Category: Walking the M62

A flurry of M62-related conversations recently. First, an enjoyable afternoon spent with Slaithwaite poet and teacher Jack Faricy discussing my 2007 walk. Jack is working on a PhD about the poetics of the motorway, “a poetic exploration of the M62 and the landscapes it connects”. We were introduced by Kevin Crooks with whom I collaborated on his 2017 project M62: The Trans-Pennine Motorway, A Photographic Monograph. 

Then, a conversation with food writer Olivia Potts, who, in researching a long feature on the history of food in service stations, has picked up on my unusually lengthy sojourns in the likes of the Days Inn, Hartshead Moor (a three night stay on my M62 journey). We recalled the days when Forton Services was a tourist destination in itself, and chewed over the significance of artisan farm shop services.

Meanwhile, Ken Wilson let me know that he has just published his book Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road, his long-awaited excursus of the experience of walking the Regina Bypass, “a series of ambitious and unconventional walks, Wilson sets out to understand the arrival and significance of the new (and politically contentious) highway encircling Saskatchewan’s capital”. Can’t wait to fire up the e-reader to begin this. I’m flattered that Ken references me, alongside Iain Sinclair, a few times along the way. 

And finally, Ken Bartley of Belfast’s ArtisAnn Gallery contacted me to ask if I’d share my reflections on my stay at The Curfew Tower, Bill Drummond’s artists’ retreat in Cushendall, Co. Antrim, which was where I spent a month completing my work on Walking the M62 (the book) at the end of my walk. Ken is writing a history of the artistic residencies at the Curfew Tower during Bill Drummond’s ownership of it, which will be published by Bill on his Penkiln Burn imprint at some point. 

I'm delighted to be collaborating with photographer Kevin Crooks on his book M62: The Transpennine Motorway. His pictures major on the heights between Scammonden reservoir and Windy Hill (where the Pennine Way footpath crosses the motorway) and I've contributed some words to accompany his visuals. Kevin already shows some of the photographs on his website: here. The book, and possibly a touring exhibition, to follow.

After Jo Brand completed her Hull to Liverpool trek for Sport Relief I sent her a copy of the book of my far slower and less physically demanding journey. Nice to get a reply from her this week… and empathising with her thoughts regarding Victoria Wood.

 

Click here [pdf, 10.7MB] for a scan of my recent Third Way article, wittily entitled The Holy Hard Shoulder, and owing rather a lot to the introduction of my M62 book.

Spirituality can be found in the everyday experiences of life. Ashley Straw meets a man of God who searched for it during a two-month walk along the M62

ALTHOUGH motorway anoraks may enjoy fruitful hours in the service station cafe discussing facts about the M62, those of us with interests outside the realms of tarmac and blue signs are unlikely to have given the route much thought.

As one of the busiest roads in Britain, with around 100,000 cars passing through some sections each day, it is hardly a place that inspires a pleasant two-hour drive, let alone a two-month walk.

But that was exactly what Rev John Davies had in mind when he decided to trek the entire 107 miles from Hull to Liverpool.

During his unusual journey, the 45-year-old vicar, of Good Shepherd Church in West Derby, which serves the people of Norris Green and Croxteth, walked through Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Warrington and Liverpool and has written a book about his experiences along the way.

The idea came to him when he moved to Norris Green four years ago, just four years after entering the priesthood.

“I didn’t know anyone so I thought the best way to get to know both people and the area was to walk around and observe closely what I saw,” he recalls.

“Along the way I spoke to people to find out their history and their stories about living here. I did that for a while and I wrote up the walks on my website for people to read and respond to.

“It was an interesting process and I found that a lot of people started to respond to this and even some ex-pats started to reminisce on the website.”

A little over a year ago, Rev Davies found out he had the opportunity to take a two-month sabbatical from the Church. While many priests take the opportunity to work in parishes abroad, inspired by the responses to his website, he came up with his M62 plan.

“When I got this chance for a break I thought I could visit some cities I don’t know anything about in a similar way to how I explored Norris Green,” he says.

“I was keen to go through some northern cities to do a sort of compare and contrast of Liverpool. I thought the M62 would be an interesting route to take, directly across England from east to west, roughly following the motorway’s path.

“I enjoy walking around cities because there is a rich environment that is often consciously ignored and, if you do walk around with your eyes wide open, a lot of interesting things are revealed.”

The route took Rev Davies past the 260-year-old Stott Hall Farm, on the Pennine stretch, which stands on a 100ft-wide, mile-long traffic island between the two carriageways.

“There is a legend about this that says the farmer resisted the building of the motorway and so it had to be built round the farm, but the truth is that the motorway had to split because of the land was soft and the carriageways would have slipped. It was by coincidence that the farm was there,” he says.

“I met the farmer next door and he agreed to spend a day with me. It was fascinating. Being an urban lad, it shattered many of my preconceptions about the farming community. I would have thought they would have hated the motorway but they are quite philosophical about it.

