Cam Vale Men’s Fellowship
Queen’s Arms, Corton Denham, 6 May 2014 [1]
Some of you heard me talk in church last Sunday about life’s journeys, and tonight I'm going to talk about a walk I did on my sabbatical a few years back, which remains almost certainly the most remarkable journey of my life so far.
I know that some of you here are keen walkers: who enjoy hikes up hills, lakeside walks, nature trails, paths around the gardens of country houses etc.
Perhaps you would agree with the sentiments of Henry David Thoreau, US writer and naturalist, who said, "An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day."
Or J.M. Barrie who said, "Make your feet your friend"
Or the biblical scholar Matthew Henry who once said, "It is not talking but walking that will bring us to heaven."
Most of us when we think about taking a walk, will probably be thinking about a nice route out in the countryside, where the air is cleaner and the scenery beautiful.
I enjoy plenty of that sort of walking, and am looking forward to getting to know well, the footpaths and the hillsides of our benefice, really beautiful. But the long-distance walk which I took on my sabbatical, was a bit different. Because I also enjoy walking through cities. And the route I took was deliberately designed to take in both the Yorkshire and Lancashire countryside and its urban areas as well. For the whole two months September and October 2007 I walked the M62.
I'd like to spend the next half hour trying to explain to you why; and to share with you just a few brief highlights from the experience, and if you're not too bemused by what I've said, to take comments and questions.
Now, if you’re not from up north, the M62 is the motorway which connects Liverpool and Hull. It gets called the Transpennine Motorway. Now you may think I'm crazy but I think that the M62 is a beautiful road. I'm not the only one to think so. Listen to this quote by Bill Drummond, from his book How to be an Artist:
I ... got out of Hull and on to the most alluring, powerful, even magical motorway on our lump of an island. Even saying its name fills me with a longing. The M62. The greatest motorway ever made. Chuck Berry can keep his Route 66, Kerouac his two-lane black top, Paul Simon his New Jersey Turnpike, Billy Bragg his A13. Give me the M62. Driving it east to west is always best, especially at the close of the day into the setting sun....
Bill's quote struck a deep chord in me. Helped confirm for me the direction my route should take. I recognised what he said about the beauty of that road as being true - at least in the high Pennine areas. And I knew that I had to follow the M62 corridor east to west - from Hull back home to Liverpool, ending up on Crosby beach, where I used to play as a child, at the end of the road where my parents still live.
But why walk a motorway? What’s the appeal of that? I'd like to suggest that any motorway has a fascination about it. I'm not the only person to think so. People tell us that motorway driving is a numbing, soulless experience but when I read an academic paper entitled ‘M6 Junction 19-16: Defamiliarizing the Mundane Roadscape’, I came to recognise that ‘both homely familiarities and imaginative connections can be fostered’ in the ‘mundane space-time’ of the speeding vehicle.’ [2] In other words you create a world by having your radio on, chatting with the passengers and taking in the scenery as you drive.
And then there's the motorway service stations which I suggest each have a sociability and a spirituality about them. I'm not the only person to think so. In his fantastic book Destination Nowhere Roger Green details the 18 months in which he spent some part of each day or night - often hours on end - in South Mimms Service Station on the M25, at first as a detached observer of life in that place but soon embroiled in it himself, as he got to know the people who worked there and the regular users, and they got to know him. Roger Green speculates that service stations are places ‘where we share space with strangers free of the constraints of our normal surroundings with their familiarity’, and of his time spent there he says, 'I began to see my fellow service station users as individuals'.
In The Art of Travel Alain de Botton described the service station as 'like a lighthouse at the edge of the ocean, [which seems] not to belong to the city, nor to the country either, but rather to some third, traveller's realm.' Gripped by this sense of the exotic which service stations have, I spent many nights on my walk sleeping in motorway travelodges, the leather chairs at Coffee Primo making a comfortable base where I could write up my journey on my laptop of an evening.
One day a friend called me en-route from Leeds back to her home on Merseyside and I invited her to come and eat with me. I'd been living in the Days Inn at Hartshead Moor Services for three days by then, and as I greeted her at the entrance to the Welcome Break restaurant, I was so integrated into the place that it truly felt like I was inviting her into my home...
Why walk the M62?
Because it's beautiful. Because it's fascinating. Because it is an arena of deep sociability and latent spirituality well worth exploring, slowly, thoughtfully, creatively.
