In Praise of Walking
How the humble act of putting one foot in front of the other got me through the pandemic
The name of this Substack - The Haven - comes from a writing project (also called Haven), that’s been rumbling along since I lived in Detroit. I missed the Sussex countryside so much when I lived in the States. Sometimes I’d think about my favourite landscapes and feel a desperate ache to be there: in the quiet and peace, with only the sea and the rabbits and the chalk for company. Cuckmere Haven, near Seaford in East Sussex, was one of those places, and from that physical place, the idea of a more non-specific haven took root in my mind. The word became symbolic of peace and quiet and safety; and, crucically, a place I could full feel myself.
Fast forward 5 years, and here we are in my virtual haven. I wanted this space to be somewhere I could express myself without fear, and a place where I could write simply for the love of writing. The dictionary definition of the word haven is a place of safety or refuge, or a shelter or inlet for boats - a safe harbour if you will - and that’s exactly what I want this Substack to be.
In the turbulent Detroit years, the open spaces of my childhood became a haven in my mind, and when we returned to the UK, we got to experience those longed-for spaces first hand, as we waited out the lockdown in Seaford. I wrote the below piece in the late summer of 2020. I don’t know why I never did anything with it, because it feels like it’s finished. It’s a celebration of the landscape I grew up in and the place that kept us sane during the pandemic, and our experiences of walking there, day in, day out.
Reading it today, I felt a little pang of homesickness. The place we live now - in West Wales - is wild and beautiful and emptier and quieter than the South coast of England, but it’s not yet ours. We haven’t grown up here, we don’t know it intimately yet. I’m looking forward to getting to know it a bit more. Our daily walking practice has been sorely lacking of late, but when I re-read this piece, it felt like a good inspiration to get started. It’s the winter solstice in a few days, and after that the light will begin creeping back in. It feels like a good time to get the walking boots back out and explore what this new haven might look like for us.
I’ve always been a runner, not a walker. Running doesn’t come easy to me - I’m not built for it, I’m easily injured, and my pace is more of a plod - but I love it. Listening to music allows my overactive mind to drift away into movie-like daydreams, while another part of my mind is always present: feeling the blood in my veins and my pulse pumping like a drumbeat in my ears. My highs are few and far between, but when they come, they can’t be beaten.
Walking, on the other hand, always felt like a bit of a chore. I have a lifelong love of nature, but I balk at a hike, being more of a scenery junkie, always seeking a good view in the shortest amount of time possible. If a walk goes on too long, I often find myself bored and distracted, taking photos or plotting a course on the map or mentally calculating how long we’ve been out and how much further there is to go: a fun adult version of “are we there yet.”
When I moved to America 5 years ago, my relationship to walking took an unexpected turn. The cliché is true - no-one seems to walk for pleasure in the States, unless it's for a designated hike in a designated area set aside for hiking. Arriving into the flat, industrial wasteland of Detroit from the rolling hills of Sussex was akin to being on the moon, and I quickly realised how much I had taken walking for granted. Starved of nature and desperate to connect to the outdoors in any small way we could, my husband and I established a regular morning walking habit that persisted on and off during our time in Michigan, through wild climate swings: from frigid cold and snow in winter, to oppressive humidity in summer. Yet it was not until we returned to the UK in January and our time outside was rationed during the covid lockdown, that my love affair with walking truly began.
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In lockdown, we quickly re-establish our morning walking routine. The Michigan version was just a mile or so, along 4 long straight roads that took us in a big square past a shipping depot, a parade of small businesses, and streets of houses, still familiar to me: the big white colonial with window-boxes overflowing with flowers; a modern new-build mansion built entirely from shipping containers; and the small, box-shaped white cottage with plastic statues of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and a little brown donkey on the front lawn. In the heart of suburbia, there was little of the nature I was used to, but I began to find it in the birds - a flash of red from a cardinal’s wing and the jarring calls of blue jays - and the trees: bare until May before exploding in a frenzied burst of green, and then turning russet, gold and orange in the Fall.
Back in Sussex, we start with a similar length loop around the streets closest to our house, but this quickly becomes tired the longer lockdown continues. So we begin to explore new ground, extending along the main road out of town and onto the South Downs, realising with a happy jolt, just how close they are to our front door.
Before we moved to America, I always followed the well-trodden paths forged by my parents in my childhood: short walks with a big view. Sometimes we’d park at Exceat and follow the Cuckmere river’s huge, graceful meanders to the beach at Cuckmere Haven; on other days we’d take the crumbly, chalky path from the South Hill barn to Hope Gap and the Coastguard cottages, or park at the lookout and have a short stroll around High and Over with its view of the valley.
