21st-Century Yokel

been told to, I remember feeling a little nervous, turning back shyly on early walks when I lost my way. Soon I learned to embrace the disorientated moments, thrived on the extra challenges of a flooded towpath or vanished hedge indentation, developing the understanding that the countryside’s job has never been to pander neatly to the needs of foot traffic and never will be. Then I went fully rogue, no longer even accepting the AA or Pathfinder as my teacher, mapping my own routes. My OS Explorer maps were in themselves as fecund with language as many a great literary novel. I became familiar with the minor complexities of multifarious gate types and began to open and shut them less in the manner of a person apologising for being alive. I eschewed GPS, as I did in the car. Looking at a map might distract you from the scenery – particularly if, like me, you sometimes found said map smothering you as you tried to refold it – but maps were more at one with the scenery than a screen could ever be. A screen sucks you in, away from the moment. You can miss all manner of stuff while staring at a screen, and who knows what it might cost you? My graduation from walking books to self-mapped routes was my rambler’s equivalent of the phase where a cook breaks free from the shackles of the recipe book or a musician starts to experiment outside their customary genre. There was something massively liberating about looking on OS Explorer 230 and seeing, say, something called Alecock’s Grave a mile to my east, then thinking, I’d quite like to know what Alecock’s Grave is, then thinking, HOLD ON! I actually can go and see Alecock’s Grave and nobody is going to stop me! GPS fostered the opposite of that, a zombified extension of something the musician and rural warrior Julian Cope bemoaned fourteen years ago: ‘People don’t go anywhere nowadays unless there’s a sign.’

My trust in maps, in the Ordnance Survey itself – that artful, loving institution, simultaneously historical and progressive, which as far back as the 1950s made a point of paying male and female employees equal wages – became immense: a renewed love affair that had begun on walks in my childhood and on long car journeys with my parents when I was often the one in charge of the atlas. Perhaps the trust was too immense at times. When maps were old and beginning to lose their marbles, they still seemed wise to me, which gave me an unwavering faith in what they told me, even when it made no sense. On an eight-mile walk near Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast I learned one of the big rules of East Anglian coastal rambling: avoid using maps more than a decade old, as this can result in erosion-themed death. I noticed that I was drawn to the darker places maps told me about, as well as the ones they didn’t. On a more successful walk in next-to-zero light I guided my friends Jack and Hannah to one of the two Bronze Age barrows in south Norfolk alleged to be the burial place of the first-century Iceni warrior queen Boudica, then on to an isolated orchard two miles north where the annual Kenninghall village wassail was taking place. ‘What is wassailing?’ asked a friend from London. ‘Is it a bit like abseiling?’ I texted him back to say that it was quite a lot different, and that you had to be a fair bit braver to do it, attaching a photo of the master of ceremonies at Kenninghall, a robed figure with a face made of leaves known as the Lord of Misrule. In truth, the wassail – which means ‘be healthy’ in Old English – was definitely the warmer, more comic side of the physical novel that I was now living inside on my walks, a manifestly unscary gathering around a big bonfire, involving the singing of Kenninghall’s own wassailing song, ‘Dance Around the Firelight’, and the splashing of apple trees with cider to banish the frost giants and encourage a healthy crop for the coming season, all led in jolly fashion by the Lord of Misrule, who explained to me that when he was not wassailing he was a homeopath named Steve. You could call it silly, but most of the best things for the human spirit are, and it would be a mistake to see such rituals as being conducted in a purely postmodern way. In the contrast between the upbeat chatter in the heat of that fire and the stark place we had walked to an hour earlier was an illustration of the immense necessity of such events in centuries past: the communal respite they provided from the cold, stripped vertebrae of the land in winter. Back at the foot of that burial mound, as the oaks and whitethorn on it above us bent back in the January wind, there had been no levity. It was a pocket of old black something enfolded in weather and history. It retained its own energy – magic, threatening, unviolated by architecture.

That mild-faced demon in Norfolk and Suffolk that I’d perceived even as an unprobing tourist in my own region stayed mild-faced when I became a walker, but grew fangs, subtle ones, deep-rooted, their edges poking up just above the flat earth. I met the demon head on, often very close to home, alone with only an OS map to hand for protection. In a field straddling the Norfolk–Suffolk border within plain sight of the brown tourist sign that welcomes visitors to the historic market town of Diss, with its fourteenth-century church and cut-price Friday market Duracell multipacks, I met one of my first scarecrows. Even a few hundred scarecrows later, it would remain the most literal and chilling in my scarecrow backlist: half a bag of sand and a subhuman arrangement of six old dark grey planks, the