Now I should point out that when I say I 'walked the M62', strictly speaking I should be saying 'walked nearby the M62'. It would have been very dangerous and possibly illegal to wander along the hard shoulder, and after about ten minutes being buffeted by passing juggernauts, not much fun either. I walked what might be called ‘the acoustic footprint’ of the motorway, in other words not on the road but within hearing distance of it.
So most of the time the M62 served as a guide, to direct me through parts of northern England which I hardly knew, and also through some which I thought I did know, where the challenge was to try seeing the place through fresh eyes. Often I was on older routes, like the canal towpaths of the East Riding and long-distance footpaths such as the Transpennine Trail which use old railway lines to direct travellers through sometimes forgotten or peripheral places, each route offering fresh views of a changing country. I wanted to spend some time in and around the major cities en-route so I left the motorway corridor for single weeks at a time to investigate parts of Hull, Leeds and Manchester often in the company of others. I made my walk a coast-to-coast journey, Hornsea to Crosby, as the M62 begins and ends rather anonymously (alongside agricultural sheds near North Cave, west of Hull, where the A63 melts away into the motorway, and in the ten-lane concrete intrusion into suburban Liverpool at Broad Green).
I'm not the first person to decide to devote weeks of my life exploring the places around a major roadway. The writer Iain Sinclair produced a book and film called London Orbital, describing his circuit of the hinterland of the capital city 40 miles out alongside the M25 in the year 2000.
On my walk I left the motorway to spend a week in central Leeds and enjoyed a full and fascinating day with members and friends of the theatre companies Imprint and Pointed Arrow, whose productions often involve journeys, are concerned with 'explor[ing] what it means to connect with our land, its history, people and stories...’ In 2004 they had travelled along the Great North Road - the A1, from London to Edinburgh, and everywhere they stopped they performed a play about the stories connected with the road, and exploring British national identity - and inevitably their own identities.
And in central Manchester - where again I spent a rewarding week doing circular walks in city spaces - I was joined by another performer, Phil Smith, a man whose plays often involve urban walking. In turn he is inspired by an eccentric engineer called Charles Hurst who a century earlier had walked through England planting acorns as he went, recording his journey in a publication he called The Book of the English Oak. I quote at length, with some delight, how Charles Hurst described his approach to walking, in that book:
Among the advantages which I have gathered from my tour, I count as not the least the proficiency I have acquired in the gentle art of strolling. I can now perform a feat which I believe few townbred men could accomplish with ease of grace: that is, to walk a good English mile in an hour. This is not quite so easy as it may appear. I therefore set down a few observations on what is fast becoming a lost art.
The first essential for success is that the stroller must free his mind from all thoughts of time, ambition, money, over-drafts, assignments, leases, bonds, agreements, formulae, loans, interests, and such tricks of commerce, and from all peevishness whatsoever. He must be prepared to pass the time of day with hawkers, beggars, parsons, squires, haughty dames, tramps, unfortunates, and bottom dogs generally, and when he receives a surly answer or a stony stare he must smile and pass on. I consider it good form to be an attentive listener to long, incoherent accounts of fearful ailments and afflictions told by garrulous old ladies: and I do heartily approve of carrying a small stock of nuts or wholesome sweets for distribution amongst juvenile friends that may be met on the way. The great secret is sympathy both with humanity and nature, and this sympathy will open the eye and the ear to sights and sounds that the indifferent would miss. A rambler in the proper frame of mind can see a complex world in each clear pool of a brook: or he can regard the tumbling ocean as a mere moisture covering a portion of a whirling atom of dust.
I love Hurst’s philosophy, ‘the gentle art of strolling’, cultivating the practice of walking ‘a good English mile in an hour’. The M62 is 105 miles long. Mimicking Hurst, I took two months to walk it. That averages at 1.7 miles per day.
Why walk the M62?
Because it gives you plenty of time and permission to explore the joys, riches, and complexities to be discovered in each good English mile.
Another instinct guiding my steps on this walk was the idea that ordinary people are interesting. I feel very strongly that there is great value in engaging with the small details of our lives. I wanted to take time in the spaces and places where hardworking people - and people without work people - spend most of their days, to appreciate and celebrate them. To explore what happens to the scriptures about valuing the small things, about ‘lifting up the lowly’ when you take them out into the arenas of everyday life.
I had an instinct that there was enough in the detail of life in Goole to make it quite different from the detail of life in Gilberdyke. That the seeds of human flourishing can be found in every place where people interact, like shopping centres and park benches, in the events which engage them there like unexpected conversations and the minutiae of their daily working tasks. And from Hull to Huddersfield, Cleckheaton to Knotty Ash, I heard some fascinating things as I walked and talked along with others.
