Episodios
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Thank you for all your support this year!
I hope you'll get out and explore your own map too...
For more ideas and info: www.alastairhumphreys.com/localI am proud to know these familiar little spots, for they have helped me learn to appreciate where I live and feel more attached to it, despite Thoreau’s insistence that a landscape can ‘never become quite familiar to you’, no matter how long you live there.
But can a single map really be enough exploration for a lifetime? Pootling around one map for a year rarely felt like an adventure, I’ll admit. But it did often feel like exploring. I enjoyed many tingles of surprise on my map of small wonders. I won’t push your credulity in claiming it was epic, but something about the experience resonated with the sliver of my soul that wants always to look beyond the hori- zon. My weekly meanderings did a decent job of keeping a lid on that restlessness. So much so, in fact, that I feel something akin to vertigo at contemplating the prospect of having the entire globe to explore.
If you pick up a map of your local area, choose a grid square at ran- dom, and begin walking around it with your eyes open, you’ll soon be mesmerised by the possibilities for local exploration. After that, it is up to you. What will you look for? What will you care about and want to take a stand on?
My map has changed my perception of home, made me less tempt- ed to fly, and more motivated to care for the environment. There is so much potential for a future full of positive stories, if only we demand change and take action.
This local map could fuel my curiosity for ever, in a way I once thought only distant places could do. My map is a fractal of the world. Today is a fractal of my life. To know one place well and to make it better is the work of a lifetime. And so, yes, a single map can be enough.
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I cycled to a small town that I knew as a motorway junction and a monstrous snarl of a roundabout. And yet I was riding towards it down pretty lanes fringed with red and yellow leaves that swirled and spun in the wind. It was disorientating not to have thought of this place in this way before. What would I discover on the last of my fifty-two grid squares?
I had spent an entire year on a small map that I’d feared would be boring and meagre. But I saw now that I was nowhere near to know- ing it fully. I would need to continue at the same pace for another seven years before I even visited every square, let alone travelled around each one in each season, during rush hour or at dawn, by bike or on foot, alone or with a companion. You never pass through the same grid square twice. I can never know even one map, not in all its sea- sons and weather, nor all its harvests and wildlife. And I had barely begun on the countless human stories and history intertwined in my nondescript neighbourhood.
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I began today’s grid square outside the Duke of Wellington pub, which dated from 1516, two and a half centuries before Old Nosey was born. I thought about all the brawls and laughs it had seen, and the tall tales told by 500 years of drinkers. I pondered also when they’d installed a petanque court in the garden, a game surely more suited to Napoleon than Wellington.
The Duke of Wellington was one of Britain’s greatest military heroes, as well as a Prime Minister. Although he was born way back in 1769, he lived long enough to have his photograph taken, which is impressive considering he was involved in sixty battles. And he is also a legend in the very diverse worlds of rubber boots and beef cooked in pastry.
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It was a morning of fresh sunshine and a chilly breeze, that day defined in The Meaning of Liff as ‘Brithdir – The first day of the winter on which your breath condenses in the air.’ There had been the first faint frost as I pedalled out this morning, pulling on thick gloves and feeling the pinch of cold on my nose. The year was drawing down. The season’s early fieldfares flew over the fields, a flight pattern of several wing beats, then a quick glide, eager to forage on the abundant haw- thorn berries. Fieldfares look like thrushes but stand taller, move in big hops, and spend the winter in flocks of hundreds.
Reading about fieldfares led me down a Twitter rabbit hole via the #vismig hashtag, of which I’d never heard. Visible migration (which I’d never heard of either) is the ‘visible’ migration of birds and butterflies during daylight. Many other species migrate at night (#nocmig), which
is harder to monitor unless flocks reach the coast at dawn, an event known as ‘falls’. We learnt a lot about nocturnal migrations when radar was invented in the First World War. All those birds could now be observed for the first time, showing up on radar screens as ‘phantoms’ or ‘angels’ flying through the dark skies in silent flocks.
I climbed a steep hillside to enjoy a misty, pale view westwards over miles of woodland and villages. I rested on a bench, poured a cup of coffee from my flask, and gazed out over a landscape that felt far more like home than it had done twelve months ago.
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As autumn approached, I was particularly looking forward to find- ing conkers. Horse chestnut trees and their appealing, polished seeds are a surefire declaration of the season. The trees were introduced into Britain from the Balkans in the 16th century. They’re not common in wild woodland, but are staples of towns, parks and villages. Insects gorge on their flamboyant candelabra flowers, and caterpillars feast on the leaves. Blue tits enjoy the caterpillars, and deer eat the conkers. And me? I hoard them.
