Footfall

There is a sound and a sense when your foot hits the ground. It can be first thing in the morning when you get out of bed and wander in a wobbly line towards to bathroom to see what damage your dreams have left on your face. That first wander for me is as if my left foot has been in a plaster cast for a year and is unfamiliar with it’s job as a foot and has to be taught how to behave before the world requires it to take half my weight and get things done. It can be on sand. Sinking in, pulling out. The miracle of all those tiny pieces of silica, the shavings at the edge of the solid world, that right themselves smooth whatever words or holes or castles we make with them. Beaches sometimes ring of summer holidays, but because I have lived so much of my life by a beach it is often in the winter that I love walking on the sand so much. Because then it is often just me and a few other hardy ones and the beach is free of man made detritus and your footprints feel like they are the only ones on the moon. There is cement. There is always cement. In England the pavements, or sidewalks, are often made of paving stones. These slabs of rectangular stone that are in the older streets were still brought in from the quarries of Purbeck and in newer streets from the concrete shop.

I fell on one of those a few months ago. Marching along the pavement, off to the bus stop, avoiding the shoppers with their shopping bags on wheels, scanning the ground for the pavers that didn’t fit so neatly together and whoop de do.. the classic phrase, “the ground coming up to meet you,” did exactly that. It was so fast. Flat on my face. Felled in my pride of over familiarity. Some young man came to my aid. “ No, I’m fine” I said, gracelessly picking myself up from the ground. I was embarrassed at being careless. Not wanting to be one at odds with the ground on which I walked. Not wanting to be a stranger.

I know I have written before about old churches. Not always the big ones, but the smaller ones in villages now consisting of a farm and a scout hut. Where you walk through the grass churchyard with gravestones almost illegible with moss and hundreds of years of weather.

And you open this wooden door into a stone vestibule where benches line the sides. Maybe for people to shake off the rain or the mud of where they had walked through, before making their way through the second door into the church itself. No fancy stained glass windows, no high vaulted ceilings.

Wooden pews, warm to the touch. These are the everyday of ancient stones. The working man’s path of pilgrimage. Many lifetimes worth of sunday devotions have made worn patterns into the uneven stones. Pressing indentations into the steps to the altar. will give you smooth and shiny stone, worn curves in the steps to the altar. Once bright and tight, now pressed down by so many centuries of feet, that you feel the echo as you walk on them and step where they once did

Footpaths and bridleways. These are not hiking trails. They don’t end up at “ Inspiration Point.” They don’t tell you how many miles you will have achieved if you do the whole loop. They may start with a wooden stile off a small road. They might start at the far end of a churchyard. They often cross fields of wheat or grazing cows. This is also where you pay attention to those grazing cows for the bullocks or bulls among them who can charge and have you running literally for your life to that stile on the far side of that field over which you throw yourself to safety. Sometimes you skim past a grand stately home. If you are lucky they pass by a pub where you can sit on a bench and grab a libation and a packet of crisps. These are the footpaths and bridleways of Great Britain. Criss crossing the countryside. Decreed by law. Drawn in the Ordnance Survey Maps. There is a swishing as your feet move through the cut grass, or the stubble path at the side of a field. There is a give as you walk through the wood that is under a canopy of trees. Not grass here but soft earth with the occasional tree root fighting its way though. This is the world of bluebells and stinging nettles, where tiny birds hop around inside bushes and gnats swarm in late afternoon.