To Town Row

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. 

This is my lane. You can see how misty it was. Last month was the wettest February on record. The lane is lined on either side with ditches and last month I kept think of the old saying, 'February fill dyke,' which I've just discovered comes from a traditional rhyme: 

    February fill the dyke,

    Be it black or be it white; 

    But if it be white,

    It's the better to like. 

Our February was mostly grey: skies, mist, drizzle, downpour, but it was beautiful in its own raw and rainy way. 

                                                    

     

                                                  

On the ground though spring was nudging up through last year's brown stems. The greens were sap-bright. 

I squelched through a couple of fields before trundling along Horleigh Green Road. It's a busy backroad, I had to squeeze myself into the verge to keep away from scudding lorries and cars. 

Then I escaped the modern world again and took the old byway to Bicycle Arms Road. The track leads down into a valley where it fords a tributary of the Rother. 

Rain began to fall in earnest and the stream's clay banks were stamped with human bootprints and the prints of deer and dogs. 

As I walked I noticed human signs everywhere, the fences, hedges and notices, the way we keep talking to one another even when we're not there. 

Beside one of the houses, someone had lined the track with snowdrops and daffodils. 

But there were further fences too, warning signs and signs of possession. 

I reached the road and turned onto Sherifs Lane. More notices, more tracks of human movement and the lane twisting into the drizzle. 

A tractor passed. It had been cutting the hedges back to their notched and knotted stubs. 

The more I looked, the more I spotted the marks of human hands and feet. I thought about the human animal, the devices we use to guide or drive ourselves through particular thoroughfares and the reasons for our doing so. 

I should have taken some photos of my destination, the Cuckoo Line Stores (under the old railway bridge, turn left at the end of the lane) but I was too busy buying a pie for lunch. I headed home the same way, back along Sherifs Lane where there were yet more guiding signs and human imprints. 

I also thought about what we cast off and how we've inscribed ourselves onto the world around us. 

After another hour's walk I reached my lane again. 

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.