Moved Journal │ Summer 2024
I’ve loved walking in the sun these past weeks — by the coast, sticky in the heat, and in the cool cloak of the forest. Summer has always felt to me like the beating heart of the year. Landscapes alive with colour, shimmer and sound. Even the storms have more aliveness to them; the rain more fragrant, the wind wild and warm.
There’s less of it this year, though — all that life. I’ve watched for it. I’ve noted its absence in the fields and meadows, which should be teeming now. Have you noticed it, too? Stillness where there used to be a busy noise of things darting back and forth on their tiny, hyper-speed journeys?
This quietening has triggered in me a sense of urgency to be closer and more connected to nature. To remerge with it. So I’ve spent as much spare time as I’ve had outside, taking it all in — acknowledging a growing awareness of impermanence and how all the more precious that makes everything.
These past few years, I’ve experienced the loss of nature as a deep grief. A type of bereavement. But, I’m starting to realise that sadness and awe co-exist. The bitter makes the sweet sweeter. Now, I’m trying to feel gratitude for the uncountable things that are left to cherish and how lucky I’ve been to know those busy skies and those thunderbug blackouts before now.
Hiking is a channel for tuning into everything that’s so astonishing about this world. What a simple, incredible thing.
Sophie x
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver
What to look forward to in the months ahead
August
August is the month to head to England’s fabled moorlands — thick with heather in its full flush of colour. The North Yorkshire Moors, Dartmoor and Exmoor are amongst the best to visit at this time of year, and a walk through them promises a desolate kind of beauty that’s absolutely captivating. It can be easy to lose your way in these English deserts, though, so don’t forget to download some hiking trails before you set off. If you stay into the evening on a clear day, you’ll be blessed with a breathtaking view of the night sky, too.
The high summer is one of the most wonderful times to see flocks of migrating birds at the pinnacle of breeding season, and rock pools filled with sea life bathing in the warmth of the sun.
September
The first crisp mornings have arrived, and change is on the way as we enter this transitional month, bringing about a shift in the rhythms of the natural world. Berries hang heavy in the trees now, and birds and squirrels are busily gathering their winter stores for the lean months ahead. Elusive Jays are out in full force during September, and warblers are easier to spot, flitting between trees, at this time of year.
This is also the month in which we welcome winter’s visiting birds to our shores — Knots, Dunlins and Oystercatchers — in their hundreds of thousands. The Wash, Morecambe Bay and the Thames, Humber and Dee estuaries are some of the best places to take a walk and see this pre-winter spectacle.
Reflections from the trail
June was a transitionary experience in many ways. Forty had loomed large for the previous 12 months, before it finally arrived. Not in a negative sense, like impending doom, or anything. Rather, like a junction I had to navigate, or a qualification I needed to pass. So it had felt right to align this midlife moment with the fruiting of a seed I’d planted on the return journey from my Saharan ultra a year and half earlier.
I’d planned it meticulously. Spent hours going over the trail, adding points on maps to check the distance, researching transport and accommodation, then re-checking the distance. We were going to hike 100km of The Ridgeway, England’s ‘oldest road’.
It had felt so far off for so long. Then, suddenly, there we were, me and the five other women who’d been brave enough to trust me, wide-eyed at Paddington Station, ready to board the train to Swindon on a midsummer Friday night.
The mood was high. We knew each other by now. We’d spent long weekends training together to bond us before we took on the journey. I’d done everything I could to prepare us all for the trail; physical training, mental preparation, packing lists, snack advice, and so on. Now, it was time to see if all my months of insisting, ‘it’ll be the most incredible experience ever’, would prove to be true.
As we bid each other goodnight before our alarm call at 5 am the next morning, my stomach did a somersault. Was I fucking mad? What was I thinking, bringing these poor, unsuspecting — well, four of them, anyway — women here to take part in this very niche kind of physical and mental torture? What if they all hated it or worse, hurt themselves at my bidding? Was this actually just a really stupid idea? These little doubts had crept in once or twice during the course of my planning, but I’d managed to stuff them down and get on with it. Now that the challenge was finally here, those voices were that bit louder in my head. So I took a sleeping pill and fell almost immediately unconscious.
The next morning, after a couple of mediocre black coffees, we jumped into the taxi in excited, anxious, anticipation of the two-day trail that lay ahead of us. The weather was bright and warm, the silence of the countryside felt like a balm to soothe our overstimulated city brains, and my worries about my own sanity seeped away with each step.
It was obvious to me from the start that this would be a very different kind of challenge than I’m used to, and that had always been the intention. I didn’t want it to feel like a competition for anyone. I wanted it to have the mood of a retreat with friends, only, you have to hike a really long way and will probably feel fairly broken by the end of it. That’s the secret, though. The breaking is where the growth happens.
What took me by surprise is how unbelievably resilient every single one of these women was. Aside from a difference in pace — a big lesson, for me — their stamina was incredible and their determination and good humour barely wavered as we started to clock the big miles. We truly felt like a sisterhood. We were collaborators, not competitors, in this undertaking.
After one of the longest hiking days of my ‘career’, aching, tired and definitely a little deflated, we rolled into what was possibly the most beautiful campsite I’ve ever visited, just as the sun was dipping below the horizon. Big bell tents greeted us, with warm fires and hot showers. I don’t think any of us had ever appreciated the feeling of simple comfort quite so much. We ate curry — famished — sitting on the floor, took our showers, then sank into our beds, knackered but elated to have made it through the day together.
When morning came, I expected at least a couple of my cohorts to tell me, “No, fuck this, I’m not hiking today. Yesterday was hell”. But what I woke up to, instead, were smiling faces and bigger energy than the day before. Not one person wanted to quit, even Haylee — the superhero of the weekend, for me — with some of the most painful-looking blisters I’ve seen in my ultra experience. We set off with renewed determination and a faster pace than the previous day.
But after around 80 or so kilometres at a mind-blowing speed, Haylee’s blisters finally got the better of her, and she retired regretfully but responsibly. The rest of us tramped to the finish line, quieter at the very end and probably delirious by the time we boarded our trains, but absolutely ecstatic to have made it to the end.
The words, “That was a bit much”, uttered as we limped into the station car park and the box of raw eggs produced on the platform — carried the entire 100km — were amongst the highlights of the whole thing for me. The tears welled in my eyes from laughing so hard. Laughter came easily on that ancient road, though. Laughter and friendship.
It’s taken me a while, as it always does, to process this trail. In a sense, I wasn’t fully able to let go on this one, because I had to take care of everyone else. I wasn’t able to tune into my body in the same way as I usually do. But I gained so many other things from it.
I’ve hiked a lot of miles over the years, and I’ve met a lot of people along the way. But being able to share this weekend with these five exceptional human beings — getting to know their sense of humour, their honesty and their kindness — makes this one of the most special walks I’ve ever taken. It felt like a beginning.
