Landscapes of Limbo

 

The dog days are back. It's no-man's-time again, the unendurable, enervating hours during which the ticking of the clock slows to crawl and echoes, loudly, around the room. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock; it feels like a death-knell, friends and relatives gathered round to mourn the passing of an era. Entropy sets in, no place to go, no direction home. 

In-between times have their plus points. For those who have neither the time, the money nor the inclination for a full-blown mid-life crisis they're good for catharsis and you don't have to fork out thousands on a Harley Davidson or a bottle-blonde bird or toy boy. Sadly, I'm getting a bit old for those sort of shenanigans, my stasis is now more cerebral than libidinal, stuck fast in the borderlands between submitting a thesis and having to defend it and unable to return to my beloved Pyrenees. 

In my book the best form of defence is attack and the only way to take on ennui is to kick out the jams. Trouble is, the sort of landscape which really pumps up the adrenalin currently lies out of reach and I'm more or less confined to the flaky friability of Wessex chalk. Talk about anthropomorphism!

Don't get me wrong! I love chalk, I was raised in the Cretaceous and I have calcite flowing through my veins. It's gentle dips and scarps have, over the duration of five decades, come to my emotional rescue and soothed my troubled soul. But right now I need the brash and the brazen, not balm.

Dry valley. Even in times of tempest the chalk remains a waterless land

You'd have think I'd have learned enough about psycho-lithology by now not to underestimate the capacity of the Cretaceous of affect spiritual change. More reform that revolution, only the igneous can truly rock my world but the subtlety of a soft sandstone can work wonders for tired minds. 

 

And man, am I tired! Worn out to a pale husk treading the downs like one of Tolkein's barrow-wights. Not physically, like one of those Duracell bunnies, if you start me up I'll never stop. Never stop. But I've been running on emotional empty far too long. It's time to tune out and plug in, deep, deep into the earth, to those parts of the lithosphere where the strata still recall the orogenies that violently re-shaped their world. For them, the Hercynian passed by like the blink of an eye and the momentum which folded and faulted their sediments hasn't quite run out of juice. If you stop and listen hard you can feel the earth moving beneath your feet.

'Ain't no way but the Ridgeway, get used it it ...'

What, dear readers, passes through your mind when you're out on the trail? Worried you didn't save that important document you were working on before sanity prevailed and you slammed shut your laptop and laced up your boots? Wonder what you might have for dinner this evening? Where you might spend your summer holidays if and when they arrive? Or maybe you knock back the kilometres contemplating existential possibilities and epistemological cul-de-sacs?

Me? I'm stuck in an ambulatory infinity loop. When I'm out walking I think about ... you've guessed it, walking. I don't just plan future hikes, I follow them with my mind's eye, fantasise about spending day after day on a trail that has no end, much in the same way that you might fantasise about running your fingers over the soft and gentle curves of your lover. 

I am the land, the land is me. It will happen, one day, that much I can sense as I cast my eye across the horizon and let the porous chalk soak up my Weltschmerz. Ultimately I have no say in the matter. The moment will arrive when I wake up one day and just walk, day after day after day. And it'll be sooner rather then later because spending seven years of my life writing about walking has stripped me bare. I live to walk and walk to live, nothing else matters.

It's all downhill from here ..

It takes me a while to get into my stride. There was a time, many many years ago that I might step out into the landscape and not feel the buzz. That the landscape wouldn't hate me but be oblivious to my presence. Listen, I can live with hate, it's just the sunny side of love turned upside down and I thrive on tension and conflict, but to be spurned by the thing I love with a passion so fierce it often overwhelms me? If that ever happened I'd sit on the hill and bawl my eyes out but thankfully those days are long gone.

A shower passes over. The skies are grey and the breeze has a chill but once I'm up on the ridgeway the horizon seems to reach into foreverland, and on either side of me possibilities unfurl themselves like leaves of bracken. The dry valley tells me one thing, the scarp another. To the north the vale of the River Nadder is calling, like the bells of Bow Church spoke to Dick Whittington: 'turn again, Sian Lacey Taylder, Ramblanista - or whatever you're calling yourself nowadays'.

But is this 'lady' for turning? 

You'll just have to wait and see ...

Rock folly

SLOW PYRENEES

From the moment I signed up to Twitter, started blogging and embarked on study for my PhD it had always been my intention to keep gender separate from hiking, as if neither informed the other. It shouldn't have taken all the time and travel to make me realise that they do but there you go - there's none as blind as those who refuse to see.

It was eight years ago, I'd just walked the Camino de Santiago for the first time and had undergone a very curious and very Catholic religious experience deep in a valley in the wilds of Spain's Cordillera Cantábrica. Eight years, but in terms of how the world of identity politics has changed it seems like a lifetime and I find myself harking back to a gender-free prelapsarian paradise because, as sure as eggs is eggs, I never expected a personality disorder to become a fascistic political ideology.

Or society to go batshit crazy!  

