Doubling Back by Linda Cracknell

Author:Linda Cracknell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freight Books

The Heaven Above And The Road Below

Château de Lavigny, Switzerland, August 2012

I succumbed today to the call of the high places, took a day off from my desk at the Château and a series of trains east into the Valais, climbing in a tiny mountain tram up out of mist into sunshine, through forest and perched villages, passing glacial grey water in the rivers, toothy mountain views.

‘I’m in the Alps!’ my body kept shouting.

I walked up from the village of Les Diablerets through deep clover, crocuses, chirping crickets, up to the grazing at Isenau where I stopped to drink coffee on a terrace and gaze at the glacier above. I relished the cool air and sense of elevation at 1800 metres, but pondered how much higher I had been on the back of Finsteraarhorn.

Cowbells donged earthily nearby. It will soon be time for the cattle and sheep to be brought down from the alpage, the high grazing where they’ve been since Spring. Transhumance in the Alps dates back to the 4th Millennium BC. Unlike Scotland, where it was the women and children who accompanied animals to the summer sheilings, here a few herdsmen go, leaving the majority of the community in the valleys. It delights me that this traditional practice lives on, and that the animals make their slow walk home garlanded with bright flowers.

Today was a day walk, a loop. I resisted the lure of well-marked trails leading the eye towards lengthier possibilities. It’s a joy, though, that’s hard to beat: setting out on a long walk, the agenda for forthcoming days dictated solely by the beckoning road. The landscape unrolls, fitness grows, and even the slight sense of hardship and rationed food is enjoyable. Only taking what one can carry brings the ultimate sense of independence. As Robert Louis Stevenson said of his crossing of the Cévennes in 1878: ‘…the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this feather bed of civilisation, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints’.

On a long walk in remote terrain life becomes simplified into a line, daily rituals, the rhythm of day and night. Added to this, a passage through a mountain landscape is punctuated by dramatic geographical features; passes and rivers to cross, junctions, inns and settlements, each of which can gather symbolic significance in a mind channelled by motion and perhaps solitude. In Scotland, I’ve become fascinated by old ways that wind through the hills; routes of pedestrian and animal travel where traces of human culture survive. I imagine myself a character in the literatures of long, slow journeys – Hardy’s Tess, Christian from Pilgrim’s Progress, Bilbo Baggins.

A palimpsest of footfall characterises the two walks that follow; a layering that the rhythms of my own tread seems to mesh with. Descending from the high places of the Alps, to foothills, passes, valleys in Scotland, and taken over a number of consecutive days, each is in my mind a ‘proper’ journey.

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