“It has brought them good business, it helps with communication and they have just adapted to it being there.”

Rev Davies started his journey last September, beginning in the town of Hornsea, near Hull. His final few strides were along Crosby Beach on November 31, 2007.

“It was important to me that the journey brought me home and that it would teach me a few things that would show Liverpool in a different light. I always wanted to finish the route at the place I was born as my original home was in Waterloo, near the beach where I played as a kid. My parents still live there.”

The vicar was helped along the way by contacts from within the church as well as people he met on his journey. Every night he wrote an entry for his internet diary. Most of these form the basis of his book.

“It wasn’t me being in role as a vicar on the walk, I didn’t wear my dog collar or any of my clerical clothes.

“I think there is a lot of spirituality in every day life that we don’t notice – little things like doing an act of kindness, making you feel welcome, conversations that give you boosts in cafes and on the bus.

“I was hoping to find it and I hope that is what readers of the book will find – the spirituality of the everyday life.”

Rev Davies’ book Walking the M62 is available from www.lulu.com priced £7.99 or £3.75 for a downloadable version.

features@dailypost.co.uk

Article sourced from Liverpool Daily Post.co.uk

Mister Roy in gyrovagueness, Friday, January 18, 2008, writes:

Envying a double colon: intertextual route planning

A pizza-box-like package arrived from lulu the other day, containing a copy of Walking the M62 by John Davies. It has taken me a few days to completely open, with two hunts for suitable tools – compared with cack-handed Amazon, the lulu people are masters of book packaging who in my view could be entrusted with safe transit of all sorts of fragile and precious items (Ming vases, newborn babies…)

On reflection I might have other reasons for delaying cutting through the plastic straps and polythene cauls to actually read the book. Stumbling across a blog reference to John’s journey (during the darkest moments of a bestial Christmastide) gave me the idea of undertaking and documenting a long walk home. The concept landed in me like a compressed file, which is unzipping joyously into actual miles walked, mud spattered, words assembled, pixels ordered into images. A very good thing.

So why not pile into the book?

Basically I think I fear traversing the same ground. Not that I’ll accidentally be lured to Hull instead of Brighton, but that my journey will become a sort of cover version, tribute-band act, or Work in the School Of…

I know John only obliquely, but enough to be aware that we share some cultural touchpoints (Ballard, the Fall) and enthusiasm for technological communication. I worry about seeing and expressing things similarly – a not unfounded fear, as I’ve already quoted a line of Eliot which, I notice, flicking through the book, is one of John’s chapter headings. So there’s a danger that my own journey (‘real’ and ‘personal’ though it might be) becomes a sort of plagiarism, or at least a partially redundant exercise.

And there’s stuff I wish I’d thought of, like the double-colon device in his headings (‘Trafford to Warrington :: 18 October 2007’), or using Twitter…

Still it’s too late now – I have opened the book and eaten the fruit of knowledge. Walking the M62 will become another component of the cultural wampum bag I carry with me. Any similarities should be read as fascinating synchronicity and/or clever intertextuality…

All territory has already been traversed, we’re all gathered at the same storytellers’ fire – and yet, paradoxically, each journey is as fresh as a new cloud formation and there’s always something new to say, albeit in motley borrowed language.

Follow Roy Bayfield on his four-year journey from Southport to Brighton, here.

Hear my Walking the M62 interview with Wayne Clarke on BBC Radio Merseyside, 6 January 2008, here [mp3]

Dear John,
….

I’m writing to say that I’ve just read ‘Walking The M62’ and I enjoyed it very much. Of course, I’d read most of it before on the blog, but I gained so much more from the writing this time around. I think the introduction adds a huge amount. It sets the terms of the walk extremely clearly. I think you fight the corner of the ‘everyday’ persuasively, linking the everyday to incarnation (and the sacramental to the ordinary) is suggestive and provocative (in a good way). I sometimes find myself at odds with Rebecca Solnit, but her distinction, that you quote, between functional and ‘disrupted’ walking is beautifully put. You add the essential qualification – that the latter can inform the former.

You describe in formal terms your seeking for the ‘good’ in the mundane sites, and your frustration at missing an opportunity. I think that just that tension, that struggle, is very clear throughout the daily entries. There is a real sense of you resisting the easy ‘take’ on a place, and then the struggle to find those points of purchase in the smooth space, to find the texture of specificity in the globalised. Once I realised that that’s what’s going on the daily entries become increasingly engaging. You are in a struggle with pernicious memes!

