The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (9 page)

It is likely that, thousands of years in the future, when the temperature cycles have turned again and the world’s water is once more locked up in ice, Doggerland will be re-exposed; filled this time with the wreckage of an
Anthropocene
culture – a vast junkyard of beached derricks and stranded sea-forts, botched pipes and wiring, the concrete caltrops of anti-tank defences, fleets of grounded and upended boats, and the spoilheaps of former houses.

Out and on we walked, barefoot over and into the mirror-world. I glanced back at the coast. The air was grainy and flickering, like an old newsreel. The sea wall had hazed out to a thin black strip. Structures of unknown purpose – a white-beamed gantry, a low-slung barracks – showed on the shoreline. Every few hundred yards, I dropped a white cockle shell. The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense. Sound travelled oddly. The muted pop-popping of gunfire was smudgy, but the call of a cuckoo from somewhere on the treeless shore rang sharply to us. A pale sun glared through the mist, its white eye multiplying in pools and ripples.

The miniature sandscapes of ridge and valley pressed into the soles of my feet, and for days after the walk I would feel a memory of that pressure and pattern. The ripple line of the ridges was recapitulated wherever I looked: in small bivalves between whose parted shells poked frilled lips, and in serpentine channels – apparent because they caught and returned the light differently to the shallower water. All these forms possessed the S-shaped double bend that William Hogarth in 1753 christened the ‘
ogee
’ or ‘line of beauty’, exquisite in its functionless and repetitive elegance; a line that drew the eye onwards.

With so few orientation points and so many beckoning paths, we were finding it hard to stay on course. I was experiencing a powerful desire to walk straight out to sea and explore the greater freedoms of this empty tidal world. But we were both still anxious about straying far from the notional path of the Broomway, and encountering the black muds or the quicksands.

Patrick’s directions said that we should reach something called the Maypole, a sunken telegraph pole with cross-pieces that marked the south-eastern edge of a tidal channel named Havengore Creek. But scale behaved strangely, and we weren’t paying sufficient attention to our pacings and distances. We became confused by other
spars
, sticking up from the mud here and there: relics of wrecks, perhaps, or more likely the mark-points of former channels long since silted up by the shifting sands. At last we found and reached what was surely the Maypole. It resembled the final yards of a galleon’s topmast, the body of a ship long since sunk into those deep sands. At its base, currents had carved basins in whose warm water we wallowed our feet, sending shrimps scurrying. We took an onwards bearing and continued over the silver shield of the water.

My brain was beginning to move unusually, worked upon and changed by the mind-altering substances of this offshore world, and by the elation that arose from the counter-intuition of walking securely on water. Out there, nothing could be only itself. The eye fed on false colour-values. Similes and metaphors bred and budded. Mirages of scale occurred, and tricks of depth. Gull-eagles dipped and glided in the outer reaches of the mist. The sand served as the water’s tain: ‘tain’, from the French for ‘tin’, being the lustreless backing of a mirror that makes reflection possible but limits the onward gaze, disallowing the view of a concept beyond that point.

Walking always with us were our reflections, our attentive ghost selves. For the water acted as a mirror-line, such that we both appeared joined at the ankles with our doubles, me more than twelve feet tall and David a foot taller still. If anyone had been able to look out from the shore, through the mist, they would have seen two giant walkers striding over the sea. That or a pair of long-shanked buffoons, traipsing to their foolish deaths.

Several years ago the sculptor Antony Gormley buried a full-size iron cast of his own body upside down in the grounds of Cambridge’s Archaeological Research Institute. Only the undersides of the iron man’s feet show on the surface. Two days before coming to walk the Broomway I’d slipped off my shoes and socks and stood barefoot in the rusty prints, sole to sole with that buried body. Now that act of doubling had itself been unexpectedly repeated out here on the sands. Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both. Hinged cuckoo-calls; razor shells and cockle shells; our own reflections; a profusion of suns; the glide of transparent over solid. When I think back to the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strong disorder of perception that caused illusions of the spirit as well as of the eye. I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing mind that mind’s own substance was altered.

