There's something quietly exciting about walking to another community. I first discovered the joy of it when I was in my twenties, after moving back into my family home in Sussex. Our twenties are often difficult and mine were frequently painful and bewildering, and I started walking as an instinctive way of dealing with depression. One day I walked to Horstead Keynes, about four miles from my home in Sharpthorne. I was amazed by how easily I could get there just by galumphing along. I couldn't drive at the time and it was lovely to know I could reach a neighbouring village without having to rely on my dad or a complicated series of buses. At that time there were only one or two village shops and a couple of pubs in Horsted Keynes, there probably still are, but my being able to reach the place under my own steam gave me a sense of autonomy and pride that I badly needed.
Now, thank heavens, I can drive and am on the whole quite a happy beast, but my early love of reaching a neighbouring community on foot still remains, and so on a drizzly morning at the beginning of last month I set off for Rotherfield.
I felt my old sense of accomplishment at having visited another encampment. The Weald is so boggy, especially at this time of year, walking in winter here is often a matter of sliding on clay or levering one's feet out of sucking mud, and our communities tend to sit on hills as far above the squelchy valleys as our ancestors could get. We don't often walk from one village to another now and, without wishing to get too romantic about it, whenever I walk to another community I feel I'm connecting to a forgotten practice. It nurtures my sense of well-being, just as it did when I was young and lost, in the quiet, steady process of using my body to discover, map and grow more aware of the world around me.
I also came away with a sense of the inescapable humanity of the Wealden landscape: the fences and notices, the hedges that carry the marks of years of pruning even long after they've grown out. Humans are everywhere here, it doesn't matter that I'm possibly the only person who walks from Mayfield to Rotherfield these days, the tracks between the two villages are sunk deep in the clay, they're ditched on either side and bounded with borders and signs that have channelled people and other animals for centuries. Walking from one village to another is easy, despite the cars and mud, we've been doing it for so long that we're guided all the way. Perhaps that's also why I love it, perhaps it's comforting too. Perhaps when it's still a way of reassuring myself that I'm not lost.