There are passages where your writing really strikes home – on the Goodly Spirit at Goole (and what a wonderful photo!), on recognising Maurice the hairdresser’s is still in operation, the final stanzas of the thanks for the high places, walking the Sign of the Cross in Leeds, the forest of pylons, and the meditation on ghosts. You generate connections and you overlay images. There is a sense of narratives in rivulets or frayed strings, tangled and yet spectral. There are real people here: making their plays, giving their take on the world, passing a phrase along, making a connection. These are people working on their world, and this world is no passive material – it writhes and it generates and it sinks down, it swamps and fades and buds. There is no ‘cross-section’ here – time is always a player, there is no freeze-frame. Instead, there is translucence sometimes, always motion, and sometimes a sense of the overwhelmingly ephemeral. A world animated.

Where I find I have some trouble is around the question of place and placement and the idea that “Nothing we do is unplaced.” That you quote from Casey. I believe there is great virtue in ‘placing’ where there is specificity, where we are dealing with that which is specific to a place, and, indeed these very such things are often those which are ignored or hidden beneath a pejorative use of “everyday” and “ordinary”. But my worry with ‘placement’ is that it too quickly assumes the authority not of specificity but of generality (of nationhood, of the clan) making the (specificity of the) place general (“best”, “ours”). I wonder if it is in those moments when we are (for most of us very temporarily) unplaced that we have the opportunity for change. The first example I can think of is being on a march or procession in a city I am not familiar with – in that situation I am mostly unplaced, the internal dialogue, music, drama of the march or procession are dominant, together with fellow marchers I am in motion and not very clear about what that motion is through. At those moments one can change one’s allegiances, one’s geography. (l loved the earlier stuff on the transitory East coast, and the way that on the second day “head red with sun and exertion, eyes red with pain” you had also become transitory. If I can be allowed to quote myself extemporising on a theme by Doreen Massey: “Doreen Massey, Professor of Geography, Social Sciences at the Open University, has called Skiddaw peak in the north of England a “migrant mountain,” “just passing through,” “moving at the rate that our fingernails TOW.” All places are “migrant.” And our selves, similarly; not simple, single points of consciousness slipping across neutral planes, but selves that are motion and in motion within and without, extended ‘organisms’ shaped and shaping relations with each other, reacting to and adapting the geometry of inanimate geographies, cultural transmissions and ideology’s reproductive system, moving about basins of attraction, patterned and patterning; a self as likely as any place to be ‘just passing through. “‘) I thought you had a similar transitory moment when you were caught up in the events that led to the blessing of the hairdressers and were given “the sort of invitation which is impossible to refuse”. And again when you entered the Goldsworthy exhibition dripping and muddy.

There are so many wonderful images that remain with me – the invisible Rhubarb Triangle, concealment and militarism in the suburbs of Birdwood, motorway as Cold War runway, that pipe you nearly crawled through, the Whirlpool Galaxy in Manchester. Your “the deviant, the stupid and the unknowing” reminded me of Shakespeare’s “lunatic, lover and poet” – I think both trios have ways of knowing things that mostly escape everyone else (though they may not ‘escape’ the experience lightly). When you quoted Joe Moran on how mundane things can “tell us stories about much larger and global changes” I thought of the Caribbean Marxist and Lancashire League Cricketer CLR James who remarked (in the introduction to The Black Jacobins, I think) that the artillery fire of the 2nd World War could be heard first in the tea shops of England.

A couple of times you mentioned a premonition of the motorways redundant and grassed over 1 had similar presentiments on my walk at Easter – on those roads you often mention that have been made redundant and which the grass has begun to re-take – I felt like I was seeing a model of something. (And I very much appreciated your comments on the often unfriendly conditions of countryside walking once off the very popular walksdogs. cattle, blocked paths – had my Boxing Day walk with my children rather curtailed by barbed wire! There is a thoughtlessness here – a general exclusion – and it has reflected politically. For when the farmers have needed the sympathy of the country, it has not always been forthcoming – partly because of this isolationist temper on the part of many, though not all farmers.)

O, and being a pedant – wasn’t the ” look down on him” sketch from That Was The Week That Was rather than the Two Ronnies?

Well, what a treat and having Christmastime and the space to read the book – I will certainly be recommending it on – it deserves a wide readership.

Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, p.4.

Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siecle decadence, a poetic of entropy – but the born-again flaneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Allignments of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian sepulchres, collections of prostitutes’ cards, torn and defaced, promotional bills for cancelled events at York Hall, visits to the homes of dead writers, bronze casts on war memorials, plaster dogs, beer mats, concentrations of used condoms, the crystalline patterns of glass shards surrounding an imploded BMW quarter-light window, meditations on the relationship between the brain damage suffered by the super-middleweight boxer Gerald McClellan (lights out in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel) and the simultaneous collapse of Barings, bankers to the Queen. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high.

William S. Burroughs, quoted in Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory, p.8.

The important fact about urban living: the continued stream of second attention awareness. Every licence plate, street sign, passing strangers, are saying something to you.

Music for an M62 Walk: CDs burnt to order, let me know if you’d like one.

[Originally posted at www.johndavies.org. Compiled with help from blog readers. Your suggestions – for a follow-up collection – very welcome]