Country Walking April 2021

Stuart Maconie
Nature is reclaiming our abandoned structures.
But it’s not a conflict; it’s a healing.
THE ‘WELLNESS’ AND ‘healing’ industry is
reckoned to be worth some £4.2 trillion globally.
That’s a lot of scented candles, colouring-in books
and whalesong CDs. Some awful pan pipe music too.
If I sound a little cynical, forgive me. I actually love
much New Age and healing music (hit me up on
Twitter and I’ll do you a playlist of Alice Coltrane,
Laraaji, Eno, Fripp etc). But, like Crib Goch in winter,
it is a thin and perilous line that must be trod
between the beautiful and the banal, the soothing
and the sickly, be it music, prose or scented candle.
The good stuff is really worth seeking out. Melissa
Harrison is a nature writer and novelist who produced
a podcast series called The Stubborn Light of Things.
In it, Melissa, relocated from South London to rural
Suffolk, records her walks and in a memorable one,
visits an old World War II air base now abandoned and
overgrown. Unlike some nature writers who bemoan
the human imprint and want it erased forever,
Melissa absorbs and enjoys the quiet melancholy
of the echoes of history in the disused chapel,
and the young lives that were carried from this
overgrown and weed-choked runway into eternity.
During lockdown, when trips to the moors, coast
and high places have been out of bounds, I’ve been
exploring more and more what are fashionably and
poetically referred to as ‘liminal spaces’: the
transitional zones where ‘country’ and ‘town’ meet.
Parks, urban woods, canals. In all of these, you’ll find
a strange juxtaposition of manmade and natural, and
you can usually trace the ebb and flow of human
history, and the dance between them down the years.
I’ve been walking the Leeds and Liverpool Canal
most weekends of late. Again and again, nature and
industry perform a grave pas de deux through time.
At Appley Bridge outside Wigan, where they made
lino, paint, and bitumen, the disused works are now
a small wildlife reserve. The walls and machinery
remain but the benzene ponds and mercury sludge
If you’re
walking the
Leeds and
Liverpool
Canal, pause
at Gathurst
where the railway
line, the M6, the
canal and the
River Douglas
cross, and feel
the satisfying
weight of history
told through
transport old
and new.
Hear Stuart
on Radcliffe
and Maconie,
BBC 6 Music,
weekends,
7am to 10am.
are gone. The living things are colonising again and
the passing trains no longer slam their windows shut.
Much of the conversation about nature and
civilisation is framed in terms of the former being
‘healed’ after the ‘scarring’ and ‘disfigurement’
inflicted by human incursion. Often it’s presented as
a conflict, of a war between one and the other, and the
justifiable notion that a victory for nature is the most
edifying outcome. The History Channel’s website
has a timeline devoted to ‘Life After People’, which
claims that “nature would take our places fairly
quickly. Many cities would be recolonised within a
year or two, and many of our buildings would begin
crumbling soon after without human maintenance.”
Even more compelling, the website Bored Panda
has an amazing, eerie, brilliant collection titled
21 Photos of Nature Winning the Battle Against
Civilisation. A flooded hotel taken over by fish in
Bangkok. A French railway tunnel that has become a
meadow. A Namibian mining town choked with sand.
These images are beautiful and mesmerising. But I
don’t find them ‘triumphant’. It’s a stranger and more
nuanced sensation than that, freighted with human
memories and experiences. There’s a definite beauty
in an entirely human-free landscape, a vista of nature
in its enormous solemnity like Rannoch Moor or the
Grand Canyon or Lowry’s haunting seascapes. But
Rannoch Moor has a railway station, and the Grand
Canyon a tiny ranch, and the occasional lonely boat
drifts on Lowry’s empty seas. Each of the details adds
a certain poignancy to the already beautiful scene.
Perhaps one day nature really will ‘recolonise’
everything of the human world. But until that day,
there’s a certain peculiar, quiet peace and
contemplation in seeing and walking in places where
engineering and structures make way for nature.
Here it doesn’t feel like a battle. Here it feels like
healing, and it’s a healing that is deeper and more
complicated than you might at first suspect.
ILLUSTRATION: STEVEN HALL
APRIL 2021 COUNTRY WALKING 31