Walking the M62

The BBC on the M62

From ellandback, a Great link to a BBC page with a wealth of info on aspects of the M62. Tales of the origins of the road, stories of terror and loss, the inevitable focus on Stott Hall Farm - the one in the middle of the motorway. Plus 120-mile-a-day commuter John Campell from Lepton near Huddersfield on life in the fast lane: "People are texting each other as they're driving at 70-plus. You've got women doing their make-up, people looking like they're doing sudoku..."

Posted to SABRE

I've joined the forum on the website of Sabre, the Society for All British Road Enthusiasts, just to ask these folks if they've any particular knowledge of or interest in the M62. It's a great new world for the uninitiated, their site, and leads via weblinks into many other wonderful worlds of British road minutae. Hopefully I may get some respondents coming this way.

It's a coast to coast

So this is where the walk will begin: at the end marker for the Trans Pennine Trail on the prom at Hornsea. It's a fifteen-mile stretch along abandoned railway routes into Hull from there; and the start of the M62 is a further twenty-plus miles westwards on foot. But it'll be good to begin my autumn adventure beside the seaside. The first sixteen days' route planned, I'm starting to book accommodation now...

About the Book and the Journey

We ran a pensioners' coach trip to Stratford last week. One of the travellers told me today, "It was lovely seeing Shakespeare's grave". Meanwhile I'm reading John Pemble in this week's LRB saying, 'Literary tourism is naff':

It means coach parties, blue plaques, monuments, the National Trust, Friends of this and that. It buys from Oxfam books like The Bronte Country, Dickens's London, With Hardy in Dorset, Literary Bypaths of Old England, The Land of Scott. Academic libraries don't cater for it, and academic critics have about as much regard for it as they have for Disney World or back numbers of Reader's Digest. It's been out of favour since at least the 1750s. ... Coleridge and the Romantics, then Henry James and Virginia Woolf, then the New Critics of the 1930s, followed by Barthes, Derrida and the deconstructionists, have scolded literary tourists. 'The author's dead!' they've told these vagrant supplicants again and again. 'So go home, sit still and read the works!'

I doubt that will convince our pensioners not to take off again, perhaps to Haworth next time, or Dove Cottage. Don't tell them, but I'm with John Pemble in his critique of 'soap, fudge and biscuit tin' tourism; but I'd still go for some literary tourism myself: the Laugharne trail is one I'd like to make. And my M62 walk might be regarded as a sort of aberrant Iain Sinclair homage.

Considering then that one-thirds of my journey will actually be static, sat at a table in a County Antrim tower, writing up the previous months' experiences, I was taken by an insight of Premble's regarding the root nature of literary tourism:

It's all about books and journeys, after all, and the Book and the Journey are powerful religious archetypes. But Christianity has traditionally been divided over which takes precedence. On the one hand, there's Catholic piety, which popularises the Journey over the Book; on the other, Protestant piety, which popularises the Book over the Journey. In the literary tourist, heading for a writer's birthplace with a biography in his luggage, it's easy to spot the Catholic pilgrim, led by hagiography to the shrine of a saint. And it's just as easy to spot the Protestant pilgrim, whose destination is Jerusalem, in the travel writer, who expounds the eucharistic mystery of place.

So ... two months pilgrimage, one month reintegrating with the word. I step out in a catholic spirit but seemingly cannot escape the clutches of my protestant heart.

www.walkingworld.com

My first purchase of a Sunday paper for some time today, drawn to The Observer by the promise of a 32-page City Walks supplement. Promoting the idea that on-foot exploring can open up realms of discovery in the previously-overlooked parts of our urban areas, and citing Bob Gilbert's seminal The Green London Way as an inspiration Pas Paschali's introduction only fails at the last when he feels the need to suggest that 'urban walks could be seen as a first step towards more ambitious walking, in the countryside, or on national trails'.

That depends, Pas, on your definition of 'ambitious', but I won't dwell on that. Oh, well, except to say that the first route in the supplement invites the walker onto an 8.5km journey linking the Shankhill Road with the Falls Road, with Paschali breathily promoting the area as an 'open-air free museum' of The Troubles. Hardly needs saying that ten, fifteen years ago, walking that route would have been ambitious, for all sorts of reasons, and that today many contrary-ambitious walkers find sites of urban conflict to be fertile territory.

Everything in the Sunday papers has a promotional tie-in of course, and this supplement, which I'll carry on my M62 walk to guide me through the sanctified urban-tourist (neo-tourist? uber-tourist? gucci-tourist?) routes in Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, was really designed to encourage readers to subscribe to www.walkingworld.com which is an online repository of over 3500 walking routes, urban and rural, from all around the country. Pay them the odd sum of £17.45 and you get a year's worth of online info at your fingertips. I was persuaded quite easily, once the walkingworld search engine brought up six pretty interesting M62 related walks, plus a few around Saddleworth and some which will help connect me on my travels between East Hull and North Cave (source of the M62). And this one here, under the M60 in The Mersey Valley.