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An episode on rewilding.
Walking always feels very different from the running and cycling I usually do for exercise. I’m generally too impatient to walk somewhere if I could run or ride instead. But the way I think changes depending on my mode of transport. Slow my legs and my mind starts to slow too. When you walk, you can stop at any time to poke something with a stick, make a note or take a photo. Walking is a movement that invites stillness. So I decided to walk this week for some deliberate slowness.I got a positive feeling about today’s grid square as soon as I arrived. On previous outings, I had often looked in this direction and thought, ‘It looks nice over that way.’The omens were promising with plenty of contour lines and no roads.
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A long row of black poplar trees escorted my road towards the low horizon. I passed a row of small industrial units, then a house offering rosy windfall apples and pears in a chipped, white ceramic bowl on the doorstep. Voices carried from an open upstairs window, engrossed in a Zoom call about something or other.
A cluster of beehives stood in the corner of a field.The coming cool weather would soon quieten the hives, but today the sun was warm and the bees were busy. They fly tremendous distances, racking up round trips of up to ten miles to forage for food. Each jar of honey contains nectar from two million flowers, with a corresponding flight distance of 90,000 miles, or more than three laps of the planet. Yet each bee produces only a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life. So it is an extraordinary team effort that depends upon bees sharing information about the food sources they find, by ‘dancing’ for each other.
The waggle dance involves flying in a straight line to show the direction of the food relative to the sun, then performing a series of
loops related to the flowers’ quality. The bee also beats its wings and waggles its abdomen to create vibrations that give extra information about the nectar and pollen’s location.
Bees are cooperative, communicative insects, complete with solar compasses, inbuilt clocks, the ability to communicate with plants via electric signals, and a sting in the tail. They pollinate most of our wild- flowers and many important crops. Bees are amazing. But after 100 million years, they are now at risk as we kamikaze towards ‘insectaged- don’ and the extinction of up to 70 percent of our wild species.
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Though the silver birch trees were turning to autumnal gold, sum- mer was back this week with a fury, despite me writing it off, but it was probably too early to speak of an Indian summer. The earliest known use of the phrase comes from a Frenchman called John de Crevecoeur in the eastern United States in 1778. It perhaps referred to a spell of warm weather that allowed the Native Americans to continue hunting a little longer. The phrase reached Britain in the 19th century, replacing ‘Saint Martin’s summer’ that had been used to describe fine weather close to St Martin’s Day on 11 November. The sun was hot on my dark T-shirt, and I pulled my cap down to shade my eyes.
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Today’s grid square was a rare outing to the far side of the river, to the very edge of the map itself. It felt like a new country. Over that next hill lay lands unknown, and maybe even dragons. I cycled up a stony bridleway through a wood, making sure to savour the greenness before the leaves fell for another year, to store away the memories as nourish- ment to get me through the winter. The year was winding round to its close, and I was going to miss these outings. They always cheered me up after tedious bouts of real life, such as queuing this morning to col- lect a parcel from the post office, which turned out to be in some other distant depot. Holly berries ripened in the dim woodland light. The path became a holloway, with beech trees arching overhead and their tangled roots exposed on the elevated track sides. A nuthatch scurried up and down a trunk, calling ‘dwip, dwip’ as it searched for food, then
hung upside down while it ate.
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The gate’s clang startled a buzzard who lumbered off the ground and flew into the sanctuary of the trees. I stood still in the field, feeling myself beginning to slow down and unwind. I breathed in the smell of hay, blinked at the sunshine, and reminded myself that things couldn’t be too bad if I got to call this ‘work’.
Riding here had been a confusing maze of winding lanes and high hedges, so I hadn’t yet orientated myself with any other familiar grid squares nearby. The road had been too narrow for cars to pass my bike safely, so I’d had to stop and tuck in whenever a vehicle appeared. This allowed me the chance for a blackberry update, nibbling one or two while I waited for each car to pass. A few were ripe and swollen, but most were still small green nubbins.
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A good old chunter about access rights, the right to roam, and Scandinavia's approach to allemansrätten.
My hopes were high. It was a perfect sunny day and the grid square looked enticing on paper. It was mostly woodland, with some contour lines, a small lake and the site of a Roman villa thrown in for luck. There was only one building on the whole square. A motorway and railway sliced through the middle, but a third of the area was a country park and all the rest was open countryside. I was looking forward to roving around a pleasant landscape dotted with enormous trees.
And yet...
And yet, it turned out that the solitary building was a historic manor house that owned most of the grid square and resolutely refused to share it with plebs like me. I was shunted away from the meadows and ancient trees by signs and fences, and ushered instead down an unattractive path squashed between the motorway and a metal fence. I hoped I could at least explore a small copse, but that turned out to belong to a golf course and was also off-limits. And the lake was ringed with forbidding notices from the fishing club that owned it.
