A walk in the unfamiliar familiar

After living in Australia for the past year and being confronted with its vastness, I realised how small the UK is, and how much of it I haven’t seen. There are so many places, historic buildings and walks that I haven’t done within just one hour of where I live and even things I haven’t experienced walking distance from my house. To try and rectify these local blindspots and figure out why this was the case, I decided to take a walk in the unfamiliar familiar. 

So Frida (my lurcher) and I set off on a footpath cutting behind a beautiful church with the aim of looping back through a large section of new territory. Immediately the busy roads became a distant memory and instead fields opened up around us as we pushed through tall tufts of grass, ducking underneath the occasional fallen tree and admiring the forked branches of ancient oaks overhead. 

As we continued to battle through unruly grass, nettles and thistles, now a good few hours from the starting point, distance crossed my mind. Here I was, shoes choked with seeds and T-shirt damp with sweat, and we were only a tiny distance on the map from the church. We stopped at another place of worship, this time one that had always eluded me. Amongst gravestones gently embraced by brambles and ferns, I sat on an old bench listening to Frida lap at her water bowl. In two hours I’d travelled a stone’s throw but I had seen so much with the countless butterflies, wildflowers and crooked styles, all accompanied by a beautiful birdsong.

Travelling is fantastic and if you can afford to, you should. But the danger with modern-day travel lies in what it can do to the idea of distance. Hopefully, where you travelled to was spectacular, but with this great experience a semantic association of adventure and enjoyment attaches itself to far journeys, and suddenly the only way to do something exciting or worthwhile requires a plane ride. You can see this same mindset with the idea of grinding that is so popular in contemporary society. The notion that the only way to experience greatness is by working to the bone. Metrics have become king and so if something doesn’t sound big or expensive then it’s boring. I think this is why we haven’t experienced so much of our local area because it doesn’t seem worth our time.

After this thirst quenching break of reflection, Frida and I continued into the unknown. Where we had previously been kept to footpaths, gnarled barbed wire on each side, this next section was large and open. Seas of tall fescue (soon to be hay) and cut golden fields rolled into one another, bordered by busy hedgerows and wonderfully green trees of every kind. In between the fields at one point we moved through a sheltered farmers track with its own leafy archway. At several points lay abandoned rusty farm machinery long forgotten. I took a minute at each one thinking about the days where they held up livelihoods and how even in disrepair they acted as trellises for burgeoning life. 

By this point we were in the final third of the walk following a river. One of my absolute favourite things to look at is water. Spying tangled water weed, hiding fish and mottled stones on the river bed as flecks of light dance atop the surface is invigorating. It was here, whilst Frida cooled her paws and drank some more, that we met Percy the whippet and the man from London. We immediately struck up a conversation on the basis of our dogs, as is always the case with dogwalkers, but he also talked of how he’d just moved here from the capital and was enjoying it all with his first ever dog. After more pleasantries were exchanged we parted ways. Sensing the man’s excitement with the landscape made me think about how he would turn from tourist to local over the years. When you’re on holiday every single banal thing becomes amazing. When I was in Tasmania; I remember absolutely marvelling over this tiny hamlet called Mole Creek. It was sleepy and surrounded by wilderness, but of course to the locals the wild landscapes were just familiar terrain. When you’re in that visitor mode, you’re so open to taking it all in, actively searching for novelties, appreciating all that you do. Behaving like a tourist makes you an optimist. Adopt this mindset in your local area and it will deepen your gratitude for it.

Finally, in what turned out to be a beautiful moment of realisation, we made it back onto familiar ground. I had entered a field at the bottom not realising I was taking a path I’d always avoided. These areas that I just experienced for the first time linked up then and there with old familiar ones – it was immensely satisfying but also strange. I had walked by this track so many times never realising the beauty that was down it. 

It is so easy to stick to the familiar or only see value in larger distances, that we can become ignorant to what’s around us. We subconsciously write off areas and put on blinders that obstruct new pathways to excitement and discovery. There’s so much satisfaction to be found deceptively close and so many reasons to practice gratitude for what you have. So next time you’re thinking of going on a walk, take that turn you always ignore.  

Words by Ned Carter-Owen

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