Walking the Wild Edges

Since I realised the calming, uplifting effect that walking in nature has on me, I've been spending more and more time outside. The Spud is benefiting from this too - he loves to be out in the fresh air. As well as our everyday walks, when the weather is good we pack a picnic into my backpack and head out on a longer expedition. 

In recent years I've moved from the country village where I grew up to a council estate in the suburbs (by way of a few people's spare rooms, after splitting with my ex shortly before we were due to go travelling). There was a bit of adjustment required when we arrived in this grey terrace, but soon I discovered there was a nature reserve behind the estate with a river running through it. Now the Spud is bigger and can walk further, we hike across the fields to the woodlands I used to walk in when I was growing up. 

Each year more land is sold to the developers, and more of the fields I used to play in are swallowed by the urban sprawl, but it's still relatively easy to scratch off the thin veneer of civilisation and find ourselves far from anywhere, between Roman roads and Old Straight Tracks, copses and hedgerows and sun-dappled glades of celandine and primrose. You can still see the progress of mankind in the ploughed fields and tumbledown barns, the glint of a beer bottle in the nettles, the pylon stalking unexpectedly across the horizon like an invader from another time. But it feels for all the world as though we're alone on the edges of things, where something magical might still happen.

I grew up here, I found myself thinking, as the Spud and I shared a sandwich and a drink of water in the shade of a hedge. Looking out over the fields I could see the straight, tree-lined cut of a Roman road. I'd walked that road with my mother as a child, and for years after I'd had a recurring dream about it, a cloaked rider on a dark horse pounding down the hill towards me. 

The Spud and I followed the footpath across the centre of the field. Vast clouds sailed across the sky like zeppelins, sending shadows chasing over the ploughed earth. I felt like Tiffany Aching walking on the Chalk. Perhaps, I thought idly, if I were ever to set up an altar again, I might do better to have some of these flints than some fancy shiny foreign crystals, no matter how pretty. After all, this ground here is what I'm made of. This chalk and flint may as well be my bones. My mother's maiden name comes from "Free", and there have been Frees here, and in the surrounding area, since records began. (I did some digging into my ancestry recently, and other than my paternal grandmother who was from Bornholm - and her ancestors, back to the 1700s at least, adding a strain of Norse to my makeup that I'm quite proud of - my family looks to be of Anglo-Saxon descent on both sides.)

Just as I was musing about flints on my altar, the Spud caught hold of my jeans and offered me a huge flattish oval specimen that he had prised out of the dirt of the path. Crouching beside him, I turned it over in my hands, and caught my breath. The underside of the flint was covered in sparkling crystal that glittered in the sunlight. Wow, I thought. Okay. I can take a hint.

My sparkling flint

This is far from the most strange thing that has happened to me out on the wild edges of this land. Nor am I the only one who can tell stories about this area. (Britain on the whole is a strange country with an equally strange history, which is why I love it so much.) For example, a few years ago I was working in one of the last independent shops on my local high street. The owner was (is) a fairly well-to-do bohemian-ish lady who lived in the next town over. To get home from work she had to drive through several villages (including mine) and along an old, but well-travelled, road overlooked on both sides by woodlands and open fields. One night she had passed through my village and was heading through moonlit farmland when something dashed into the road in front of her, paused in the headlights for a moment, and disappeared into the hedge on the other side.

But in that frozen moment she saw it quite clearly. "I can only describe it as a goblin," was what she said, and though the shop staff speculated that it may have been a flashback from an acid trip in her misspent youth, she was quite shaken, and it was a while before she drove that way at night again.

The street I grew up on was at the edge of the village and ended in farmland. There was a big pasture at the end of the road, which was bordered on the far side by a very old narrow footpath known locally as the cinder track.

One evening when I was about eight or nine, my friend Alec and I were sitting with our backs against someone's garage door on the edge of the pasture, talking rubbish and looking out over the fields as the sun went down. We both saw, at the same moment, a figure striding along the cinder track towards the village.

I remember looking at Alec to make sure he was seeing it too, and my own fear was reflected in his eyes. The dark figure - a black silhouette - was taller than the straggly trees that bordered the footpath, making it ten, eleven feet tall or more. Its arms were unnaturally long, reaching past its knees. And even from this distance, impossibly, we could both see its eyes, which were deep red, glowing like hot coals. And there was this... feeling, seeping from it like mist, a malevolence.

Without a word to each other we both bolted, ran for our houses, leaving dust in our wake.

Sometimes, walking in the woods with my little boy, I feel like I've stepped sideways out of the flow of what is deemed to be 'normal life'. There are days when I'm so enmeshed in the System -  earn your money, pay your bills, check your emails, go to the supermarket, watch telly, work work, rush rush, veg out, repeat - that getting out of it seems impossible. I look at those I know who live in vans and on boats, who drift on the wind and the tide at whim, and I can no longer figure out a way to join them. 

But I'm not sold on the other way of living either, and I feel that keenly when we're wandering on the edges. I feel this gulf between me and the world of Friends re-runs and hair straighteners, Love Island and eyelash curlers and Primark... Suddenly none of that has any meaning. I feel more and more like I'm looking at that world from somewhere else, and it's a language that I don't understand any more.

Sometimes it's alienating to believe in magic and monsters when most of those around you are existing in a different reality. But I've seen what I've seen and felt what I've felt, and the flint of the land, thousands of years old, is in my bones. Strange things still happen on the Old Straight Tracks, even as the sound of traffic encroaches and the pylons march on across the landscape. The weird and the wild are still out there, beyond this 'civilised' existence we've trapped ourselves in, if you know where to look.