on a pilgrimage along this novel pathway. A question forever hovers in the background: does this alignment exist by accident, or by design?
Luxuriating in the quotidian aspects of walking while keeping an eye on the bigger picture, Twigger sees his trek as a homage to the ancients, to “my freedom to do as I pleased, sleep and walk where I pleased. And freedom also includes not paying for things that are ours by rights, by the rights of ancient England”. “I was fondly hoping to develop ideas about England’s ‘primitive’ past”, he writes, “and to point out that ancient man was just as intelligent as us.”
Part poet, part pub philosopher, he is sometimes friendly and open, discussing Jack Kerouac with fellow trekkers, for example; at other times, he is a misanthrope who enjoys being alone and unhappy, mired in bad weather, suffering from blisters and getting lost. In perhaps an accidental allusion to the eternal monomyth, he seems to be on his own Hero’s Journey: he grows dispirited as he zigzags through the Peak District, facing false starts, disenchantments and deliverances – he is frustrated by barbed wire and blocked passages, but elsewhere discovers an “island with a single small oak ... made for a great seat, a regal seat, a poet warrior’s seat” – while repeatedly vowing never to forget the pain of walking.
An inveterate grumbler, Twigger is seldom a bore, however, and this melancholy, elegiac and meandering book is strangely satisfactory. It doesn’t matter that the original conceit, the supposed line from north to south, retreats into irrelevance (Twigger reluctantly concedes that he “had a correlation. Nothing more”), it is just good to be in his company as he walks and reflects on such esoteric subjects as shamanism, Continental philosophy, church porches, land ownership, autobiography, family history and the stressful and sometimes soul-destroying nature of modernity.
Patrick West
No comments:
Post a Comment