In the strange half-life prompted by the pandemic, we are afforded the luxury of exploration, and our walks quickly become the highlight of each day, growing longer week by week. I realise how much I’ve missed the beauty and magic of the Downs: their gentle curves and slopes and the soft shape of the hills - a sight so rarely seen in the flat plains of the Midwest. Walking on the Downs, I’m struck by how close together everything is. We climb ancient footpaths and bridleways, up steep, chalky hills, onto windswept ridges, where Sussex appears laid out in front of us, like a map. On a clear day, the sea sparkling from Beachy Head in the east, all the way to Littlehampton in the west.
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Each morning we get up at 6 and leave the house, the dawn growing earlier as the months pass. In the early days of spring, we departed before sunrise, stepping outside with pink wisps of clouds just beginning to emerge on the horizon. Now the sun is high in the sky by the time we leave the house each day. We cross the road and walk the ten or so minutes out of town - past terraced houses and parked cars on Alfriston Road, and the cemetery with its huge wrought iron gates - before reaching our haven.
We usually choose one of two circular loops. The first tracks the perimeter of a wheat fields, climbing steadily to the brow of Hindover Hill before circling back towards Seaford. At the top of the hill, on our left is a spectacular uninterrupted view of the Cuckmere Valley, with the river winding past Friston Forest and out to sea. On our right, endless fields stretch across to Newhaven and beyond to the Ouse valley. The second loop takes “the comp”, an old footpath that snakes inland across the downs and continues all the way to Lewes. When we take this route, we follow this path as far as the golf course, the highest, most northerly point of Seaford, before turning back and cutting through fields of wildflowers and crops, until we reach the houses that fringe the town once more.
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As the seasons change - from chilly, late-winter days to the heat of high summer - the beauty of walking slowly reveals itself to me. Walking daily affords chances to notice shifts in my landscape that previously eluded me, caught up as I was in the mental chatter of the day to day. With life at a standstill and little to rush back home for, I begin to notice what’s actually going on: how each plant and flower has its moment to bloom, before dying back, being replaced, softly and subtly, by the next. Flood waters in the valley slowly recede as high pressure moves in and then persists, settling into an uninterrupted run of sunshine.
In April, we walk in quiet woodlands carpeted with bluebells and wild garlic, and see vibrant white and pink apple blossom in the hedgerows. Trees previously bare grow new buds, hedges explode with clouds of white Blackthorn and Hawthorn. Daffodils make way for bluebells, before fragrant lilac and buddleia take centre stage as spring turns to summer. Fields of yellow rape burst and blossom, filling the air with a heady scent; wheat turns from green to gold, as the year marches on. Tiny lambs, unsteady on their feet, grow quickly to adolescence; the air filled with the sound of their plaintive calls. Skylarks trilling their high-pitched songs are a constant presence, hovering like kestrels above the wheat, before dive-bombing into the field. Now, in August, the elder and hawthorn berries are turning, and blackberry blossom has made way for early fruits holding the promise of a full harvest in September.
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It is not just the flowers that catch my attention on these walks. Butterflies flit past in flower meadows and along the footpaths: common blues, meadow browns and gatekeepers; the high-vis orange and black stripes of cinnabar moths on their favourite ragwort plant. A solider beetle trundles through the grass, stopping me in my tracks. I bend down close and catch a flash of iridescent green on its back legs. I see a flicker of burnt orange from the corner of my eye, and watch a fox whip along a tractor path in a field of wheat. A heron swoops low to the group before landing at a vantage point at the side the river; rabbits forage timidly by the footpath, and buzzards circle above. We come across a deer sitting serenely in a thicket of bushes and bright pink fire weed flowers. We stare each other down before it picks itself up, unsteady, and gallops into the dense cover of the woods. In Spring, we looked forward to the first sightings of swifts and house-martins; now in August we watch a flock of swallows swoop low over the river before gracefully rising in the sky, preparing for their long flight home.
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Some days we go beyond our regular loops, extending our walks down into the valleys of the Rathfinny wine estate where we stumble across densely wooded thickets with huge elderflower bushes that tower like trees, covered in clouds of sweet-smelling blossom; and wildflower meadows that fringe the crop fields, filled with poppies, mauve linseed flower and thistles with huge, magenta heads. Other days we walk down the steep hill to the river, following its curves all the way out to sea. We traverse the sharp inclines of all seven sisters, and cross a field carpeted in yellow buttercups. We navigate the deep ruts of Seaford Head, stumbling, out of breath, up its precipitous slopes.
One morning we walk to Cuckmere Haven, the beach where the Cuckmere estuary meets the sea, with the Seven Sisters cliffs rising to the east. The tide is low enough that we can hop and skip across the vast plains of rockpools and seaweed to reach the velvet sand beyond, spread out like a blanket. As the sun rises and casts its golden light across the bay, I look around: we are the only people for miles.
