Day 10: St Justinian's to Abereiddy

Weather: Partly cloudy, then sunny, warm and still

Distance covered today: 16.3km (10.1mi)

Last night's B&B: The Coach House

% Complete: Cum distance: 72.1%: 212.0km  (131.7mi)

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 10 (click!)

Walkers of the world unite!  We demand our rights (of way)!  Forgive me, but it is May Day, or in these politically correct and bureaucratically anodyne times, Early May Bank Holiday.  The hordes are still in town, inducing me to withdraw from the scrum into the realms of thought, and specifically to thoughts about walking.

Thoreau looms ever larger in my thinking. Sensible man, he had a great love for walking, which we share. He also wrote very eruditely about it. In fact he wrote an essay which he named simply “Walking”.  I first heard about it from a young, American student, by name Joanna, who was doing a creative writing course at Washington College in the US and who randomly commented on a post in my LEJOG blog. She introduced me to his field notes, written by him in preparation for the final essay.

I have come across references to his love of walking and its philosophical underpinning in many instances since then, and earlier in this walk, Adrienne was expressing ideas with which he would have been quite at home.  Last night, I finally met up with the intrepid group of walkers from Tunbridge Wells, and amidst much ribaldry, had a half-way serious conversation with their deposed “glorious leader” George, a thoughtful, amusing and articulate member of the group and its chief organiser. His ouster as leader was the collective and boisterous result of his faulty planning of their walk the previous day, which resulted in their late arrival in St David’s (and their incidentally standing me up in The Jolly Farmer!)

They had obviously discussed me and my wanderings and were keen to interrogate me on the whys and wherefores. I fear I acquitted myself poorly, but over the general hubbub, George and I did have an interesting conversation.  He introduced me to the idea of “Ambulando solvitur”, which was new to me, and on research, rather surprisingly so. It means, literally “It is solved by walking”, and has a long and distinguished intellectual heritage.

I was trying to explain that I had found it impossible to think deeply about things in my walks, something I have been going on about in these blogs for ages. He disagrees. He says the whole point is that by exposure to all the elements of a walk and the practical exercise of it, the subconscious is processing these issues in its own time and space and that the solutions will emerge as a natural consequence. This is something with which my good friend Peter, in Pringle Bay, would no doubt agree.

Thoreau too reaches into the same idea: “In the spaces of thought are the reaches of land and water, where men go and come. The landscape lies far and fair within and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled.”  This may have been a touch too self-serving, though he wasn’t necessarily referring to himself!  I argued with George about this, but he was insistent. He is convinced that walking is the natural condition of Homo Sapiens and it is therefore a process through which we address big issues, even if we do not consciously approach them at the time.

Thoreau, again in his essay on walking, waxes eloquent on the subject.  He may be a little politically incorrect in this post 9/11 world, in which Bush the Younger made such a fool of himself about the crusades, but allowing for the context of his own times, Thoreau says:  “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children- exclaimed, ‘There goes a SainteTerrer,’ Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean….For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.”

On the same theme, my good friend, Mary sent me this quote from Rebecca Solnit, in her book ‘Wanderlust: A History of Walking’;  “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts”.  This precisely addresses my issue. I have equated being lost in my thoughts with thinking deeply, and the act of walking prevents this. Rebecca is at one with Thoreau and George that this doesn’t matter!

She goes on to say, “Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.

“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete, for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.

“Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known. Perhaps this is where walking's peculiar utility for thinkers comes from. The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far.

“Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.”

There is for me a congruence between these ideas, and what my good friend Julian would call a synchronicity in their all coming together during this walk. How far separated Thoreau and his Walden Pond is from George and his squash-club colleagues in Tunbridge Wells!

And so this is me, your saunterer, sounding intense, but, if truth be told, actually just loving the challenge and the fun of this walk.  So maybe I am just an idler and a vagabond after all?

A fiery sunset in context for the conflicts that beset St David's Cathedral through history!

Only a parent will understand!

St David's magnificent cathedral in the smallest city in Britain

The ruined Bishop's Palace: St David himself lived humbly. The princes of the church later did not!

Setting off from St Justinian's along this magical path

An Oystercatcher admiring the patterns of lichen

Approaching Whitesands Bay

The beach at Whitesands Bay at low tide

The coast up to Carn Penberry, the first igneous outcrop on my journey so far

Violet?

I would have to walk over the shoulder of Carn Penberry

A seal lazing in the sun

Two of his brothers, standing upright in the water for some reason

A most striking butterfly! Julian, what is it?

The crown of Carn Penberry

Looking northwards from the Carn towards some really rugged coastline

Ox-eye Daisy

?

 

Looking back over the path already travelled

Abereiddy, my destination for the day in the middle at the top

A field of primrose