Pride comes before a fall: Deep Catalunya,Part One

Monday 5 June - Friday 11 June
Olot - Joanetes - Olot - Camprodon 

Mare de Deu de Cabrera. So many summits in this part of Catalunya are topped by edifices dedicated to the Mother of God. This website catalogues many of them.

It all went wrong, in a sense, from the second day when I fell, quite literally, arse over elbow, but perhaps the whole project was doomed to follow a trajectory I'd neither anticipated nor hoped for. What had been intended as a more-or-less continuous thru-hike through the hills and mountains of Catalunya turned out, in the end, to be little more than a walking holiday, albeit one that lasted over six weeks. I say 'wrong', but there is, of course, no binary 'right' or 'wrong', no fixed way of going about things; going askew, being lead astray by the pernicious deities that guide the psychogeographer's booted feet is surely to be celebrated.

Isn't it? Rembember, I am, by trade, a pilgrim; I follow, every summer, linear paths that converge on a city of spiritual significance, the destination enlivens the landscape, adds a another veneer of meaning. But the summer of 2017 was to be quite different, no fixed geographical objective but a series of landscapes through which to pass and dwell. It was an experiment, of sorts, I wanted to see whether I could make the transition from pilgrim to thruhiker, as if the two, as some hardened trekkers argue, inhabit entirely different ambulatory spheres.

Familiar ground: the journey began along a branch of the Camino Catalan, a via verde along the old Girona to Olot railway line. Soon, however, the yellow arrows of the Camino de Santiago would be replaced by the red and white flashes of the more secular grand recorrido network of long-distance paths.

As has become my custom, I took the train and bus to my point of embarkation - or perhaps, given the fraught emotions over the six months that preceded the trip - the point of release. The Eurostar to Paris and then the afternoon direct train to Barcelona, alighting at Girona then taking the bus to Olot, a town that's beginining to feel like my second home; chances are it will be my home within the next twelve months. 

The plan was to take a gentle afternoon hike to the wonderful and wonderfully good value Mas Rubio guesthouse and then explore the hinterland to the west of the Garrotxa volcanic zone, including the formidably iconic cliffs of Puigsacalm (pronounced: puj-sa-cal-m). 

Puigsacalm (1515m), in rain and shine: much, much more than a lump of lofty limestone and marls

But my first port-of-call was the Santuari de Mare de Deu, a thin slice of flat limestone that rises somewhat precipitously in the hills of Collsacabra. It's a bit of a slog from Joanetes, first a steep climb out of the Vall d'en Bas on a zig-zagged track that winds its way through the cliff which form the base of the Serra de Collsacabra.

It was hiking the via verde along the Cami de St Jaume last summer that I became aware of Catalunya's distinctive topography. At valley level the characteristic scrap-and-dip-type landscapre creates an impressive repertoire of geomorpholigical features, from up above wave after wave of splintered cliffs and densely-forested slopes marches from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean littoral. 

This is what I mean. A forested piedmont topped by crags around 20-30m in height which in turn give way to a gently undulating plateau ...

 

... from which rise the peaks of the Serra de Cabrera (1307m, above) and the Cingles d'Aiats (also 1307m, below.

It's a fairly easy three hours' hike to the foot of Cabrera but at the last moment, for those who hesitate with heights, there's a sting in the tail. A brisk climb up thirty-or-so metres of bare, knobbly rock. Your correspondent, who has her 'moments' in situations like these, came perilously close to turning back but she persevered and was rewarded handsomely. 

(above) One of the two paths up to the Santuari de Cabrera clambers quite precipitously up the steep buttress at the end of the plateau through a series of steps and ledges. There is, I soon learned, a gentler approach but this produced the best views (Agulolla de la Tuta (1142m) below)

The short, sharp ascent levels out equally abruptly to a meadow beyond which is the Santuari de Mare de Deu, intact but deserted and locked-up today.

Santuari de Cabrera: is it a church? Is it an hotel? Not even the internet seems to know

From the santuari, the ridge narrows and the path crosses a slender platform of bare rock with steep but not deep drops on either side. The perfect place to cure a person uncertain at heights.

If you insert 'Santuari de Cabrera' into a popular internet search engine you'll come up with 'about' 55,900 results, many of which details routes and walking experiences in the area. But on a Monday in early June I was the only hiker in town and, despite having purchased an excellent 1:25000 Editorial Alpina map, negotiating the network of paths back down the mountain required my full attention. With the asphalt road in sight, I let my concentration slip, congratulated myself on my navigational prowess and forgot to focus on my feet.

I've never fallen before. Not properly, arse-over-elbow-flying-through-the-air rather than a stumble or a slip. It can't have lasted longer than a split-second but I'm still trying to picture the image of my brief, uncontrolled flight. Mercifully, I was carrying a light pack but the impact with the ground still knocked the proverbial stuffing from me. I picked myself up and dusted myself down; no bones broken, a mild state of shock. 

It took a while for the pain and discomfort to set in, I'd twisted my knee and had to tread gingerly for the remainder of the hike. But the full extent of the injury didn't really manifest itself until the following morning when I awoke with stiff limbs and dull pain in my ribs.

In Kafka's Metamorphosis, despite waking up to find he has been transformed into an insect, Gregor Samsa refuses to adjust his life accordingly. Mr Samsa, of course, did not have access to a computer and after consulting the internet and my #InvisiblePilgrim, who just happens to be a nurse as well as an academic, it became apparent that I had bruised or cracked my ribs and that as a consquence all bets were off.