So far, the most enjoyable part of the outing had been standing on the motorway bridge and watching the hypnotic traffic hurtle beneath me.
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I cycled to today’s grid square with Test Match Special playing in my headphones. Listening to the ebb and flow of a cricket match arcing towards its conclusion is one of my greatest pleasures. I turned it off reluctantly when I arrived so that I could concentrate on what I was exploring.
I began outside a working man’s club with a fluttering Union Jack, then rode among Victorian terraces, streets of post-war pebbledash, and 1980s semis. A brick clock tower had been built in the town cen- tre with the largesse of the local mill owner 150 years ago, and the mill’s chimneys still smoked away in the distance. There was the usual array of shops and eateries: convenience stores, kebabs, fried chicken, Chinese, Indian, garage doors (that was a first), and a bookmaker. It was a typical old-fashioned town of struggling shops and pubs sliding into decline, plus a shiny new Domino’s Pizza takeaway.
An elderly man laboured across the street with his shopping trolley. A car slowed and waited an age for him to cross. ‘That will be me one day,’ I thought to myself, ‘sliding into decline.’ And, ‘Be grateful then for this moment,’ I reminded myself. This moment is my life
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It seemed to me, walking and cycling through this year on my map, that the seasons move in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. No change, no change, no change... and then one morning the new season is well on its way, overlapping the previous one in its eagerness to get going. I caught the first embryonic smells of autumn today, along with heavy dew and a noticeably later sunrise.
I always enjoy daybreak, though doing the school run means I’m rarely free to head out and play at such an hour. But I managed it this morning and immediately felt I was winning the day. It took an hour to ride across my map to the grid square, and I had time to enjoy the sun rising, the rabbits in the fields, and the foxes slinking home after a big night out.
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I had waited for the rain showers to pass before heading out today, but I was forced to shelter from a fresh cloudburst beneath a bowed old horse chestnut tree. Sheets of water slid down the road and dampened my enthusiasm. I had, however, spotted the map symbol for a pub on today’s grid square, and I had little to do later.
‘Go for a look around the square, and after that you can go to the pub,’ I bargained with myself.
It had been a warm and humid day between the heavy showers. Aside from traditional British grumbles, which we all enjoy, the weath- er had not actually been too bad recently compared with, say, the year 1816, when ash clouds from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia shrouded the world in an extended winter. Mount Tambora’s blast was heard 1,600 miles away and plunged the 350 miles around the volcano into darkness for two days. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.
Over the next year, a cloud of ash spread through the atmosphere, wreaking havoc with the weather for three years. The resulting potato famine in Ireland led to a terrible outbreak of typhus and mass emi- gration. North America’s arable economy crashed, causing the panic of 1819 that pushed the country from being a commercial colony towards becoming an independent economy. In China, three consecutive har- vests failed, prompting farmers to plant poppies in place of rice, with far-reaching and long-lasting global consequences.
But while Tambora’s eruption caused widespread famine and dis- ruption, the strange weather also influenced an output of poetic and musical works infused with gloomy genius and named for the Greek god of fire: Byron’s Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, and Schubert’s first commission, the cantata Prometheus, composed to a poem of the same name by Goethe.
Volcanoes erupt now and then, and weather conditions also swing back and forth naturally, but sane people are in agreement that human behaviour is now causing climate breakdown far beyond natural var- iations. A clear and alarming demonstration of our extravagant and irresponsible way of life was the occurrence of ‘Earth Overshoot Day’.
Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s annual demand for ecological resources and services exceeds what the planet can regenerate in that year. It means we’ve used up our sustainable bio- capacity for the year. We deal with the deficit for the rest of the year by borrowing from the future and gobbling limited reserves of ecological resources more quickly than they can be replaced, if at all.
Qatar and Luxembourg’s Overshoot Days for the year were back in February. Britain’s was in May. The only reason the world’s Overshoot Day as a whole is as late as August is because the poorest countries are still living within their means. They prop us up, while also bearing most of the burden and consequences of climate change.
Sustainable living dictates that you must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We are clearly failing to do that. How long would you tolerate the behaviour of a friend who guzzled voraciously, overspent in his own interests, then came to you each August asking you to bail him out for the rest of the year?
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I filled my bottles with ice before heading out this morning. It was the hottest day of the year, and Britain was parched by an unusually severe drought. As I got ready, I heard on the radio that 20cm of rain had fallen in an hour in Germany, causing floods that killed almost 200 people.