Even before I got banned from Twitter for daring to contradict the most tedious mantra de nos jours - 'transwomen are women' - and calling out a bloke who thought he was a bird, I'd determined to break that vow because biological sex informs every social aspect of life, even at the summit crater of a volcano in El Salvador.

Especially at the summit crater of a volcano in El Salvador. 'Trans' ideology might try to run from socio-biological realities but it can't hide. 

Once a poser, always a poser! The photo above is of me somewhere in deepest Dorset way back in 1989, the final days of that gloriously glamorous gender-bending decade, when slapping on a streak of eyeliner and slipping into a frock didn't automatically turn a man into a woman. I was called Simon back then, a failed student and wannabe rock-star with an eye for the laydeez. There's no point in pretending, no point in trying to rewrite history to nudge Simon out the back door and slamming it shut because he was - still is - an inconvenient truth. 

I love that photo! 'Misgendering' and 'deadnaming' have never fazed me, society sees what it wants to see and if image meets perception it'll happily play along with the conceit. Because that's what 'trans' ideology is, a bare-faced lie dressed up as a liberationist narrative. But you know what they say, one man's freedom is another man's licence and, as always, women tend to be on the receiving end of it. 

Why and how 'Simon' became 'Sian' is another story, to be told on a long winter's night with a bottle of gin in front of a roaring fire after a watching an episode of Midsomer Murders, Nettles-era, natch. In this mini-essay I want to focus not on the inconsistencies but the ever-presents - the hair, of course, but also the map because even as I type this I'm surrounded by dozens of them; in the 32 years since that photo was taken they've never left my side. 

'Transwomen' and their lickspittle lackeys like to pretend that biology is an irrelevance and that any woman who says it isn't is pandering to essentialism. But only women bleed, what they wilfully ignore is that bodily functions play an integral role in the way society treats women and they way boys and girls evolve during their formative years. 

I prefer to hike and travel alone. In the Spanish Pyrenees, up a Nicaraguan volcano, on a train from Bristol to Romania, through the streets of San Salvador and Mexico City. It's my modus ambulare, a declaration of a state of independence. I don't like being told what to do or where to go. Assuming I'm female, people often ask 'aren't you ever scared?' or 'don't you feel vulnerable?'

The answers, of course, are 'yes' and 'yes'. When I was sitting in a snowstorm in the Pyrenees with a fractured kneecap and my mobile battery on 1%, waiting for a helicopter to rescue me, for example. Or when a guy in a bar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, pulled a gun on me. On both occasions I lived to tell the tale and, of course, they only fuelled my desire for more danger and risk. 

But that, too, is another story.

There are plenty of women who hike and travel alone. I know of one who is currently in the final stages of walking solo across Europe and many years ago, in El Salvador, I met a woman who was cycling the Pan American Highway from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego - I still wonder if she ever made it. When I'm alone at night in the wilds of Catalunya I often ask myself, would I have done this had I not spent the formative years of my life 'as a male'? Who knows, but I can say with some certainty that spending the formative years of my life 'as a male' gave me the confidence to and that confidence was largely due to my biology and its social implications. 

As a boy, I was brought up not to fear but fight. If somebody threatened me I was told to stand my ground, not run away because the worst I'd experience would be a bloody nose. That four-letter word - rape - never featured in my vocabulary, neither did sexual assault. I could go out, get pissed, stagger home at three in morning without worrying about being attacked and made pregnant by a male. I could hitch-hike, alone, from Weymouth to Edinburgh to London (Xmas 1984) because although I was vulnerable, I was much less vulnerable than female students of the same age. And vulnerable in different ways.  And, of course, I could pursue a career without having my employer worrying that I might get pregnant and I never lived with the threat of FGM or child marriage.

So here's the thing. Thirty years after beginning my 'transition', twenty-five since lying on the operating table having my meat and two veg surgically transformed into something which resembles a very elegant inverted Yorkshire pudding, I give thanks that I grew up a boy. That I never experienced the oppression, discrimination or life-threatening violence that my female contemporaries did. And still do, on a daily basis, not just here in Europe but across the globe. If I'd been born female, I'm not sure I'd have the confidence to do what I do now. Or rather, if I'd been born female I'm not sure I'd been allowed - or permitted - to develop that confidence. The extent to which I'm a rebel 'woman' today is dependent on the socio-biological reality of growing up as a boy.

Don't get me wrong, as I pass the 55 year milestone and prepare for a PhD viva I also give thanks that I made that change. But it was neither the best nor the most important thing that's ever happened to me and it certainly doesn't define my life. Indeed, in terms of achievements it ranks very low on the list: it was a means to an end not, as most 'transwomen' perceive it, an end in itself. 

I hike therefore I am. Walking is my world and defines my existence. To this end, when circumstances permit, I have in mind a pilgrimage-oriented project that uses my academic and life-experience to foster this oh-so important confidence in those who, for various reasons, lack or have been denied it. It will feature the Camino de Santiago but it will also include excursions in the UK.

Enough already. F*** gender, let's hike!

 

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?

