Walking as respectful wayfinding in an uncertain age

In 2010 I made a short trip to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. My main impetus was to visit the ancient standing stones at Calanais as well as experience, however briefly and vicariously, other worlds, lives and landscapes. Regardless that I had only a couple of days on the island, I decided to catch the local bus and walk to the sights rather than hire a car. I’m sure many readers have made similar choices and experienced the delights of being on foot in an unfamiliar place. Instead of the ordinary, regular, enclosed, plastic world of automobility, I was greeted by smells, animals, uneven surfaces, twisting paths, sheep, dogs, farmers, wind, sun, and more. My intention is not to romanticize walking, nor to suggest a singular notion of walking. How I walk, what I look at, and my practices of movement and thinking are all shaped by historically contingent cultural practices of looking and moving that are familiar to those with a European cultural heritage. Acknowledging this is to understand that walking is as cultural as it is embodied, and that there are many ways to walk, many ways of seeing and knowing (Solnit 2000; Ingold 2000; Amato 2004). What I do want to emphasize is the interrelation between body, knowing, place and feeling. In many ways the random and impromptu qualities of walking engender a kind of openness to surprises and chance encounters that provoke affective ways of knowing (Solnit 2000, 11). The intermeshing of movement, mind, body, land/scape, ground and atmosphere transport us into a realm of inexpressible, ineffable and fleeting relatings, where we know “the world through the body and the body through the world” (Solnit 2000, 29). At the end of the day, my sore legs and tired feet reminded me of a gently undulating topography of peat bogs, paddocks, craggy cliffs and scattered settlements. Alongside contemporary lives, on Lewis it is possible to see the remnants of worlds past and those passing. As I walk this landscape I’m reminded of the contingencies of space, time and power. Lewis, once a center of power, is now considered remote and marginal. Its past is revealed on a day’s walk where one can go from the Bronze Age standing stones to an Iron Age broch and finish up at recently repaired “blackhouses” belonging to a mode of living more recently gone. Walking slows you down, time passes differently and mind and body are merged in the effort to cover ground and take in the surroundings. That is, every step embodies time as well as space, each step meshing things past and those to come in an ongoing process, each step participating in the making of worlds and in the process, knitting together responsibility for past, present and future