The last of the morning dew felt cool on my toes as I cycled down a grassy path in my flip- flops. In the crisp, brown fields, the harvest seemed to be ripening before my very eyes. A silence hung over the day, which reminded me of Spain. A distant voice carried from across the fields. I was roasting. And it was still early. I envied a buzzard whose feathers ruffled in a breeze as it perched on a pylon by the railway.
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Includes a polite argument about land access and the right to roam.
I sat down on an overgrown, underused bench outside a derelict timber-framed pub to squeeze out my socks. The men in hi-vis jackets from the water board had warned of a deep flood on the road, but I thought, ‘Come on, lads, how deep can it be?’ and pedalled on.
‘Pretty deep,’ was the answer.
Now I had wet shoes and socks for squelching around today’s grid square. Well done, me!
Unique on my map, but very welcome, was a long strip of grass beside the road. It would not have been of much interest except that it was marked on the map as ‘land available for access on foot’. Beyond the slender threads of footpaths and the declining municipal parks, this was a rare example of the 8 percent of England that is open-access land for anyone to roam freely.
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There was a humid, jungle feel to the day after heavy overnight rain. Plants shone, the ground steamed, a thrush sang a persistent tune that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the tropics, and pink rosebay willowherb flowers gave off their strong, sweet fragrance. The plant is known as fireweed in North America, and its scent always reminds me of it growing on blackened land following forest fires when I cycled through Canada. The dormant seeds make the most of the increased sunlight and decreased competition after fires, to bloom quickly before young trees return and outgrow them. During the London Blitz, wil- lowherb was called bombweed as it flourished in the wreckage of buildings.
I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt today and not even carrying a raincoat in my bag. The weather had rarely been so clement this year and I had been excited to get on my bike this morning. Yet although the weather was kind, the overgrown footpaths continued to be anything but. This was another week of hacking through brambles, squeezing past nettles and swatting mosquitoes in damp undergrowth. All this slashing and whacking and stinging felt like a jungle expedition, albeit a gentle one accompanied by 4G phone signal and the sound of motor- ways. I’m content that this is about as ferocious as the British country- side ever gets.
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To reach today’s square, I needed to make a short crossing on a small ferry, which I knew would be fun but also added the tiniest frac- tion of hassle to proceedings, which is all I ever need to be tempt- ed to procrastinate. That quibble aside, I always enjoy ferry crossings. The only thing that beats them are cable ferries across rivers, with a bonus point for those you have to hail by shouting, hoping that the ferryman hasn’t gone home for lunch or closed for the season. Though these journeys are brief, they have the excitement of crossing a border, a boundary, to somewhere new.
Although today’s river was only a few hundred metres wide, I wasn’t brave enough to swim or canoe across it. The brown water swirled and boiled with eddies and undertows, and ships ploughed up and down. Even the ferry struggled, crossing the current in a wide, swerving arc.
As the ferry slowed down to dock, I looked back across the river at the landscapes I had been linking this year. I enjoyed seeing those con- nections from this fresh perspective, noting how this place joined onto that place. I wheeled my bike down a causeway of riveted girders, over tidal mud and shopping trolleys, then pedalled away from the ferry.
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I removed my bike helmet and wiped my sweaty face. It was hot. I was at a memorial to a pilot shot down by German Messerschmitts in the skies overhead during the Second World War. Appropriately, the fields around were filled with poppies. Scattered at the base of the memorial was the rubbish from a KFC takeaway. The ten-piece Wicked Variety bucket contained 4,790 calories, the large fries had 1,440 and there were 750 more in the large Pepsi. I hoped it had been shared around, for that is a spectacular 6,980 calories, enough to fuel one eater through an impressive 69.8-mile run. Although given that they had been too lazy to put their rubbish in a bin, I doubted these calories were being used for long-distance running.
A cockerel crowed from behind a nearby hedge, jubilant not to have been fried. I rarely heard cockerels around here, but the sound reminded me of travels in other countries, of pre-dawn wake ups in the Philippines and the potholed roads of rural Nicaragua.
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A bonus round. A little something extra. Have a look at what you could have won...
I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square as usual, but to see the squares between the squares. I’d found myself with the rare but joyous occurrence of a weekend afternoon all to myself, so decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the big football match in the evening. I wasn’t playing and was merely preparing to take my seat in front of the TV with beer in hand and loud opinions galore. But the game was still all I could concentrate on.
I headed out after lunch to see how many of the grid squares that I’d visited I could link together in an afternoon. I would ride through as many as possible before I ran out of time, and then zoom home for kick-off. It would be interesting to take stock of all I’d seen so far.
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