Deep in the Heart of Dorset

I call myself a psychogeographer, as I plod across the fields of Wessex or, more frequently nowadays, the Caminos of the Iberian peninsula, I often feel I'm in danger of breaching the Trades Description Act. Sure, there's plenty of psycho, probably more than is healthy for a woman of my background and breeding, and girt, humungeous dollops of my beloved geography but if you're looking to radical derives through urban edgelands a la Ian Sinclair then I'm definitely not a good example of the genre. 

Every which way but loose ...

Take last weekend, for example. Not for me forty-eight hours exploring the nitty-gritty in nearby Bristol. Rather, I jumped in my car and set off for the familiar, comforting hills of rural Dorset. I'm safe here, aren't I? Sure, I get my kicks from trudging up volcanoes and hiking hundreds of kilometres of mountain and meseta but here, in my safe Wessex homeland, nothing can happen, right? 

Desire lines, striations across my soul

If you scratch the surface the landscape will bleed. Profusely, excessively, like the non-stop sobbing of tears, speaking to me of loves lost. The earth beneath my feet laced with memories like a minefield, every step an encounter with the past, stirring yearning and a deep desire. I am the land, the land is me, carved from clay, chiselled from chalk, and laid down to rest. 

Deep, down below, someone is stoking the fires of hell

Something isn't right. Something is very, very wrong, even though the sun's out, spreading warm tentacles across my naked forearms and raising a moist sweat. Am I, Sian Lacey Taylder, out of kilter with the land or is the land out of kilter with me? It happens, sometimes; on a hot summer's day back in 1988, lost in the labyrinthine folds of West Dorset the landscape hounded me out and more or less expelled me. What I'd done for it to take umbrage so I really don't know, perhaps I'd become complacent, a bit of a braggart: 'oh, me and the land, we go back such a long way, nothing can tear us apart'. But now I never take it for granted, even though it appears to be my destiny - or fate- to walk the paths and the tracks alone and into eternity, a sort of Kubla Khan de nos jours. 

How green are my valleys?

It occurs to me, as I move seamlessly from my Cretaceous to my Jurassic, unable to move forward in time, that I'm turning into a long-playing record, wearing myself into a deeper and deeper groove at fewer revolutions per minute, from 45 to thirty-three-and-a-third. Well, not so much a groove as a canyon, whose walls are steep and slippery, not that I have any desire to escape. I tread the paths from day to day, year to year with weary eyes red-embered like burnt out stars. This is all I need: to walk and to walk and to walk ... because I can't do anything else.

Get into my groove

If there were an English shire to which you could trust your soul you'd put your money on Dorset, a supinecreature with come-to-bed eyes. You wander lazily through its scarp and vales on a sultry summer's day and all is right with the world. Tell me, then. What happens when the earth beneath your feet rises up and goes for your jugular? The day drags on, I slip deeper into Dorset, deep into my subconscious, deep into my own private uber-gothic. Deep in the heart of Dorset, here be dragons.

The roof of Dorset, the roof of heaven

Cut loose for the myths of the borderland, it's between the scenes I ramble: faster, faster, faster until my lungs are fit to burst. But can I out-pace my past? Can I hell! I comes creeping up behind me, dragging me down with its overbearing, overpowering gravity. But still I walk, because that's all I know and it's all I can do.

The night is a wire 

Deep in the heart of Dorset is my Faust. One night, deep in the heart of the nineteen-eighties we sat down together in the woods and hatched out our plan, raising a glass of Pernod-and-black to seal the deal. Oh what bliss it was, to be alive back then, in a landscape full of possibilities. I sold my soul; not for rock 'n' roll, worst luck, but to the earth beneath my feet. From thereon in, for the rest of my life, everything and - more importantly, everyone - would take second place to my pursuit of landscape and the incessant need to keep on moving, to never, ever stop. Love and life and happiness? To the back of the queue with hope and prosperity. And stability. Obviously stability. especially stability. I am the land, it unhinges me.

This way lies madness. And all the joyous treasures of human existence

You think that Deep in the heart of Dorset is all patchwork pastoral and Laura Ashley landscape twee. You think it's all Enid Blyton Famous Five or Thomas Hardy costume drama, Poldark without the porn. You think it's all fifty organic shades of pastel green, bland and anodyne. If I tell you Deep in the heart of Dorset is all prelapsarian nature red-in-tooth-and-claw you'll snigger and gently - and very politely - mock my neo-romantic leanings and get back to your Deleuze and Guattari. This is what happens, you'll say, when the subjective is given its head. Give them the facts, Sian Lacey Taylder! Give them the effing facts!

The Dorsetshire Gap: Everything that Dorset now is, everything it ever has been and always will be flows through this void

I lasted thirty-six hours, dear reader, and then I had to head for home. Deep in the Heart of Dorset I lost my heart and my soul as well as any remaining vestiges of perspective. And somewhere up there, in the roof of Dorset, I said farewell to love and humanity. From now until the end of my days there is only the path and the lie of the land, everything else is beyond me.