Chalk paths and old futures

We’re about to start a project with the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge where we are trying to re-connect to pre-fossil fuel culture in order to imagine new ways of living and being resilient to climate change in the fens. As the water table drops, the English fens now produce nearly 4% of the UK’s carbon emissions, starting overdue conversations about the history and future of this man-managed land. As part of preparing for this work we’ve been looking for ways to learn about the cultural history of the fenlands.

Many societies (or the fringes of them) are choosing this moment to turn back to deeply rooted indigenous heritage as inspiration for living with climate change. Braiding Sweetgrass is the popular introduction here. But the UK doesn’t really have an indigenous population (a more nuanced discussion of this topic can be found here). So our project in Cambridge is making us ask what can we learn from connecting to pre-imperial and mediaeval culture about how to live with climate change? Is there a form of British indigeneity or cultural heritage that can reconnect us to pre-modern forms of belonging to the earth and land? And what role can museums play, as the custodians of our collective cultural history?

Nigerian poet and thinker Bayo Akomolafe discusses, and challenges, the idea of ‘becoming indigenous’ in his essay ‘Dear White People’. If you haven't read it, I'd recommend it. One section that resonates reads: “to be indigenous is not to be original; it is to stray from original paths. It is to disturb calculable algorithms. It is about being sensitive and open to the world. It is about listening to the murmurings of place, sitting with the unnamed, following shadows towards unsayable adventures, and coming alive to a sensuousness that often resists articulation or conceptualization.”

In an attempt to do just this, I decided to travel the Icknield way, which claims to be the oldest path in Britain. Robert MacFarlane has written about walking the path in his book ‘The Old Ways”, and was my inspiration here. At around 5000 years old the route goes from the Ridgeway National Trail at Ivinghoe Beacon, near Tring, to the start of the Peddar’s Way National Trail at Knettishall Heath. During the second half it passes through the Cambridgeshire fenlands - or what would have been fenlands before they were drained. Yes, it was in part a holiday, and there are certainly more direct ways to learn about cultural histories. But this was me taking a few days to follow shadows and listen to the age old murmurings of the English countryside.

This writing is somewhere between a semi-narrative travel blog, and a set of unstructured reflections on climate histories. It’s also an  attempt at embodied learning, part of my own exploration into other ways to learn (beyond a screen) and more narrative ways to share (albeit on a screen) about the deeper histories that shape our presents.

Appreciating deep time (makes the hills easier)

Friday - Early afternoon. After travelling to the start of the route, or near enough as I could conveniently get by train, I was feeling energised and observant. A red kite danced a circle around a far away plane as if it was about to snap it up. After leaving the safe tarmac of Princes Risborough I quickly met a steep hill and was slightly shocked by the ruggedness of that path. The Icknield way is part of the great chalk way, and became a path of choice because it draws a chalk ‘spine’ across the country. It would have been too marshy and the ground too soft to travel long distances either side. These paths were slippy more than marshy with a smooth seam of white chalk tracing the core of each path. The chalk was worn smooth from generations of feet, hooves, wheels and streams, which carved the paths.

Macfarlane writes that “this chalk was laid down on the bed of epicontinental seas at a rate of about 1mm per century over a period of about 35 million years.” And these chalk hills directly led to the creation  of the Cambridgeshire fens in the ice age around 18000 years ago. England at the time was a fringe shoreline of central Europe and  the undulating land under the north sea - Doggerland - was very much above water. I was cycling with Annie Proulx’s book “Fens, Box and Swamp”  - in retrospect an odd choice for this specific route besides benign short and light - but it did help to connect the chalk way with the fenlands I would emerge into. Proulx describes how in this period “Half a dozen rivers carried water down from chalk uplands across the lowlands to empty into the North Sea. (Later silt deposits at the mouth of the Ouse formed the distinctive rectangular shape of the wash that shows up on maps.)” The aquifer properties of the chalk purify water that runs through it, leading to the unique ecological characteristics of chalk streams and the surrounding fens.

At the end of this ice ace, massive ice melting caused the Storegga slide of 6100 BC. An underwater chunk of modern day Norway broke off, triggering a tsunami that submerged all of Doggerland and its mesolithic seaside population, and flooding the forests of pine, ash and oak that inhabited the low lying land to make the fens. The Mesolithic population faced flooding from an immense Ice melt, and now we face the same challenge over 8000 years later.

This had been my reading on the train a few minutes earlier, and even my rudimentary geological understanding gave these climbs a different meaning. I had to push my bike up most of the hill, but it was easier knowing that this ancient, porous, and slippery chalk was the start of a much bigger story.

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Our history is largely unmarked

Half an hour later. At the top of whiteleaf hill sits a set of beautiful, but largely unmarked neolithic long barrows. Just a couple of mounds of earth with a white belt running over each of them, they are the oldest architectural tradition in England, and were built by almost every community in the cotswold-severn area between 3800 BC and 3500. The barrows speak to ancient burial practices and through it, an attitude towards death in that period. The bodies were positioned at the base of  torso shaped barrows, historians interpret as a symbolic way of returning people to the womb - while their use by these communities as territorial markers signifies their permanent attachment to the land. Despite their significance the barrows are unmarked and easily missed.

Saturday - Late morning. One village I passed through - the parish of Chalgrave - had a visibly rich connection to its history. The village was adorned with signs and incredible old photos and maps of the area dating back a few hundred years. Maps and photos of villages like this are not uncommon, but it was great to see them so accessible. As usual, these photos focused largely on the buildings and how they changed over time. While the recent, visible transformation of the area is undoubtedly striking, the more moving images were of the people, and the threads of experience that connect us. The photograph is also only so helpful. The maps probed a longer history, but I was left wondering what artefacts could reach further back.