You enter the mirror-world by a causeway and you leave it by one. From Asplin Head, a rubble jetty as wide as a farm track reaches out over the Black Grounds, offering safe passage to shore. As we approached the jetty the sand began to give way underfoot, and we broke through into sucking black mud. It was like striking oil – the glittering rich ooze gouting up around our feet. We slurped onwards to the causeway, the rubble of which had been colonized by a lurid green weed. Sea lavender and samphire thrived in the salt marsh.

I walked alongside the causeway rather than on it, finding that if I kept moving over the mud I didn’t sink. I passed through miniature cactus forests of samphire and between torn chunks of ferroconcrete. The surface of the mud, a gritty curded paste, was intricately marked with the filigree of worm tracks and crab scrabbles. In the centre of the causeway, where the mud had dried and cracked into star patterns, there were many wader footprints – sandpipers, oystercatchers and gulls – and I remembered the printed snow of my night-walk back in Cambridge. The slithery clay offered pleasure to the foot, and mud curled up between my toes with each step, oily as butter. By the time we reached the sea wall, David and I both wore diving boots of clay. We washed them off in a puddle, and stepped up onto a boat ramp. We had made landfall.

We sat on the out-slope of the sea wall, eating sandwiches and talking. David took a photograph of an MoD sign that read ‘Photography is Prohibited’. The sun was fully out now, and barely a wisp of the early-day mist survived. The clay dried fast on my legs, crisping the hairs and tightening my skin so that I felt kiln-fired – a mud man. To my joy three avocets rose from the salt marsh and flew screeching in circles above us, before rocketing back down into the sea lavender. I thought of the curlew I had seen in numbers out on this coast earlier in the year, and about how the paths of birds and animals were really the oldest ways of them all: aerial migration routes, bringing geese to this shore from Siberia, peregrines from Scandinavia, scored invisibly into the sky over millennia and signed by magnetic forces. Staggering recent research into avian navigation has revealed that, by means of retinal proteins called cryptochromes, birds can actually
see
magnetic fields. Magnetic force-structures are perceived as darker or lighter forms, which are superimposed on the conventionally visible landscape, and so help to guide the birds to their destinations.

Beyond the causeway’s end, the shining sands stretched to a horizon line. One of Foulness’s farmers, John Burroughs, has spoken wistfully of coming out onto the sands in late autumn to hunt wigeon: he brings a board to use as a shooting stick and, leaning against it, feels that he ‘
could be on the far side of the moon
.’ That felt exactly right: the walk out to sea as a soft lunacy, a passage beyond this world.

In his weird way-book of 1909,
Afoot in England
, W. H. Hudson described being on the Norfolk coast under similar conditions to the ones David and I had experienced that morning on the Broomway. The tide was low and Hudson was far out on the blonde sands watching herring gulls, when a ‘
soft bluish silvery haze
’ began to build, causing sky, sea and land to ‘blend and interfuse’, producing a ‘new country’ that was ‘neither earth nor sea’. The haze also magnified the gulls until they seemed no longer ‘familiar birds’, but ‘twice as big as gulls, and … of a dazzling whiteness and of no definite shape’. Hudson’s prose registers the experience as mystical: a metaphysical hallucination brought about by material illusion. The gulls temporarily appeared to him as ghost gulls or spirit birds that merely ‘lived in or were passing through the world’, presences made briefly seeable by the haze. Then, in a scintillating reversal, he imagines that he himself – ‘standing far out on the sparkling sands, with the sparkling sea on one side’ – has also been dematerialized, ‘a formless shining white being standing by the sea, and then perhaps as a winged shadow floating in the haze’. ‘This,’ he concludes, ‘was the effect on my mind: this natural world was changed to a supernatural.’

