and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime.
A little earlier, poet Thomas Gray was so thrilled by the ‘terrible’ spectacles he saw of the Alps on his Grand Tour with Sir Horace Walpole that he later toured the Lake District in 1769 and, in an extended account, ascribed to this region similar turbulent natural scenes. With the writers that followed – who were responding, however unconsciously, to the Industrial Revolution – there came the sense that nature had to be freed from mankind’s manipulations. They felt that in authentic landscapes were to be found atmospheres, a sense, a feeling, that would have an answering chime within every soul, like Coleridge’s Aeolian Harp.
Over 200 years later, the modern walker in a region such as Rannoch clearly has similar desires. Here, as the sun is setting its final fiery orange rays across these hills and tussochs, you see a perfect example of the sublime: the prospect that can at once unsettle you and yet leave you marvelling at its gaudy beauty. Such a sunset is not that far removed from J. M. W. Turner’s depiction of an erupting Vesuvius; the sky raging and glowing, the people below just dim, phantom-like silhouettes.
We can balance romanticism against the implacable rationality of eighteenth-century proto-geologist James Hutton, and his revolutionary observations of the cycles of nature. His understanding of the rocks and soil being washed into the sea, forming bedrock, forced volcanically to the surface and then being worn away over infinite years back into sediment. Even then we might feel an odd poetic link between local legends of the ageless faerie folk who ‘dwell in the hollow hills’ and Hutton’s awe at the eternity-old land. ‘The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,’ Hutton told the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, ‘is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’
The new learning was teaching men that the ground beneath their feet had been there long before Eden. Some of the walkers who were to take up the pursuit with such vigour in the Victorian age did so in part as a challenge to the church, and to the hold that it had on society. But even before them, the idea of walking as a genteel pursuit, a subtle pleasure that could reveal much about personal character, and which could even be enjoyed by refined women, was to be immortalised in English literature.
CHAPTER 3
Dorking to Box Hill: Introducing Jane Austen, and the Subsequent Rise of the Victorian Walking Club
My grandmother was a keen walker all of her life. But she had a freezing disdain for the landscape of south-east England: it was too flat, too undramatic, too safe, too cosy. What on earth would be the point of walking anywhere within easy reach of London? Only the Highlands would do, or perhaps parts of Northumberland at a pinch. It is a prejudice shared by veteran rambling campaigner John Bunting, who spent so many of his formative years being chased by gamekeepers in the Peak District. Would he ever fancy a walking tour, say, of the South Downs? ‘When I get a bit older,’ replies the ninety-three-year-old.
For a long time, I shared my grandmother’s dismissive attitude towards the southern Home Counties, which in my case was shaped by many very dull train journeys from London to Brighton. Is it insane to judge a landscape from a railway line? Apart from anything else, many better people than me have been drawn to walking in this gentle area. Throughout the nineteenth century, this part of Surrey not only formed the backdrop to some immortal literature, but also captured the imaginations of a generation’s finest thinkers, who strode across these sleepy fields, hopped over these stiles and bounded up these silent hills with all the enthusiasm and vigour that the Victorian age could summon.
I find myself wandering through silvery mist at the top of a wooded hill, admiring the thickness of the silence, and the darkness of the cover of the oaks, and the mysterious low shapes of the old sprawling yews. I have to take all my own shallow prejudices back. After all, I am only a mile and a half outside Dorking and just a few miles from Gatwick – yet there is a subtle splendour in the quietness of this country. As for gentler walks, in the early nineteenth century, before Victoria reached the throne, Jane Austen practically turned southern counties roaming into a sub-genre of literature.
In all of Austen’s novels, characters walk, and each walk always carries its own significance. Sometimes it will be triggered by a banal reason – a carriage is not available at a particular moment, say; but the walk that follows either carries emotional or symbolic resonance. Be it an act of social defiance, or a response to a moment of romantic crisis, the gentle paths and fields and hills are as delicately and closely suggested as the figures that move across them. And it is broadly the pastures and meadows of the southern counties that Austen’s characters walk about in. In Emma, we often find Mr Knightley striding from his house; even Mr Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, sometimes ventures out on foot, as opposed to horseback. Walking is frequently indicative of mood; there are times of upset when an Austen heroine wishes to walk alone and refuses a companion. For these heroines, the very act of walking itself can be taken as an assertion of independence: the exercise is sometimes cathartic. At other times, as in Emma, it is distinctly pleasurable and the company stimulating:
As a walking companion, Emma had very early foreseen how useful she might find [Harriet Smith] … Her father never went beyond the shrubbery, where two divisions of the ground sufficed him for his long walk, or his short, as the year varied; and since Mrs Weston’s marriage, her exercise too had been too much confined. She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to a walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges.
These days, walkers are enticed into sampling ‘Jane Austen country’, following trails that wind around Chawton in the county of Hampshire, where she lived so long. A little more vigorous is the walk up to the scene of one of Austen’s most famous passages from Emma. A party ascends Box Hill for a picnic. Emma Woodhouse humiliates Miss Bates and is roundly picked up on this by Mr Knightley. Distress and embarrassment are signalled by members of the party detaching and going for their own small walks atop the Downs. For Emma herself, she ends up wanting to be ‘sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in observation of the tranquil views beneath her.’
There are other walking crises to be found in Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is accused of ‘conceited independence’ when she undertakes a mighty 3-mile crosscountry walk to visit her ill sister.
That she should have walked three miles so early in the day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs Hurst and Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt for it.
The accuser, Miss Bingley, also wonders what effect such an expedition might have upon Mr Darcy. It is clear that one unspoken source of her discomfort with the idea is that Elizabeth has done something quite improper; that there is a forwardness about a young women walking such a distance out in the open all on her own. In fact, Miss Bennet is such a keen walker that when, at one stage in the novel, a proposed tour to the Lake District is altered to a journey to Derbyshire instead, she vents her irritation loudly. The pursuit of recreational walking seemed to have become part of genteel ‘English culture and comfort’ about a century before Austen’s fiction. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote, in Journal To Stella:
I have always been plying you to walk and read. The young fellows have begun a kind of fashion to walk, and many of them have got swinging strong shoes on purpose; it has got as far as several young lords; if it hold, it would be a very good thing.
Young lords and gentlewomen were obviously not alone in their sensibilities; by the middle years of the nineteenth century, pleasant prospects were sought out by increasing numbers of highly organised rambling groups from a wide array of social and professional backgrounds. There was an element, for ordinary working people, rather lower on the social scale than Austen’s heroines, of raising themselves up. Walking became not just about fresh air; there was also an element of