On ‘Borrowing’

Saturday, late afternoon. One of the landmarks I sped past was ‘Gerry’s Hole’, an old Borrow Pit from which the material was excavated to build the now defunct Hitchin to Bedford railway line in the 19th Century. It was named Gerry’s hole after a Gerry drowned in it after a night out at the pub, and it has subsequently been turned into a thriving local nature reserve, albeit with large penises graffitied on all the signs. The name ‘borrow pit’ likely derives from a combination of Barrow - a large burial mound, or structure used for carrying earth - and Burrow, associated with the building of tunnels. Sitting only a few miles from both a set of iron age long barrows, as well as the mouth of the HS2 tunnel through the Chilterns, which celebrated its completion only a few days before, the spot and its entomology hints ​​​at the tension between ancient and industrial​​ that defines this route. While it may be a nature reserve at the moment, the ‘borrow’ was not in fact​​ borrowed, but leaves a scar on the land.

Saturday involved taking a lengthy detour to reroute around the HS2 building site which had cut off access to the 5000 old route, and transformed a whole hillside into rubble and concrete. It was tempting to get angry at this disruption of ancient ways for the sake of political goal scoring (of course coupled with the mild inconvenience to my day off), but in many ways the disruptions to my route also gave me hope. There were numerous occasions where landowners had ploughed over the path (forcing me to carry my bike over five hundred metres of heavy red soil) or deliberately locked gates hoping to deter visitors to the route. But plenty more evidence of travellers undeterred, striding fresh paths through stinging waist high nettles to keep the path alive. And the Icknield way has never really been one path. Like the Camino de Santiago, Spain's historic pilgrimage route,  it is a web of desire lines that will branch and weave as long as the desire sustains.

A wheel is a poor substitute for a foot

Sunday, getting back on the bike in the morning. Macfarlane walked the Icknield way over 8 days. Not feeling like I had the space for this in my ‘busy life’, I decided to cycle the way instead - I suspect my 5000 year old ancestors would have been unimpressed. Unfortunately the bike instilled in me a need to complete it faster. I could feel myself rushing along, trying to get a few more kilometres out in a day, in a way that I never would have on foot. There is a different kind of contemplation from walking. Less to focus on by way of ground. Slower. Longer.

There is a rich history of people who have already walked this route and written about walking it. Edward Thomas in 1916 wrote  a poetic volume that pores over each stage of the trip, with no shortage of narrative and intellectual detours.  John Emslie (1839-1913) also travelled the way, asking as he did about scraps of local folklore about the route, mostly just a few sentences of hearsay, and recording them in a notebook, also in a linear manner along the length of the Icknield way. While I have dipped into both, I truly have sat, or walked, with neither. The bike doesn't lend itself to reading en-route

For what was intended as an embodied experience - retracing an ancient route- this actually felt like anything but. A continuation of modern, gadget filled, efficiency seeking, achievement based culture. It reminded me that embodiment really does take a whole body. And that there is no substitute for taking the time to do something like this slowly. For putting one foot in front of the other.

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A tension of high and low culture

Sunday, late afternoon. I guiltily cut off the last few miles of the way and headed back to Cambridge as I wanted to visit the Fitzwilliam museum where we will be collaborating in a few months time.

I asked around the museum invigilators for objects that tell the history of the local area, but they all pointed me in the direction of the museum of Cambridge - or the Cambridge Folk Museum. Its a small townhouse crammed floor to ceiling with domestic and industrial objects that speak to how people used to live in the fens. There was a room on folk stories that recounted pagan and pre-christian legends. They felt like a good read on local fears, value sets, and mythologies of the period, but the objects themselves were largely quite mundane. The museum sells itself as telling the ‘Extraordinary stories of ordinary people’ and the tales were doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

By contrast, the Fitzwilliam museum’s long halls adorned with stone and wood had no ordinary objects and largely told the stories of extraordinary people, or at least those with extraordinary wealth. The special exhibition was a set of objects from the museum curated by a group of ‘lay’ people, along with their incisive commentary and critique of the artefact, in sometimes just their imagery and associations. The directness of curatorial voice felt refreshing and the objects were given local, modern day relevance through the author’s lenses.

I think there is a productive tension to explore in the engagement between these museums, and in who and how their collections are juxtaposed. How do we combine the vernacular folk narratives and local relevance with the inherent appeal and artistic merit of the extraordinary object? Ideas of Indigeneity require us to connect to our history, to move slow and sit with the unnamed, or unextraordinary. They require us to find new forms of beauty, look beyond originality, and to hold together different histories, making sense of them hand in hand. That's our aim with our project in Cambridge - a slow commingling of  local histories, mixed method creative approaches, and pre-modern museum collections in an attempt to tell new - or old - stories about how we live with land.

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I didn’t quite finish the Icknield way, and if I had it would have been arriving at an unmarked spot in Thetford, pausing for a smile (and probably a pint) before jumping on the train back home again. This blog doesn’t have a grand conclusion either. There isn’t one idea that ties it all together, or if there is I haven't arrived at it yet. But I hope you've enjoyed reading, or taken something from it all the same. If you did, I'd love to know what those are. Like walking a route, one reason for writing a winding and unstructured blog is to hold space for people to come out with different experiences. For stories to resonate differently. Feedback is so so important to that experiment and whether a word or a paragraph I will be very grateful. Thank you!

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Thanks to Evie Rothwell, David Gunn and Ollie Bream McIntosh for seeding many of the ideas explored above.