There is the occasional stormy day, the ground wet with puddles, the grass turning a technicolour green from the welcome rain. Grey clouds gather out in the channel as a weak sun attempts to break through. On a misty day, desperate to get out of the house, we park near Beachy Head and stumble blindly through the fog; on another we negotiate intense winds and flash showers on the cliffs by the Belle Tout lighthouse. As we find a place to shelter under the dense thick canopy of a gorse bush, the rain stops as suddenly as it starts and a rainbow appears. The joy of discovering a new path or stumbling across a meadow thick with flowers and bees is palpable. Sometimes we look around and realise that we are alone with no signs of human life: no pylons, no fences, no water troughs for the sheep and cows. It could be 500 years ago. It makes me feel, at once, grateful and small and awed.
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Walking also affords us our only semblance of human connection. We begin to recognise the familiar faces of the people we see each day: the old Irish man who owns a friendly 3-legged Labrador lurcher cross, or the lady who owns Polly, the enthusiastic black lab. We smile and say hello, and sometimes we stop to chat. As we walk, I watch the huge sky above and dodge cow-pats below, and as I do, the weight of my thoughts lessen.
My husband and I talk, non-stop. We know each other so well, our conversations drift like the river beside us in a stream of consciousness. Through the rhythm of our footsteps and the flow of the conversation, the walk becomes a kind of moving meditation. I feel so free, that I never want to go inside again. Being inside means that there’s the possibility of turning on the radio or the TV and hearing the news. Worse still, the insidious pull of my phone is stronger inside, where, physically distant from one another, social media seems suddenly more appealing: the promise of connection, of that dopamine hit.
It’s comforting to know others are feeling the same way as me, but the reassurance is short-lived. Instead, I find myself reading endless threads and headlines and community forums; sucked into arguments on other people’s pages. The noise from the internet becomes a low level anxiety, a thrum of annoyance that I find it almost impossible to shift inside. Outside, the momentum of the walk and the beauty of the landscape takes over, and I’m able to silence the relentless chatter of the news.
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During the lockdown, I swing from enjoying our newfound simplicity, to struggling to readjust to life in England. I feel suspended between two lives and two homes and often find myself pining for America. I want to create a new normal in a place I spent 5 years missing, but I ache, periodically, for Detroit; confronted, with the sharp realisation that I have deep feelings of love and affection for the place I was at odds with for much of the time I lived there. With these feelings, comes the awareness that the “grass is always greener” adage is a perennial problem.
I spent so much time in America daydreaming about what life would be like when we were back in Sussex: “I’m never going to take for granted being able to walk by the sea again!” I proclaimed, only to grumble my way along the pathways I’d thought about so much, thinking only of that mile long square block near our home in Michigan.
I often think about the differences between our experiences of nature in England and America. In Michigan, I often found huge swaths of green space and parkland on a map, and arrived expecting a wilderness only to be disappointed by a series of well-signposted, man-made paths and manicured lawns. In America, stiles do not exist: there are no ancient footpaths that track across farmland, and in cities, the grid system is favoured over winding alleyways and twitterns. There is jaw-dropping scenery and beauty, but this is located firmly away from urban areas. Instead, cities and suburbs compartmentalise nature into new-build, parks surrounded by freeways. Back in Sussex, our daily walks allow me to appreciate what I missed so much during the years we were away, and although I still miss America, I’m content to be back on the Downs; the landscape that has always held my heart.
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Lockdown has been many things to many people. I have been one of the lucky ones: I have not been ill and neither has anyone I know. I have been able to find work, and crucially, I have been able to walk. I think back to my first, freezing winter in Michigan and how penned in I felt in our 11th floor apartment. I couldn’t simply step out of my front door to walk, and even once I’d traversed the long corridors and elevator ride, there was little beauty to be found in the empty streets of downtown Detroit.
During lockdown, I have often thought of those living in cities without access to green space; those lambasted by the British press who have been so quick to judge the decisions of people choosing to take a walk in a local park. I have felt angered by their criticism, and humbled by the privilege I’ve had: to experience nature on a daily basis. Over the past eight months, I have felt the soft cloak of nature encircle me, smoothing out my frazzled, rough edges and returning my mind to equilibrium. It has taken these long, quiet months to for me to download the simple, but fundamental lessons that nature teaches: that change and impermanence are an inevitable part of life. We’re not separate from nature, we exist within it and move through it, and it is part of us.
As the world has been brought to its knees by covid, nature has continued to do its thing, quietly and perfectly: there is no fuss or ceremony, just a simple surrender to the cycles of birth and life and death, and a quiet confidence that the same cycle will begin again next year. In a world that has irrevocably changed; where uncertainty is rife, I am so grateful for its conviction (and I think my running days are definitely over).
Beautiful