Some days my journey took me well away from the blue route by necessity. Deliberate planning to exclude pedestrians, or the simple absence of parallel footpaths means that some motorway junctions and rural passages are impossible to get close to on foot, so I often found myself forced to take circular routes or ones which zigzagged over and under the motorway over some distance. But this just gave me the opportunity to explore some more.
On other days though the M62 was so ever-present to me that I sometimes stopped noticing it, for all its furious sound and motion. Occasionally I was gripped by the beauty of its construction - as in the bridges over the Ouse at Boothferry and the Manchester Ship Canal at Barton, and during two days of joyous discovery around the entirely manufactured landscapes of Scammonden, where the M62 engineers triumphed where no other road builders had, in crossing the Pennines at their darkest, peatiest, and most extreme height. On other days I became possessed by the terror of the roads: in the cameo of a group of workmen strimming the grass edges of a narrow slip road at the viciously tumultuous M62-M1 junction, gripping my camera tightly on pedestrian bridges which shuddered as traffic thundered beneath.
Memorable parts of the journey included getting lost late-night in the dark eerie fringes of the North Manchester Hospital site after a curry, a day with the truck drivers at the massive Junction 31 Wakefield Europort, a morning spent on top of the Pennines with a farmer - just by Stott Hall Farm which is famous for being surrounded by the two motorway carriageways which split around it, days spent exploring the spirituality of The Trafford Centre and Warrington's Golden Square with retail chaplains, and a disorientating night journey through the seamier fringe of Leeds city centre where the streets were too unlit to read a map and the only people around to mis-guide me seemed, well dodgy.
I spent a lot of my time sitting outdoors in public places (blessed, most days, by excellent weather), and I inevitably had for company the sorts of people who do precisely the same, day after day. Each encounter was unique and each was valuable. It probably did me good feeling like an outsider on much of the journey; it has certainly opened my eyes to realise just how many other ‘others’ there are in our city squares and on our town hall steps.
After I got back to Liverpool I had a few days walking into and around the city centre before ending the adventure with what was possibly the hardest and strangest day of all - a walk around that part of the city which is most 'home' to me, revisiting childhood haunts and ending on Crosby beach, which was quite nondescript in my childhood, although it was a place of great adventure for us boys, but is now a well-known tourist attraction - thanks to the sculptor Antony Gormley who installed 100 metallic casts of his own naked body on a three-mile stretch of sands, each of them gazing out to sea. He calls it ‘Another Place’.
It’s impossible to say precisely what I got out of the experience of spending two months on the road like this. It introduced me to parts of our country which I never knew, introduced me to many people I really enjoyed meeting, opened my eyes to the lives of people who spend their whole lives by the M62 - truckers, business drivers, the people who work in service stations, Pennine farmers who welcome the motorway because it's connected them to the outside world.
The poet T.S. Eliot wrote,
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. [3]
After my M62 walk I carried on walking around different places in the city of Liverpool, in Cheltenham, in Manchester and Nottingham, taking others with me on these journeys of exploration as I went. Because I think we learn a lot about a place - and about ourselves - by walking and talking.
Whilst incumbent of a parish straddling two housing estates notorious for the activities of drug gangs I invited my friend Bob Gilbert to spend a weekend leading nature trails around Croxteth and Norris Green. I insisted to locals that this wasn't as ridiculous as it sounded. Bob has worked for the parks and gardens in London all his life and knows his stuff. He is the author of a book called The Green London Way which is a long-distance footpath taking the walker one hundred miles through inner London - along its canal towpaths, through commons and woodlands as well as ordinary streets. It is a real nature trail, because Bob insists that if you know what you're looking for you'll find plenty of nature in the city. We found plenty in Croxteth and Norris Green on our walk: rare mushrooms on waste sites where houses have been demolished; even rarer Chinese trees growing in what used to be the kitchen garden of a mansion house, now derelict in the middle of Norris Green Park. What an eye-opener these things were for us.
Walking the M62 - and other daft-sounding journeys. I'd like to suggest to you that there is a bit of a method in my madness.
