Sherds does not share the passion for cycling that seems to have gripped so many people over the last two decades. In the words of the self-styled ‘Super-Tramp’, W H Davies, ‘A poor life this if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’, and it is the standing and staring that walking permits, whereas cycling (uphill at any rate, with traffic presenting an ever-present threat) seems full of care. Walking puts you in touch with the past which is, as John Berger (author of Ways of Seeing) wrote, is not behind you at all but in front and beside you – that path you are following, that oak, ash, and thorn, that church tower on the horizon, they all possess time depth, and to walk down a sunken lane is to follow in the footsteps of the countless people who have tramped that path before.
Andrew Green, former Chief Librarian of Wales, clearly agrees with such sentiments: Voices on the Path, his newly published history of walking in Wales, is an extended paean to the joys of bipedal rambling (by contrast with bike-pedalism), whether for a purpose or for pure pleasure. The author begins with the evocative Mesolithic footprints preserved in the intertidal mud of the Severn Estuary and ends with the Slow Ways movement, which aims to create a national network of paths linking every settlement in Britain, a ‘superhighway of dreams and adventures’.
The book uncovers some remarkable stories, including that of the first documented account of a long-distance walk in Wales – undertaken by Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188 – and of the best-preserved medieval road in Britain, the Monks’ Trod, a 24-mile path engineered by the Cistercians in the 12th century to link their monasteries at Abbey Cwmhir and Strata Florida, and still very much in use today (sadly, though, by damaging off-road vehicles as well as walkers).
Seeing red