Well, perhaps I was a little Samsa-esque in my response, blithely assuming that after a couple of days of light walking without a full pack I'd be fully restored to health and normal service would be restored. However, an afternoon hike through the Garrotxa soon suggested otherwise, camping was out of the question so I left my gear at the hotel and after the morning-after-the-night-before UK election hubris, jumped on a bus to Camprodon and the higher peaks of the Pyrenees proper. 

An afternoon's recuperative hiking in the Garrotxa volcanic zone: it was already becoming apparent that #DeepCatalunya was something of a misnomer and that the Garrotxa would become the sun around which the next six weeks would orbit.

Deep pastoralism

Path of the Day

It wasn't a good idea. I'd spent hours poring over topographical and geological maps planning my trip when I could've been writing my thesis. Like so many supposedly good ideas, they got flushed down the pan of personal history; #DeepCatalunya and its author were both beginning to fall apart apart at the seams.

Cut loose for the myths of the hinterland: Deep Topography, Deep Catalunya

Oh Lord, thou switherest 

Back-of-a-fag-packet route map

I never really intended to be a pilgrim, it happened by accident or, if one is spiritually inclined, as I am from time to time, by some sort of grand design. Hiking, however, has always been in my blood - my heart has always been in my boots, if you like. 

As has, of course, landscape. Not just landscape as a backdrop; not landscape as a veneer, a thin sheen of skin on which the earth plays out its existence but landscape as a living, breathing substance that pulses through my veins. Landscape as existence, landscape as the be-all and the end-all, landscape as love, life and death.

Ever since my adolescence reached its 'sensitive' phase (somewhere between winning and losing my first love), my modus perambulare has always been to get under the skin of the land and breathe into it an effervescent and irrepressible life. Had not dreams of rock 'n' roll stardom intervened, I might well have turned out to be a more orthodox geographer and ended up in a local governement planning office churning out an endless stream of well-meaning but ultimately futile documents and strategies. As it was, my first (and not entirely succesful) encounter with academia was through the scholastic mish-mash that was Geography and Landscape Studies.

Once on the periphery, always on the periphery. Circling round, eyeing the lie of the land, wondering what makes it tick. My undergraduate dissertation dealt with landscape and literature in a post-Hardy Wessex and had I been a less louche character I might have followed it up rather than being drawn into the world of soil engineering then spat out into Latin American politics and theology. I am the land, the land is me, receptacles into which the chaos of our lives has been casually tossed, sediments of memory and experience, good and bad, as volatile as magma, as brittle as slate. 

I was never taught that, not at school, not the sixth form nor the Institute of Higher Education where my pathetic flush of A levels led me; it was something I had to learn. That landscape was a messy business that coudn't be crammed and shoe-horned into the dreaded geographical models so beloved of the structuralist. Do you know what? Thirty years later I'm still fighting to persuade my impressionable, adolescent students that geography really isn't as dull as ditchwater or taught by bearded men sporting Hush-Puppies and elbow patches. 
John Wylie writes of the landscape as tension: 'a tension between proximity and distance, body and mind, sensuous immersion and detached observation' (2007:1). Since inadvertently becoming a pilgrim junkie I've been feeling a similar conflict, torn between the lure of following - perhaps unthinkingly and unimaginatively - a clearly defined and signposted trajectory and following my nose and the contours on the map. Pilgrimage and/or thru-hiking is all very well, and the glamour boosts my ego (student: 'how far are you walking this summer, Sian?' Tutor: 'one thousand two hundred of my European kilometres').
So the plan was to fulfil a long-held desire (well, since 2013) and walk from the Mediterranean coast of Spain to the Atlantic, via Santiago and the Via de la Plata from Sevilla. But even as I was planning the route I slipped in a sneaky week-long introductory pedestrian excursion through the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees - the Pre-Pyrenees, as if that was where I felt I really belonged.
Then matters of the heart intervened (the landscape isn't immune to the slings and arrows of love) and I ditched the linear for the circular (ish); I wanted to explore that hinterland where Catalunya meets the mountains, the not-quite-elite landscape frequently overshadowed by the grandiose, snow-clad peaks to the north. 

I take as my template the deep topography of Nick Papadimitriou's wonderful psychogeographical explorations of the 'uplands' of south Hertfordshire and north Middlesex; the foothills of the Chilterns, if you like. It's a landscape I know well, from various sojourns in the Home counties, and one which Nick Papadimitriou brings to life in a manner which reminds me of the final pages of Gabriel Garcia's One Hundred Years of Solitude - a sort of psychogeographical and suburban magic realism.

Hinterlands, not forgotten lands. The landscape that gets ignored and left behind, the landscape that is perceived as a means to an end rather than an end in istself. The landscape through which the masses scamper in their desperation to reach the mountains or the sea. Deep in the hinterland I dwell, have done ever since I was an adolescent. In Weymouth I eschewed the beach for the allure of the mysterious intricacies of the backstreets around which I wove my own dreams, like a teenaged John Cowper Powys. In Dorset I deviated from the coast path for the layers of chalk and clay that lay behind, and the sensuous sinuosity of the River Frome as it meanders its way languidly towards the sea. 
I fell out of love with England a long, long time ago but its landscape still exerted a magical pull. Until 23 June 2016. I was in Catalunya when the British voted to leave the EU and I returned a furious rebel and saboteur. A couple of weeks later I was back in France, trekking towards Spain the Pyrenees on the Camino but in the intervening period I ventured out, tentatively, onto the Blackdown Hills. I wanted the landscape to work, for it and I to click, if only for old times' sake, but there was nothing. Nada. Rien.
So once again I turn my wrinkled features and fading locks to my homelands. In Catalunya, I think - perhaps delusionally - that I might have found my space, in its physical and cultural hinterlands. Neither one or the another, a place apart, detached but not severed. 
I am the land, the land is me. Or is there more to it than that?