Six (guest) Things

Oct 18, 2023

A midweek departure, the first of an occasional series in which I hand over this space to a guest. On this occasion it’s the excellent Alastair Humphreys: adventurer, writer, podcaster, pretty-much-everythinger. Al does so many things I’m convinced there are at least three of him. He links to a couple of his entertaining videos, but most importantly he has a book out soon. It’s called Local – a search for nearby nature and wildness and I’m very much looking forward to reading it.

Now, over to Alastair.

I always enjoy receiving Lev’s Six Things, so I was very happy to be offered the chance to write a guest post for him. Here, then, are six things that interest me...

Most of my adult life has involved chasing adventure across the globe. I once spent four years cycling round the world, crossing five continents and 46,000 miles. On other occasion, I rowed 3000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. A third adventure, suitable for the musical hints of this newsletter, was following in the footsteps of Laurie Lee as I walked through Spain to Madrid, with no money or credit card and only my virtually non-existent violin busking skills to pay for my next meal. (It is very British to pretend that I was rubbish but actually to be a maestro – I actually was hopeless at the violin! It was a terrifying, thrilling adventure.)

After such dogged wanderlust, how would I cope with my decision to swap big adventures for an entire year exploring the single small Ordnance Survey map that I live on? It is a nondescript, uninteresting sort of landscape on the margins of a big city. I've never much liked it, never paid it much attention, and held a fairly strong conviction that ADVENTURE meant distant horizons. At first I thought that it was a terrible idea.

But as we destroy the planet by flying hither and thither, tolerate living in one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth, yet are stirred to anger and sadness by the felling of one iconic tree, I decided to search for nearby nature and everyday wildness. If I paid enough attention, I wondered, could a single map be enough exploration for an entire lifetime?

My boring year on my boring map turned out to be one of the most eye-opening, fascinating journeys of my life. I've written about it in my new book, Local, and I hope it might tempt you to also buy a map of the neighbourhood you live in and start paying attention to the nearby nature and everyday wildness that is all around us.

Which – eventually – leads on to six interesting things I discovered during this year.

Thing 1 – Footpaths

We are so fortunate to have an incredible network of footpaths in this country. They were a vital way for me to explore my local map. In England we have such wonderful paths as the 5000-year-old Icknield Way, although that is a mere ingenue compared to Somerset's Sweet Track, a 6000-year-old wooden walkway over wetlands. Yet 49,000 miles of historic footpaths and rights of way are due to be lost forever, unless we jump up and save them from this sad move by the government.
But footpaths are not only ancient, immutable things. The fabulous Slow Ways group is creating a new network of convenient walking paths right across the country. Find one near you and try it out this weekend. It's really important to get out and walk the countryside we live in, not least of all because in England we currently only have the legal right to roam on 8% of our land. This restricted lack of access drove me mad this year, made me care about the right to roam campaign, and look with envy to the allemansrätten principles of Scandinavia, where everyone embraces both the right to enjoy the landscape and the responsibility to look after it.

Thing 2 – Maps

Once a week, for 52 weeks, I unfolded the Ordnance Survey map covering the area where I live and picked a random grid square. I headed out, come rain or shine, with the optimistic aim of seeing ‘everything’ within that single grid square. Some weeks, this involved cycling up and down streets. Other weeks were spent wandering around woods or wasteland. I highly recommend you treat yourself to a map centred on where you live and begin exploring more locally. We are fortunate in Britain to have such superb maps, and probably take it for granted. But imagine living in olden times when the maps were very different... I love this old map of London before the houses were all built. And you can go back even further, almost 700 years, to the incredible Gough map which is one of the earliest maps to show Britain in a geographically-recognizable form. I find it thrilling to search on this digitised version for places I know well today.

Thing 3 – Trig points

One of the ways in which the Ordnance Survey produced such accurate maps of Britain was through a network of trig points. If you've climbed a big hill, you'll have seen one. You may have sheltered from howling winds behind one of the concrete pillars while eating a soggy sandwich and wishing you were elsewhere. They were first used in the retriangulation of Great Britain on 18 April 1936. On that day, a group of surveyors gathered around a white concrete pillar in a field in Cold Ashby and began the retriangulation of Great Britain. They were built so that a theodolite could be accurately sited and readings taken. A trig point is actually a more complex structure than I'd imagined, with various internal intricasies. I encountered several during my map exploration. But hats off to Rob Woodall who was the first to 'bag' every single trig point in Britain, all 6190 of them, ranging from the top of Ben Nevis to Little Ouse in Cambridgeshire which is actually below sea level. Perhaps you could get out this weekend and find your local trig point (using this handy map) and perhaps even tackle the seven summits of your neighbourhood as a more achievable alternative to the Seven Summits of the World, the highest mountain on each continent.

Thing 4 – Data

At the outset of spending a year on such a small map, I imagined that I'd spend most of it ambling or cycling around learning about nature (something which I love but am spectacularly ignorant about) and poking around rabbit holes. I did plenty of that, but I actually spent even more time diving down internet rabbit holes when I got home, prompted to curiosity by the things I had seen out on my map. Much of it revolved around my escalating horror about the way we use our land, and the devastating impact that has on nature, rivers, and wildlife. These are hot, emotive topics, and you can cheerfully waste many late night hours arguing with strangers on social media about all of them. But I preferred to develop a fascination for data, not something I had ever done before. I became strangely mesmerised by the Our World in Data website. Their mission is to publish the “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems”. And they do this in interesting, understandable ways. So the next time you are worried about something, anything, please do explore their site. For example, I was staggered to learn that half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, that almost all of this is related to meat and dairy, and that ditching it could free up an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined! That's a lot of space for nature, rewilding, carbon absorption, and other things that people seem to get angry about late at night on Twitter. (In the spirit of Six Things, I wonder whether you might be interested to take the jump and try these six shifts to protect our earth and live with joy?)

Thing 5 – Thoreau and Whitman (Lev: are they things? Al: YES)

My unofficial ambassador for doggedly staying put and exploring locally was Henry David Thoreau. He is famous for living in a cabin in the woods at Walden pond, for the fact that his mum brought him pies and did his laundry, and for his timeless writing that revolves around the notion of taking long walks and paying attention. I wanted to share Mary Oliver's poem 'Going to Walden' about 'the slow and difficult // Trick of living, and finding it where you are.' But what really jumped into my mind when I thought of telling you about Thoreau was how much I love this video series about Walt Whitman (my mind jumped from one bearded old dude to another. Sorry. If I carried on in this way I'd feel compelled to share possibly my favourite film I've ever made, about John Muir. Sorry.) I absolutely love the deep South of the USA, and this experiment in using documentary and poetry to reveal the threads that tie us together via Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’ is beautiful.

Thing 6 – Deneholes

Much of my year on my map was fairly gentle. Suburbs and swifts, woods and wrens, fly-tipping and dragonflies. So finding myself switching on a headtorch and lowering myself down a climbing rope into a subterranean hole was a rare burst of excitement. I had never heard of deneholes until the day I slithered down into the pitch-dark chalky cave. They are medieval chalk extraction pits that once riddled the land before we invented chemical fertilisers (which keep 40% of humanity alive, make up 80% of the nitrogen in our bodies, and pollute our waterways). I was fascinated to get this reminder of how simple, slow, and back-breaking life used to be, and how innovative people have always been. Every humdrum neighbourhood that we live in is dotted with history and mystery.

Thank you, Lev, for this opportunity!

My new book, Local - a search for nearby nature and wildness is available to pre-order now.

Six Things