Felt pressure, sensed texture and perceived space can work upon the body and so too upon the mind, altering the textures and inclinations of thought. The American farmer and writer Wendell Berry suggests this in a fine essay called ‘The Rise’, where he describes setting float in a canoe on a river in spate. ‘
No matter how deliberately
we moved from the shore into the sudden violence of a river on the rise,’ writes Berry, ‘there would … be several uneasy minutes of transition. The river is another world, which means that one’s senses and reflexes must begin to live another life.’

We lack – we need – a term for those places where one experiences a ‘transition’ from a known landscape onto John’s ‘far side of the moon’, into Hudson’s ‘new country’, into Berry’s ‘another world’: somewhere we feel and think significantly differently. I have for some time been imagining such transitions as ‘border crossings’. These borders do not correspond to national boundaries, and papers and documents are unrequired at them. Their traverse is generally unbiddable, and no reliable map exists of their routes and outlines. They exist even in familiar landscapes: there when you cross a certain watershed, treeline or snowline, or enter rain, storm or mist, or pass from boulder clay onto sand, or chalk onto greenstone. Such moments are rites of passage that reconfigure local geographies, leaving known places outlandish or quickened, revealing continents within counties.

What might we call such incidents and instances – or, rather, how to describe the lands that are found beyond these frontiers? ‘Xenotopias’, perhaps, meaning ‘foreign places’ or ‘out-of-place places’, a term to complement our ‘utopias’ and our ‘dystopias’. Martin Martin, the traveller and writer who in the 1690s set sail to explore the Scottish coastline, knew that one does not need to displace oneself vastly in space in order to find difference. ‘
It is a piece of weakness
and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place where we are born,’ he wrote in 1697, ‘thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.’ So did Roger Deakin: ‘
Why would anyone want
to go to live abroad when they can live in several countries at once just by being in England?’ he wondered in his journal. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau: ‘
An absolutely new prospect
is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.’

The American artist William Fox has spent his career exploring what he calls ‘
cognitive dissonance
79
in isotropic spaces’, which might be more plainly translated as ‘how we easily get lost in spaces that appear much the same in all directions’. Fox’s thesis is that we are unable to orient ourselves in such landscapes because we evolved in the dense, close-hand environments of jungle and savannah. In repetitive, data-depleted landscapes with few sight-markers, ‘our natural navigational abilities begin to fail catastrophically’. Fox had travelled to Antarctica, to the American deserts and to volcanic calderas in the Pacific to explore such monotone spaces – but David and I had stumbled into one a few hundred yards off the Essex coast.

We walked back along the causeway to the point where the Broomway supposedly began, and there we turned into the wind and returned along the route by which we had come. With the sun now fully out, each sand ridge carried its own line of light, running along its summit like an inlaid wire, and in each pool burnt a tiny version of the sun, a bright borehole to the earth’s white core. Our shadows were with us now as well as our reflections: the two of us had been four on the way out to the island, and we were six on our return, at once solipsized and diffused by the proliferating versions of ourselves.

Perhaps halfway back to the Maypole, emboldened by the day, we could no longer resist the temptation to explore further across the sand-flats, and so we turned perpendicular to the line of the land and began walking straight out to sea, leaving the imagined safety of the Broomway behind us.

That hour, walking out – back – into Doggerland, was an hour I will never forget. We did not know where the sand would slacken to mud, and yet somehow it never felt dangerous or rash. The tide was out and the moon would hold it out, and we had two hours in which to discover this vast revealed world: no more than two hours, for sure, but surely also no less. The serenity of the space through which we were moving calmed me to the point of invulnerability, and thus we walked on. A mile out, the white mist still hovered, and in the haze I started to perceive impossible forms and shapes: a fleet of Viking longboats with high lug-rigged square sails; a squadron of feluccas, dhows and
sgoths
; cityscapes (the skyline of Istanbul, the profile of the Houses of Parliament). When I looked back, the coastline was all but imperceptible, and it was apparent that our footprints had been erased behind us, and so we splashed tracelessly on out to the tidal limit. It felt at that moment unarguable that a horizon line might exert as potent a pull upon the mind as a mountain’s summit.