Two themes seemed to recur on my walk, both quite surprising to me. One was a developing interest in shops and the complexities of what people are actually doing when ostensibly ‘out shopping’. I found myself spending a lot of time in shopping centres because that’s where your feet lead you when (a) you’re looking for the life and energy of a place and (b) you need a sandwich. And it struck me deeply that ‘shopping’ involves far more than making purchases: it’s an arena for complex social interactions at all levels. This is as true in out-of-town megastores as in more ‘traditional’ town shopping centres and village shops.
The second theme is the presence of ghosts on this journey. All the way, I found myself in the company of ghosts.
At dusk on the day I reached the end of the M62 (The Rocket Interchange, Broad Green, Liverpool), not far away two boys, Kieran (7) and Guy (6) attempted a short-cut home by riding their toy scooters across the M56 motorway in Preston Brook,Runcorn; In the growing dark they were unsighted until close up. The drivers of three vehicles hastening home at the end of the rush hour could not avoid hitting them. The boys died instantly. As for the adults involved - drivers, parents, neighbours who had spoken to the boys minutes before - something terrible was awakened in them by this awful incident. In their troubled TV interviews, you could see it in their eyes.
All along my two-month journey I had seemed to be sensing ghosts. Absences in the presence. Presences in the absence. I gazed out from Hornsea in awareness of the ancient villages of Holderness lost to the brutal North Sea: calm waters overlying Waxholme, Colden Parva, Hrafnseyrr, and all the other almost forgotten villages which slipped into the sea centuries ago; oil tankers from the Humber Refinery riding the waves fathoms above the drowned ruins of Ravenser Odd, ‘an extremely famous borough’ (according to the Chronicle of Meaux Abbey) before its inundation in 1360.
I became fascinated by the numerous ‘dead roads’ en-route: once vibrant highways or viable country lanes which were sundered by the building of the motorway and its service routes, and which now through society’s inattention and unconcern have been reborn as neglected wildlife havens, dumping sites, and secluded positions for clandestine afternoon liaisons (couples clinched in one of two vehicles parked together.)
At Junction 23 below Outlane the M62’s noise and the disruption in the air perpetuate the violence of the motorway’s construction. For Outlane is a viciously severed village. Alongside the bridge across the junction, a row of houses directly abut the hard shoulder, rising high above the road. This is at Leeches Hill on New Hey Road, a long road out of Huddersfield which is re-routed through the motorway roundabout, but whose original course on each side of the motorway shows the village of Outlane with its nerve ends exposed to the M62, Six carriageways fire traffic ferociously through what used to be the village high street. I found myself following the imagined line of the demolished houses through the air in the chasm above the motorway, connecting the old road back to itself, sensing a place which is no longer there.
The M62 makes spectral sounds, under the Ouse Bridge: where in a wide, dusty agricultural plain under a high sun a few steps into the bridge’s shadow remove all vehicular movements from view, and in the sudden stillness the senses open to the booming, cracking, clanking, noises above. The steel plate girders in the bridge’s body rattle like prisoners in chains as countless juggernauts batter over them, wheels whistling and tyres thudding over the reinforced concrete deck slabs. In a narrow lane of trees between IKEA and the M62, Birstall, and on cobblestoned Philips Park Road in a small wood hiding the motorway near Whitefield, similarly hissing, slashing, whispering spectres accompanied me on my way. Standing north west of Scammonden Reservoir, by a fence bordering the eastbound edge of the motorway Brian, a local farmer, raised his voice above the roaring traffic to tell me that the scattered stones by which we stood were, until the coming of the M62, a hamlet called Han Head. The two brothers who farmed each side of the valley were both loud characters, and regularly held conversations with each other across the open space. Their sister never left Han Head in her life - ‘except to be buried’, Brian said. And while he told me this, an unending flow of travellers flashed past us. In the minute it took him to relay this tale probably a few hundred vehicles had passed us by. The drivers’ lives-in-motion and that woman’s so-static existence, the deafening engine screams and the brothers’ valley-wide discourses: all were alive to me in that moment.
It was on the thirteenth night of my journey, my fourth night on the M62, that I had the most vivid otherworldly encounter of the trip. Restless in bed, due to the undoubted thrill of having reached Goole, and perhaps more immediately to the high temperature of my rooftop room in the Clifton Hotel and Chinese Restaurant on busy Boothferry Road, in the midnight dark I opened my eyes, frustrated from my futile attempts to slumber, and sat upright as facing me in a sepia glow on the opposite wall, was an apparition. The shape of a cloaked person, with a thin head or perhaps wearing some sort of crown - like one of the Magi - looked down on me. Formed on the wall by streetlight diffusing through net curtains this still, nocturnal visitor seemed to me a calming presence. Not the shape of those fevered ghosts I’d encountered underneath the Ouse Bridge, this was more a quietly welcoming spirit. In my state of altered consciousness it didn’t take me long to decide who this kindly visitor was. I gave this shape a name: The Goodly Spirit of Goole. I sought out his gentle presence as I explored the town the following day, and concluded that he could be Cornelius Vermuyden, the man celebrated as the founder of the modern port of Goole, 1630s constructor of the Dutch River, which drained the marshland and opened up valuable trade routes. His presence was everywhere thereabouts.
At Boggart Hole Clough in North Manchester Phil Smith and I walked in search of boggarts, which are sprites, mischievous spirits, mainly found in Lancashire and Yorkshire, often thought to be responsible for poltergeist activity and pranks like turning the doorstep milk sour, making things disappear and causing dogs to go lame. They live in mossy places, and north- east Manchester has many mossy places, among them the spooky Clough, mist-shrouded on that October morning. The spirit we actually encountered on the walk was of another sort altogether. It was the spirit of Emmeline Pankhurst, Mancunian suffragette, who, we discovered, had addressed crowds of 25,000 to 40,000 at Boggart Hole Clough in May 1896, and was summonsed and charged with breaching public order. Here was mischief of another order, in the park where Pankhurst and her comrades strove to awaken the public to issues of equality and democracy, and where seemingly she caught a bad cold from so much standing around speaking. As we wandered through Boggart Hole Clough our feet trod the very ground where the tactics of the suffragette struggle had been honed; this was the place where Emmeline Pankhurst's star first rose as she pushed herself on to the stage of national politics on her own terms rather than in support of her husband. Boggart Hole Clough: indeed, a place of history-making mischief.
The M62 ends at a railway junction, Broadgreen Station, and the pub across the flyover from there is called The Rocket. It invokes the ghost of William Huskisson MP who was killed by the train of that name at the Rainhill Trials in 1829. As Rebecca Solnit points out in Wanderlust, Huskisson was not mourned by the crowd then or remembered by anyone since, our heads having been turned by the speed of the motorised vehicle. And all along my route, on motorway bridges and beside every other form of roadway I saw floral tributes tied to trees and lampposts, memorialising those who died just there at their or someone else’s wheel, and whose spirits hover in horror and condemnation, while the traffic speeds on past.
At Junction 24 at Ainley Top, and on Windy Hill near Saddleworth Moor, the high places of the route where the redundant chimneys and reclaimed chapels of Rochdale and Halifax sprawl within vast moors, I found myself reimagining Roman Legions moving across the landscape of the North. This must have been a frightening vision in its day: one to send you scurrying to safety, deeply fearful of the deathly power in those booted feet. And on those hilltops another M62 vision was born: of a day - not in my day, but perhaps in a day which the classmates of Kieran and Guy will see - when the motorways will become dead roads, mossed over, and people will walk them, fantasising about the roaring violent vehicle convoys which once used them. After the oil runs out, or some inevitable catastrophe hits our dying civilisation, future people will look back on us that way. We will be ghosts to them.
There are valid criticisms to be made of my desire to find ‘the good’ in places like service stations, shopping centres or housing estates. Accentuating the positive can cause a failure to be critical of unjust systems and structures which entrap their occupants and workers - and the North of England knows a lot about that. My instinct though is that if we pay more attention to the detail of life in such places, if we take time to value more the lives of those people who most occupy these spaces, then that’s a large step forward. My walk - and the book which came out of it - is an attempt to encourage a positive engagement with the stuff of everyday life, a heightened sense of beauty in the urban as well as in the countryside.
If we open our eyes to see these things in a new way and open our ears to hear then this approach to our everyday lives and the ordinary places where we walk, may I think, liberate us into new understandings of the works of God and the kingdom of heaven.
Notes
[1] This talk is a concatenation of a presentation I made to the Faith Seeking Understanding Lent Course, Southport College, 11 March 2009, and my piece M62: In the Company of Ghosts in Edward Chell and Andrew Taylor, eds, In the Company of Ghosts, The Poetics of the Motorway, erbacce-press, 2011.
[2] Edensor, Tim, "M6 Junction 19-16: Defamiliarizing the Mundane Roadscape", in Space and Culture Vol. 6, No. 2, 151-168, 2003
[3] T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding, Four Quartets.
[4] There’s plenty more where this came from at my Walking the M62 website and in my book Walking the M62, Available from Lulu.com.
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